The fault lines that emerged after No Other Land won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature were fairly predictable. The film chronicles the attempted eviction of a collection of Palestinian villages known as Masafer Yatta through the eyes of two friends—Basel Adra, a Palestinian, and Yuval Abraham, a Jewish Israeli. Controversy has surrounded the film, since, despite international acclaim, it has failed to find a U.S. distributor. In accepting the award Sunday night, Abraham said, “Can’t you see that we are intertwined? That my people can be truly safe if Basel’s people are truly free?” Almost immediately after stepping off stage, Abraham was accused of being a Hamas supporter and a “kapo” for siding with the enemy. Others were angry that a Jewish Israeli was even up on the dais in the first place, his mere existence an affront to Palestinian liberation. And this week the BDS movement released a statement that the film indeed violates the organization’s anti-normalization guidelines.
The hullabaloo reminded me of the response to Moment’s recently released film, A Protective Presence. The documentary short, directed by Eli Katzoff and for which I was the executive producer, follows activist Rabbi Arik Ascherman for 24 hours as he traverses the West Bank to protect Palestinians under threat from extremist settlers and the Israeli army. Through Ascherman’s eyes, we witness a Jewish shepherd bringing his flock of goats into a Palestinian vineyard to eat and destroy the plants, as well as the arrest of a Palestinian farmer by the Israeli army during which no one would say what the charges actually were.
Of course this film offers only one perspective, but what drew me to the subject was that it wasn’t depicting the burning of houses, torching of cars, destruction of businesses and physical violence that we see on the news when discussing increased West Bank violence toward Palestinians since October 7. Rather, it shows how the normalization of harassment, destruction of property and risk of arrest have created an almost uninhabitable environment.
After the launch event for A Protective Presence was announced on social media sites, a deluge of comments came in that quickly devolved into fights over who has a right to the land, whom it actually belongs to and who should be labeled victims or aggressors.
I can’t say I was surprised, but something unexpected did happen. After the premiere of the film I saw a message in my Facebook inbox from a college friend I had lost touch with and hadn’t spoken to in 15 years. From what I remembered, he made aliyah soon after graduating and belonged to a religious Zionist community in Israel. I figured we would have differing viewpoints and steeled myself for more of the same vitriol I had been receiving on social media. But I was wrong. He told me that he is a big fan of Ascherman’s work and that he has even become involved in his organization. We ended up chatting via Zoom, and I learned how some of his views have changed over time, how he and his family regularly go out with Ascherman to protect Palestinians, how he feels shame when he sees Jewish extremists mistreat their Palestinian neighbors. And how he wants Palestinians to see a different type of Jew–especially a Jew in a kippah serugah (knitted kippah)–than the ones they are so often forced to interact with.
This Shabbat is Shabbat Zachor (Remembrance), where synagogues all over the world will hear the commandment to remember Amalek’s attack on the Jews leaving Egypt and to wipe out their memory. The concept of complete annihilation of Amalek and their descendents has a long and tortuous history in Jewish thought, but one (minority) interpretation that I have always liked is that when we are instructed to destroy Amalek, we are being instructed to destroy the Amalek—i.e., the unnecessary cruelty—in ourselves. If we want to expand this idea, we can view this as a call to look outside ourselves and open ourselves up to the perspective of the “other” no matter how impossible that may seem.