The fate of two documentaries, one about the West Bank and one about Gaza, reminds us of the shifting battle for narrative supremacy that has long accompanied the Israel-Palestine conflict.

On 3 March in Los Angeles, Israeli-Palestinian co-production No Other Land won the best documentary Academy Award for its vivid portrayal of the brutal treatment and ethnic cleansing of more than 1,000 Palestinian inhabitants of Masafer Yatta on the southern edge of the Israeli-occupied West Bank. This being Palestine’s first shared win at the Oscars tempts one to record it as a new high-water mark for Palestinian narratives penetrating mainstream western culture.

Thirty-six hours later, in London, the BBC’s top leadership was explaining to MPs why another documentary had been withdrawn from streaming, after Israeli officials and their powerful allies complained to the broadcaster. The reasoning was not any pro-Palestinian bias in the independently made Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, but rather the undisclosed identity of one protagonist—a 13-year-old boy whose father worked in Gaza’s Hamas-led government, even though it had no discernible bearing on the film.

The Oscar-winner recounts how over four years the Israeli occupation bears down on a pastoral Palestinian community in a rural, but strategically sensitive location, ultimately expelling residents from homes and livelihoods that have sustained them for generations. The military claimed it wanted to make way for a training area, but the reality is revealed at the end of the film that—no surprise here—the plan all along was to deny the land to its Palestinian inhabitants.

Numerous documentaries have captured Israel’s oppression of Palestinians before, but No Other Land offers an ingredient that many see as the reason for its clinching an Academy Award and a host of other prizes over the last year. One protagonist, Basel Adra, is Palestinian, an activist-influencer from Masafer Yatta, while the other, Yuval Abraham, is an Israeli journalist and solidarity activist, who helps document the home demolitions, Jewish settler violence, and apartheid practices, as he campaigns alongside Basel.

In the film, Basel and Yuval’s star-crossed bromance comes across as heartfelt, if slightly awkward at times, developing from their first meeting to document a house demolition in 2019. (Fortuitously, for the purpose of the documentary, the moment was filmed by Israeli co-director Rachel Szor.) The film ends when armed settler pogroms escalate in the aftermath of 7 October making peaceful activism impossible. In the last heart-rending scenes, hundreds of Masafer Yatta residents pack up and leave. Basel’s plan to resist the expulsions by gathering international support and leveraging social media platforms proves fruitless against such a powerful and ruthless enemy. Now, with an Oscar to his name, the campaign has reached an unimaginably large audience, but to what advantage for the displaced residents?

In the face of this failure, one wonders what the point of the film’s “good Israeli” character was, especially as Yuval has no practical effect on the outcome. Is it that Basel needed a reassuring Israeli presence to mitigate his Palestinian otherness before a global audience? Would the film have won international prizes without Yuval? Apart from mentioning Yuval’s Arabic language studies, the motivation for his presence is not addressed in the film—he’s there because he's there—although thematically he does help illustrate the privileged status of Jewish Israelis over Palestinians living under occupation. Critics might argue, however, that his participation promotes the liberal Zionist worldview, that “not all Israelis are bad” and Palestinians should give up their struggle and learn to accommodate the descendants of people who drove them off their land in 1948.

Following the Oscars ceremony, several social media accounts shared this passage from Palestinian writer Mohammed El-Kurd’s recent book Perfect Victims:

“Take the genre of Israelis and Palestinians making films together. The Palestinian filmmaker is chaperoned to the film festival, allowed on stage as their authoritative cosignatory’s charismatic sidekick… [We] eavesdrop on a forbidden conversation, a titillating reconciliation between the slayer and the slain. Discussions about the film, reviews, the way it is promoted, and our excited elevator pitches to one another all become masturbatory, reducing the film to the fact that it was a collaboration between an Israeli and a Palestinian, fulfilling the viewer’s fantasy of a happy ending to an otherwise miserable story. We turn it into a fetish."

