Hollywood honors anti-Israel film.

Winner's acceptance speech slanders Israel with absurd charge of "ethnic cleansing."

The accounts I’ve seen about this year’s Academy Awards ceremony say that the event was drama free and largely devoid of the performative leftism and virtue signaling that, from what I’ve heard, plagued past ceremonies. It turns out, however, that the ceremony was marred by anti-Israeli slander.

I guess that doesn’t count as drama, performative leftism, or virtue signaling these days.

The Academy gave the Oscar for best documentary to an Israel-bashing film called “No Other Land.” The movie purports to document the horrors that Palestinians confront at the hands of oppressive Israeli military demolition crews bent on destroying their homes, displacing their people, and stealing their land.

Joel Margolis debunks that narrative here. He points out that the Palestinian Arab settlements in the film, known as Masafer Yatta, are, by virtue of the Oslo Accords, in Area C of the West Bank. The Accords grant Israel interim control of Area C.

But in 1999, Palestinians violated them by erecting new shacks in Masafer Yatta without obtaining building permits from Israel’s Civil Administration. Since then, according to Margolis:

Palestinian Arabs have orchestrated many such unlicensed land grabs in Area C. Using slapdash combinations of cement blocks, mud bricks, corrugated metal sheets, plastic tarps and portable electric generators, they create chess pawns strategically positioned to block the buildout of Israeli communities and enlarge the pretense of “Palestinian land.”

The decision to add Palestinian settlements in Masafer Yatta was especially provocative because that barren expanse had been classified in the 1980s as an Israeli military training zone.

This Palestinian land grab resulted in two decades of litigation. Finally, in 2022 Israel’s left-leaning High Court of Justice ruled that the disputed Masafer Yatta outposts must be removed. The affected villagers were not expelled from the area. Instead, when the demolition order was enforced, they relocated to nearby cave homes where Muslims, Christians and Jews lived for centuries.

In sum, the picture presented by “No Other Land” grossly distorts reality. But because the distortion casts Israel in a false light, the Academy rewarded it with an Oscar. And, to no one’s surprise, a goodly portion of the audience at the awards ceremony gave the activists who produced the movie a standing ovation when they took the stage.

Proof, if any were needed, that Hollywood hates Israel.

Then came the icing on the propaganda cake. In his speech accepting the award, Basel Adra stated:

About two months ago, I became a father. My hope [for] my daughter is that she will not have to live the same life I’m living now, always fearing settlers’ violence, home demolitions and forcible displacement that my community in Masafer Yatta is living and facing every day under Israeli occupation.

‘No Other Land’ reflects the harsh reality that we have been enduring for decades and still resist. We call on the world to take serious actions to stop the injustice and to stop the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people.”

(Emphasis added)

“Ethnic cleansing?” How is it ethnic cleansing to knock down illegally constructed structures? How is it ethnic cleansing when the occupants of those structures continue to live in the same area? How is it ethnic cleansing to adhere to the terms of the Oslo Accords agreed to by none other than Yassar Arafat?

The “ethnic cleansers” here are the Palestinians. They seek a state cleansed of Jews — Judenrein, to use the Nazi word for it. They seek a state on the West Bank like the semi-state they got in Gaza when the Israeli government mistakenly agreed to leave the Strip and forcibly removed all Jews living there.

(Israel, by the way, is home to around 2 million Arab citizens. By contrast, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and Lebanon, where Jews once thrived in large numbers, are essential “free” of Jews.)

Yet, thanks to the haters in Hollywood, a Palestinian activist was able to accuse Israel of ethnic cleansing to an audience of nearly 20 million Americans.

However, it’s not clear that many Americans will see the movie itself. Apparently, it lacks a U.S. distributor at this time.

The producers blame this problem on fear of a political backlash. But that’s the risk you take when you produce a blatantly one-sided polemic against a nation that just had its citizens (as well as foreigners living among them) massacred by Palestinians.

I wouldn’t want to see “No Other Land” censored. But its producers have no God-given right to have their propaganda distributed in America.

I suspect, however, that “No Other Land” will find its way into American theatres in cites on both coasts and in college towns. That’s okay. I just wish that the Academy hadn’t honored the film and given its producers a soap box on Sunday.