THIS is with reference to the report ‘Israeli-Palestinian film wins Oscar’ (March 4) about the documentary No Other Land (image above from social media). The documentary was filmed and prod-uced by Palestinian activist Basel Adra, who documented the Israeli military’s destruction of his hometown, Masafer Yatta, situated in the southern occupied West Bank.

It has been made with Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, who co-directed it along with Palestinian filmmaker Hamdan Ballal and Israeli filmmaker Rachel Szor. This seems to be a deceptive effort to legalise and normalise Israel’s occupation.

This is just like the aborigines in Australia, who were killed, and whose land was robbed to eventually have these same ‘foreigners’ stand next to the indigenous people, demanding they have equal rights to live in harmony.

The colonialists did everything in their power to kill the aborigines, but some remain even today to be kept in shabby conditions.

Though Australia will put a few abor-igines forward to show the world that they have successfully assimilated into Australian society, it is starkly obvious that the balance of power in Australia is with the white man.

The same European squatters in Arab land are working together with ‘Muslims’, sending a message to the world that some Muslims are so pathetic that they are willing to accept the rapists and convicts on the run from Europe — both men and women — who are now the killers of 48,000 Palestinians and occupiers of their land.

How on earth did the Palestinians who stood shoulder to shoulder with non-Arabs at the Oscar ceremony come to terms with colonialists’ rule over them? This is simply beyond my comprehension. Does this non-Arab filmmaker, who squats on Palestinian land, and lives in a house that was robbed at gunpoint from a Palestinian family, has any intention to return to Germany, Spain, the UK, the US, Ukraine, Russia and Australia, from where his ancestors actually came?

This is a familiar path the colonialists took in Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Canada. They beat, killed, raped, tortured, bombed buildings (huts when the US was attacked by the Europeans), destroyed agriculture, contaminated water, and bombed the indigenous people into submission.

Years, sometimes centuries later, these colonialists demanded equal rights for the people whose land they had occupied earlier. This is all part of the scheme.

In fact, they did it frequently in the past, and they are doing it right now in Palestine. We should never lose our focus on the land of Palestine which belongs only and only to the Palestinians.

Angabeen Ahmad
Karachi

Published in Dawn, March 17th, 2025