Responding to No Other Land and the mere existence of co-director Yuval Abraham along with director Basel Adra, this is one especially unhinged response from the radical, pro-Hamas wing of the Palestinian solidarity movement in the UK. David Miller is eloquent in his own perverted way. The expression of sheer hatred is immediately repellent. It’s also hypocritical on the author’s part, who stands with nothing to lose in his call for death and destruction. The language is clearly psychotic. But a stubborn kernel of truth about Israel and Jews and their fusion, about Zionism and Jewish identity, and also about Jewish anti-Zionism, about which Miller is especially harsh –all it buried in this grotesque and violent ideation by an inveterate anti-Semite on the global left.

For it’s part, the inveterate anti-Zionist and anti-Israel Mondoweis chimes in here suggesting the same about Yuval Abraham’s speech at the Oscars, calling him a “liberal Zionist.” The author Nada Elia, a diaspora Palestinian scholar notes the “very narrow” focus of Adra’s speech (and the film itself) on Masafer Yatta. She supports the film while wanting from Abraham maximalist political positioning, something consonant with the dead-end claim that “Israel, by its mere existence, dispossesses the Palestinian people.”

Lastly, PACBI (The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI)’s position on No Other Land), which is the organizing coordinating body of global BDS weighs in here. Taking upon itself the mantle of “[ensuring] harmony with the movement’s anti-normalization guidelines, PACBI is calling for a boycott of No Other Land. PACBI claims that the film or filmmakers did not meet movement anti-normalization guidelines, for not calling out genocide and settler-colonialism. But the core problem is the presence of Israeli co-producers. “Regardless of the above and aside from BDS guidelines,” the statement reads, “it is important to recognize that Palestinians do not need validation, legitimation or permission from Israelis to narrate our history, our present, our experiences, our dreams, and our resistance, including artistic resistance, to the colonial system of oppression that denies us our freedom and inalienable rights. It is therefore imperative for us to challenge the racist conditions, whether covert or overt, imposed by the colonial West and its hegemonic institutions, which do not platform Palestinians except with the permission or validation of Israelis.” The statement goes on to excoriate “Hollywood,” which one can read as code however one wishes.

In response, Samah Salaime at +972 interviews reports on local activists from Masafer Yatta pushing back against the blowback from activists from the Palestinian diaspora and on the global left around collaborating with Jews and Israelis. She quotes Tariq Hathaleen, an activist from the village of Umm Al-Khair, who explained: “Everything we stand for here is in real danger. We have been under daily attacks from settlers. On the same evening that the whole world was talking about [“No Other Land”] winning the Oscar, the settlers organized themselves and came to take revenge…I have personally been active in this struggle for more than two decades. After much thought and discussion, we decided back then that we would welcome all supporters who identify with us on the ground. Twenty years ago, groups from Israel and abroad came, and I accompanied them. For me, they are a force I cannot afford to give up on. All these years, we have heard the accusations from the boycott movement against us — we expected it.”

Diaspora politics have a tendency to focus attention on “identity” and “identification,” and then harden around reified identity categories. With its own tight pivot, No Other Land is a film not about identity, not about the identity of filmmakers Adra or Abraham, as it about Masafer Yatta and the people who live there. As if against the narcissism of diaspora and binary identity politics, Palestinians interviewed by Salaime reflect on the formation of local and class politics connecting people and collectives into new constellations across social difference. Against the image of black and white, good, and evil, Salaime sees in No Other Land a film that “forces us to imagine possibilities for a future with Israelis, free from occupation, genocidal violence, and Jewish supremacy.” That’s precisely why, as she says, voices on the global BDS left set out to strip the film of legitimacy. Local politics is not complex. Salaime interviews Jihad Al-Nawaja, head of the village council in Susiya, who tells her that, as far as he is concerned, namely from his own perspective, Yuval Abraham is Jewish, Israeli, and “Palestinian to the core.”