The BDS Movement Officially Boycotts "No Other Land"

Yes, you read that right. The anti-Israel BDS movement has announced the boycott of the Academy Award winning documentary that exposes the forcible displacement of West Bank Palestinians by the Israeli army. Why? Because the film making was a cooperative effort between Israeli and Palestinian directors -- in other words, an effort at peace making -- that the international BDS movement cannot abide. Here is the explanation:

First, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) has from the start reached the conclusion that this film indeed violates the BDS movement’s anti-normalization guidelines in several ways. The BDS movement has always fought against normalization as a powerful weapon employed by oppressors to whitewash their crimes, to colonize the minds of the oppressed, and to undermine global solidarity with the struggle to end oppression.

Regardless of intentions, and according to the anti-normalization guidelines agreed upon by the vast majority of Palestinian civil society, normalization is the participation in any project, initiative or activity, local or international, that brings together (on the same “platform”) Palestinians (and/or Arabs) and Israelis (individuals or institutions). . . .

No Other Land was produced with the help of Close-Up, an organization that is engaged in normalization and is therefore boycotted by many filmmakers and PACBI. Moreover, some of the team’s Israeli members are not on record supporting the comprehensive rights of the Palestinian people. They have failed to acknowledge that Israel is perpetrating a genocide, or have even made extremely harmful, immoral statements drawing a false equivalence between the colonizer and the colonized that may be used to rationalize Israel’s genocide. Accordingly, the film certainly violates the BDS movement’s anti-normalization guidelines.

We acknowledge that the film’s team recently published a statement that explicitly mentions the Nakba, ethnic cleansing, settler-colonialism, and apartheid. Calling for justice for Palestinian refugees, it goes a long way to address the above-mentioned serious flaws. Yet, the statement still fails to identify Israel as the perpetrator of all these crimes. 

Second, regardless of the above and aside from BDS guidelines, 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.

What is left to be said? There is evidently no effort at mutual cooperation, understanding, or recognition that can satisfy the BDS demands. Bibi Netanyahu has repeatedly, and falsely, declared that Israel has no partner for peace. The BDS movement seems tragically determined to reinforce him.