The Israeli government has failed to overcome antisemitism in the public diplomacy war in this case, and doing so seems to be an insurmountable task in a world willing to swallow every lie as long as it is anti-Israel.
“No Other Land,” awarded an Oscar for Best Documentary, focuses on the so-called villages of “Masafer Yatta” and presents Israelis as violent, immoral occupiers supported by a cruel and bloodthirsty army.
The facts - but who needs facts? - tell a completely different story: Arab squatters, supported and funded by foreign governments and anti-Israel organizations, set up a network of illegal outposts inside an active military training ground. The squatters spent years in Israel’s Supreme Court in an attempt to block the demolition of their outposts – but their claims of indigeneity, victimhood, homelessness and dispossession were disproven by the very evidence they brought to the court.
The film presents over a decade of carefully staged and curated footage, filmed in an area designated as an IDF live-fire training ground in 1980, following a meticulous survey of what has always been desert wasteland. After determining that the Ottoman, British and Jordanian designations of the area as uninhabited, ‘imminent domain’ property of the state were accurate, the State of Israel registered and designated the area as IDF Firing Zone 918; for decades afterward, the Israel Air Force and numerous IDF infantry divisions conducted live ammunition drills there.
In an effort to prevent the enforcement of demolition orders issued by the Israeli authorities, the squatters spent more than two decades arguing their case before Israel’s highest court, not known for its love of the Jewish settlement, claiming that their ancient villages were being threatened and that they would be left homeless if the “communities” of Masafer Yatta are destroyed. The court considered evidence – real, historic, factual documentation – that disproved each of the squatters’ claims:
The Palestinian Arab propaganda film “No Other Land” ignores the facts, disregards years of legal consideration, makes no attempt to present another side of the specious narrative of displacement and occupation, and glosses over a host of very problematic facts that arise in the film itself, such as the fact that the star of the show and his family make their living from an illegal – and massively polluting - petrol station in the middle of the desert, or the massive financing for the entire illegal enterprise provided by foreign actors.
“The State of Israel must not abandon the public diplomacy arena and must present the historical truth to the world,” Deutsch continued. “At the same time, it must stop the entry into Israel of foreign anarchists who continue to operate in Judea and Samaria and cause unrest on the ground. Because, really - we have no other country."
Head of the Har Hebron Regional Council Eliram Azoulay remarked: "We who live in the area know the truth: we have seen Hamas use the same propaganda and lies, presenting the Arabs as downtrodden victims of 'occupation' while at the same time creating a de facto Palestinian Arab state by building strangleholds of illegal construction around Jewish communities as the anarchists that work with them ignite confrontations that produce the juicy images for Palestinian Arab propaganda.”