COMMENTARY:
Months ago, we saw the film No Other Land at the Fountain Theater. Last Monday, an English teacher who’d shot some of its footage was killed.
We liked the unique story of the film’s making, by two Palestinian and two Jewish directors, about the forced displacement of Palestinians from Masafer Yatta, a cluster of villages in southwest occupied West Bank. The Israelis declared that a huge swath of Palestinian farms and village was part of an Israeli military base, so that the residents were trespassers. Yeah, it reminded me of the U.S. South decades ago. The authorities weren’t marching Negroes to concentration camps, but stood by while white citizens did as they liked.
The film is deeply personal, especially in scenes where the two key directors talk about their situations. The Palestinian was born in Masafer Yatta.
It moved us. It helped humanize what’s going on there.
A similar cooperative spirit ran through our recent radio visit with Amalia Zeitlin, Las Cruces resident and symphony violinist, discussing her efforts to bring Jewish and Palestinian youth together through music in Jerusalem.
Dead is Awdaw Hataleen, father of three. The settler who shot him had been under U.S. sanction for violence against Palestinians – until Mr. Trump took office.
If I focus here on the West Bank, it’s because the slow, inexorable, illegal eviction of Palestinians from their farms and villages there has angered me longer, since well before October 7, and has been so clearly wrong. Nothing could justify the October 7 massacre and kidnappings; but earlier events can help explain.
The film won the 2025 Oscar for best documentary feature, yet couldn’t find distribution because of prejudice among the powerful.
I have Israeli friends whom I love. I do not judge them for their country’s misdeeds, as I was grateful that folks from other countries never judged me for my country’s terrible crimes. Fellow budget travelers who liked someone from the U.S. would say, “Oh, you must be Canadian.”
In December I wrote that Israel’s leading genocide scholar classed Israel’s treatment of Gazans as genocide. That bus is filling up. Just this week two Israeli human rights organizations and Marjorie Taylor Greene jumped on. Include prominent Holocaust historian Omer Bartov, who initially called Israeli actions “just war crimes.”
No one wants to say a country founded partly in response to the Holocaust is committing genocide, but there are 60,000 dead, 90% of the population displaced, and 80% of medical facilities destroyed or only partially functional. Amputations have replaced limb-saving surgery. Sixty per cent of housing units are gone. Huge numbers are starving, with innumerable kids suffering malnutrition in what the U.N. calls a “worst-case famine scenario.” More than half of aid shipments have been denied, delayed, or impeded.
West Bank facts help establish motive or intent. They show on a smaller scale, over time, that Israel does not regard Palestinians and their human rights, or lives, even outside Israel proper, as worth protecting. And that predated October 7. Netanyahu has more understandable motives than Hitler did; but he’s doing the crime. So did Hutu. Reasons, but not justification. As an Israeli human rights group points out, all instances of genocide have had justifications, at least in the minds of those who committed them.
As Edmund Burke and Albert Einstein said, the world will not be destroyed by evil-doers but by regular folks standing by silently.
Ain’t that us?
Peter Goodman's opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of KRWG Public Media or NMSU.