In March, the film “No Other Land” won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature at the Academy Awards. On April 17, host Mitch Cormier interviewed movie reviewer Meaghan Brander, on CBC’s Island Morning about the movie and its upcoming showing in Charlottetown’s City Cinema.
In the segment entitled: “A deep dive into documentary made by Palestinian-Israeli collective”, Cormier opened by saying that the movie “explores the struggle for land between Palestinians and the Israeli forces that occupy that territory.”
Listen to the full segment below:
Brander echoed his statement, saying that the film “explores the struggle for land between Palestine residents and Israeli forces that occupy the Southern West Bank territory of Musafer Yata.” Brander continued to say of watching the film that “it was very eye-opening and also heartwarming but also, yeah it’s really hard to watch people losing their homes.”
The film ostensibly shows how Arabs indigenous to Musafer Yata in Judea & Samaria (West Bank) have been displaced by Israeli forces, an emotionally hard watch. But as broadcaster and writer Jonathan Sacerdoti put it in The Spectator, “it is little more than a masterclass in Palestinian distortion.”
Unmentioned by Cormier or Brander, Musafer Yata was the subject of a 22-year legal battle in Israeli courts, culminating in a ruling in May 2022 that these Arabs were not indigenous to the land.
Additionally, Musafer Yata is in “Area C” of the West Bank, which the Oslo Accords, an agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA), put in full Israeli control.
The CBC broadcast likewise didn’t mention that the Israeli military designated the area as a military training zone in the 1980s. At that time no one was resident there, as proven by aerial photographs. However, the Israeli defense forces permitted Arab farmers to graze their animals there, going as far as to provide them with advance notice of live fire exercises. The farmers would sometimes sleep in the caves in the area, keeping their animals there overnight. After almost 20 years of this arrangement, the Arabs built structures there, without permits, claiming residency.
In fact, the High Court judgment found that “these residents, almost without exception, have permanent homes in the nearby town of Yatta.” It is therefore the Arabs who are displacing the Israeli military, and Israel’s dismantling of these structures is a legal recourse to restore rightful ownership. Yet this crucial context went unmentioned.
Brander also stated during the interview that “the film takes place before the events of October 7th,” a nonchalant nod to the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, where 1,200 innocents were murdered, including women who were gang raped, mutilated, and burnt to death.
As a movie reviewer, one would expect her to be aware of the list of movies produced about the “events,” yet she didn’t mention even one.
Brander continued to say of the producers, that “there’s been attacks on their homes and on themselves one of the filmmakers was attacked and arrested in late March.” Yet neither she nor Cormier provided any context as to what happened.
Hamdan Ballal, one of the producers, was indeed involved in an altercation with the Israeli military in March, but whether he was the attacker or the victim depends on which version one believes. Shem Tov Luski, an Israeli who was also involved in the conflagration, reported that a group of Arabs, Ballal included, threw stones at a single Jewish shepherd in the area, whom he came to defend, getting his car windows smashed in the process.
Brander also mentioned the movie’s struggle to find a distributor in North America, but neither she nor her host seemed curious as to why that may be the case. Along with their deletion of the bigger picture around Musafer Yata, their segment became a feature of misinformation. One hopes that their listeners want more than that.
