The lies behind Oscar winner "No Other Land" ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Monday, March 03, 2025

The lies behind Oscar winner "No Other Land"

Last night, the film "No Other Land" won the Academy Award for Best Documentary.

It is described at the film site "Deadline" as exploring "root causes of enmity as the filmmakers chronicle the Israeli military’s incremental expulsion of the West Bank community of Masafer Yatta — home to 20 ancient Palestinian villages."

That is a myth. There were not 20 ancient Palestinian villages there. All of structures in the area were built since the 1980s, deliberately as a land grab of state lands.

Here is the entire history of the area as described by Wikipedia, today:

In 1881, the British Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) noted the following places: Shảb el Butm, meaning 'the spur of the terebinth', Tuweil esh Shîh, meaning 'the peak or ridge of Artemisia', Khirbet el Fekhît, meaning 'the ruin of the fissure', and Khirbet Bîr el 'Edd, meaning 'the ruin of the perennial well'. At Khirbet Bîr el 'Edd, PEF noted "traces of ruins, and a cistern", while at Khirbet el Fekhît, they noted "traces of ruins, and a cave."

Here is the PEF map showing the four (not twenty!) places:

The British found no villages, no population, just traces of old ruins.

In 1981, then Agriculture Minister Ariel Sharon was alarmed at the spread of illegal Palestinian structures moving towards this area. He proposed to turn the area into a firing zone for IDF training. “I want to tell the representatives of the general staff, we want to offer you additional training areas. Additional training areas must be closed in at the border, [between] the bottom of the Hebron Hills and the Judean Desert. In light of that phenomenon – the spreading of the Arab villagers on the mountainside toward the desert....We have an interest in expanding and enlarging the shooting zones there, in order to keep these areas, which are so vital, in our hands."

There is no doubt that his purpose was political to keep the areas empty in light of Arab expansion towards this desert. There is also no doubt that at the time, there were no permanent structures there yet.

The Regavim NGO describes how these empty areas became today's Masafer Yatta:

The shepherds of Yatta would sleep in caves in nearby grazing areas, rather than trekking back to the village each night. After the IDF closed off the area, the shepherds were permitted to continue grazing their flocks there; the IDF gave them a few days’ warning before live-fire exercises to insure that no one got hurt. The Palestinian Authority seized the opportunity – and began funding construction of permanent structures. Foreign interests jumped right in after them, funding infrastructure projects to support the “indigenous farmers” – laying water and electricity lines that enabled more and more people to set up homesteads on the “free” land.

Aerial images show this to be the case. Here are two such images from 1997 and 2021, showing a village in the area built from scratch.

The Israeli High Court ruled in 2022 that the people claiming they lived on the land for decades had no case - and that even their own evidence contradicted their claims!

For the sake of example, our focus will be on the aerial photographs of "Khirbet al-Fahit" presented by the respondents ("al-Fahit" according to the petitioners). In 1967 and 1981 the area was completely empty of buildings. Some development is evident during the years 1990 and 1991. In 2001 it is evident that a number of buildings were already built in Kharbit, and such were built more and more in 2007, 2009, 2011 and 2012.
An identical picture is revealed from the aerial photographs attached by the petitioners and even more clearly. It can also be seen that in 1972 and 1981 there is no evidence of buildings in the area compared to 2011, when there is a lot of construction on the site.
The same is true with regard to Khirbet Hilweh ("Al Hilweh" according to the petitioners). There is not much room to doubt that in the early years (1967, 1979, 1981 and even 1991) there is no evidence of construction on the site. However in the years 2007, 2009, 2011 and 2012 more and more buildings and houses were built. There is a sharp and noticeable difference between the photos from the early period (in 1972, 1981 and even 1993) and the photo from 2011 in which construction can be clearly identified.

Similarly, the Arabs claimed that the book "Life in the Caves of Mount Hebron" by Yaakov Havakook, published by the Ministry of Defense in 1985, proved that these villages were permanent. The High Court read the book and found that it said the opposite, and moreover, that all the residents of the caves had permanent homes in nearby real villages.

Havakook reiterates that at the time the book was written (1984), it can be seen that every year shepherds from nearby villages used to stay in these ruins and "at the end of winter, the shepherd families return and abandon the caves, which were used during the grazing months, and move to their mother villages or to other, more promising grazing places" (p. 56). Therefore, the reference to Havakook's book does not help the petitioners.

Of the many reviews I've read of "No Other Land," none of them even hint at the facts here. The film is pure propaganda meant to incite people to hate Israel. One review even says the film "will make you want to throw rocks."

That is the entire point.

Propaganda exists not to inform but to manipulate people's emotions. Many reviews mention that the film itself is "resistance," which in Palestinian parlance means both creating propaganda like this and murdering Jews: there is little distinction between the cognitive war and the kinetic war.

Make no mistake: "No Other Land" is part of the cognitive war against the Jewish state.