I recently went to see the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land.
I sat in the theater, my kippah on my head, watching the film unfold. It was well-made. It was moving. It was painful to watch. The filmmakers followed a small Palestinian village in the West Bank as Israeli soldiers came to evict families from their homes. You saw children crying, women wailing, houses being reduced to rubble. I won’t lie – watching people’s lives be upended like that was devastating. I don’t want anyone, anywhere, to live in fear.
But here’s the thing: No Other Land gives you the tragedy from one point of view. It shows you soldiers with guns, but not the attacks that made them come. It shows you children crying, but not the Israeli children who have been massacred. It doesn’t tell you why Israel must take these actions – just that they happen. And that’s the trick, isn’t it? You take something rooted in decades of war and rejectionism and terrorism, and you strip it down to one story, one image, so that by the time the credits roll, you don’t see history –you see a villain. And in No Other Land, that villain is always Israel.
And then came the Oscars.
I watched as actors and artists paraded down the red carpet, pinning little red hand symbols onto their designer suits, patting themselves on the back for their moral clarity. We heard Mark Ruffalo, in full celebrity-activist mode, racing down the carpet, shouting, “We’re late! The Palestinian protest just shut down the Oscars tonight. Humanity wins!”
Humanity wins?
A protest that ignores the 1,200 Israelis who were butchered on October 7? That says nothing about the hostages – many of whom are still being raped and tortured in Gaza at this very moment? That calls for a ceasefire while innocent people are being held underground, some of them children, some of them already dead?What does humanity mean to these people?
And the red hand pins. That symbol isn’t just some vague call for peace. It references the blood-soaked hands raised in triumph by a Palestinian lynch mob in 2000, after they tore two Israeli reservists to pieces in Ramallah. They literally pulled their organs out. And when they were done, they ran to a window, held up their hands, dripping in Jewish blood, and the crowd below cheered.
That horrid pin is what Guy Pearce was wearing, this was what Billie Eilish, Mark Ruffalo, and Phoebe Bridgers were wearing.
Insider’s perspective: being an artist does not confer morality. It doesn’t grant wisdom. It doesn’t mean you understand history, conflict, or justice. It just means you know how to hold an audience. And at the Oscars, they were performing for it. “See, we are not the oppressor class, we’re the good guys. Please, love us!”
The jubilant roar of the Oscar crowd after No Other Land won Best Documentary wasn’t just applause – it was a statement. A tacit or overt declaration that Israel is the villain. That Hamas – the group that throws gay men off rooftops, that burns families alive, that rapes women, and kidnaps babies – is somehow the underdog. That 1,200 Jewish lives don’t matter as much as maintaining their carefully curated image.
No other land? Maybe.
But no other story either.
Adapted with permission from the blog of the author, a Grammy-nominated musician and prolific writer – peterhimmelman.substack.com/. His latest book – ‘Suspended by No String’ – is available at amazon.com/Suspended-String-Songwriters-Reflections-Aliveness/dp/B0D2W8NLFZ