Author Malcolm Gladwell defined a “tipping point” as “the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point” where an idea or practice would pass the point of no return.

CBC’s de facto acceptance of Israel as the guilty party appears to have long passed this point.

Two recent CBC reports on the topic of the Oscar-winning film “No Other Land” evidence this perspective. Triggered by the film’s director Hamdan Ballal’s detention by the IDF, on March 25, the CBC radio program Commotion, hosted by Elamin Abdelmahmoud, featured a segment about the documentary and an interview with Matt Carey from deadline.com, and the following day, CBC Foreign Correspondent Margaret Evans penned a report on Ballal’s reported arrest.

In her article entitled: “’It became worse’ after Oscar win, says Palestinian director Hamdan Ballal detained by Israel,” Evans wrote that “Oscar-winning Palestinian director Hamdan Ballal believes he is being deliberately targeted by Israeli settlers and soldiers in the occupied West Bank” because “I take the message [to the outside world.]” While Evans did creditably include the Israeli military’s statement that they had detained three people due to their rock throwing, what Evans did not record is that Shem Tov Luski, the Israeli whom Ballal accused at length in her article of being his attacker, not only denied that Ballal was beaten, but also “said he didn’t know Ballal was an Oscar winner,” challenging Ballal’s narrative.

She continued: “the film, which Ballal co-directed with fellow Palestinian Basel Adra and Israelis Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, documents Palestinians in Masafer Yatta living under occupation and struggling to hold on to their land.”

Evans went on to ‘explain’ that “Israel captured East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan in 1967. Today, there are some 500,000 Jewish settlers living in the West Bank alone, even though they’re considered illegal under international law by much of the world.”

Evans didn’t explain that Jordan only captured the “West Bank” in 1948 during the War of Independence when four Arab countries launched a war of annihilation on the nascent Israeli state. When Israel was drawn into another defensive war in 1967, they gained the area from Jordan. Evans also ignored that Israel disputes the claims that Israeli settlements in the “West Bank” are illegal citing their ancestral, religious and legal claims to the areas in question.

In the 16-minute Commotion interview with Abdelmahmoud, Matt Carey said that he chose the film as one of his top ten picks because: “I just was very touched by its depiction of the anguish and life for Palestinians in this very rural area of the West Bank who get next to no attention uh for what they go through they have been living for many decades under an expulsion order from the Israel Defense Forces which claim their land as a military training Zone and so we see them in their homes, then they’re sort of have their possessions tossed out and bulldozers from the IDF come in knock their homes down knock down schools but it’s a very rare glimpse into the lives.”

Abdelmahmoud, whose program has hosted a long line of anti-Israel activists, typically offering little in the way of challenge to his guests, did not push back against Carey’s assertions, or even perfunctorily provide Israel’s perspective.

Despite the film ‘No Other Land’ being hailed as an important look into the lives of persecuted Palestinians, the truth is far different.

Jonathan Sacerdoti in The Spectator described it as “little more than a masterclass in Palestinian distortion.” Musafer Yata lies in ‘Area C’ of the “West Bank” which the Oslo Accords agreement between Israel and the Palestinians put in complete Israeli control. The IDF designated it as a military training zone in the 1980s, when there was no residential habitation there, as proven by aerial photographs, and the IDF allowed Arabs from nearby areas to use the area for grazing their animals, even providing them with advance notice of live fire exercises.

But after almost 20 years of this arrangement, the Arabs built structures there, without permits, claiming residency when in fact it was found that almost all of them had permanent homes in the nearby city of Yatta. The Arabs went on to claim indigeneity to the land in a 22-year-long court case which ended in 2022 when the Israeli High Court ruled that the Arabs were not indigenous there.

Both Evans and Abdelmahmoud have a history of one-sided reporting. Their canceling of the other point of view as regards Ballal and Musafer Yatta shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone paying attention.