El-Kurd was not writing about No Other Land specifically, but the passage has sparked heated online arguments among pro-Palestine accounts. Some have praised Abraham’s acceptance speech to millions around the world which condemned Israel’s “ethnic supremacy” and the inequality of a “regime where I am free under civilian law, and Basel is under military law that has destroyed his life”. Others pointed to Abraham’s implied call for Hamas to free Israeli hostages “brutally taken in the crime of 7 October”. Why, they ask, should the pure Palestinian message of No Other Land be adulterated by a speech centring an Israeli talking-point that has nothing to do with the film. If Israelis held in Gaza are highlighted, why not the thousands of Palestinians imprisoned (illegally, under the laws of war and occupation) in appalling conditions by Israel?

The last 18 months have witnessed Israel openly contemplating a “Second Nakba” against the Palestinians. Its behaviour and rhetoric have caused many westerners to revise once-positive attitudes towards the idea of a Jewish state, especially as awareness spreads about how Israel was founded in 1948. Arab opinion has also hardened against Israel, with diminishing numbers now thinking a two-state solution either possible or desirable. As such, the sight of liberal Zionist Yuval Abraham up on stage with Basel Adra provoked as much controversy in the pro-Palestine camp as there was outrage in the pro-Israel camp about the film being given the Oscar in the first place.

And so, to the sorry tale of the BBC broadcasting, and then withdrawing Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone from its streaming platform. When the Jamie Roberts/Yousef Hammash production was aired on 17 February, many critics of BBC coverage were pleasantly surprised that—finally—the corporation had done something to humanize the most heart-breaking victims of Gaza’s live-streamed destruction, Palestinian children. The film captures the lives, hopes and fears of its youthful protagonists so that you begin to love them like your own children. My favourite, Zakaria, who volunteers receiving ambulances at a hospital emergency unit, witnesses unspeakable horrors yet maintains the cheeky exuberance of a typical 11-year-old underneath the dust and the blood. You fear for all their safety and pray for their deliverance. Unlike the Oscar winner, no human presence is included to represent Israel, only the violent soundtrack and visuals which play throughout the film: bombs, fighter jets, wounds, gunfire, drones, helicopters and voice messages telling civilians to flee.

Israel’s lobbying operation went into instant overdrive to undermine the film’s credibility. There were accusations of one-sidedness because it focused only on Palestinians; others complained about the subtitles, where the standard Palestinian term for Israelis, al-Yahoud, was not translated as “the Jews”, supposedly to hide how antisemitic people in Gaza are. But the silver bullet proved to be the discovery that the father of the young narrator, Abdullah Al-Yazouri, serves as a junior agriculture minister in the Hamas government. Complainants branded Dr Ayman Al-Yazouri as “a terrorist leader” although his CV is purely technocratic, with a UK PhD and former service in the UAE government.  But the fact the BBC had not been given this information by the filmmakers before broadcast provided the ammunition needed to pull the film. Critics of the film celebrated, but a letter signed by more than 800 artists and media personalities was sent to BBC chiefs calling for the documentary to be reinstated.

BBC journalism has been a major contributor to the long list of examples of dehumanising media speech about Palestinians contrasting with humanising language used for their Israeli equivalents. The penchant in BBC copy for Palestinians to “die” in “clashes” while Israelis are “killed” (and sometimes “brutally murdered”) being the textbook example. Early in the war, I lodged a successful complaint against a BBC story about a family being massacred by Israel which carried the headline “In a Gaza refugee camp, a father outlives his wife and four children”. Outlives! Especially galling has been the concerted BBC effort devoted to telling stories of Israeli victims, while the numerically superior Palestinian (and Lebanese) victims are usually treated as unnamed statistics. So it was a relief to see this 59-minute production reversing that trend in a most compelling, emotionally effective way—at least for the two days before the BBC pulled it! 

Naturally, this being 2025, removing the film from the BBC’s iPlayer service helped publicise, rather than restrict access to Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone. The documentary was uploaded to multiple streaming platforms and has probably gained a larger audience than if there had been no surrounding scandal. But as a matter of principle, one might compare its treatment, hypothetically, to a documentary in which a child was found to have undisclosed family ties to an Israeli official involved in the Gaza genocide—would such a film be pulled if Palestinians complained? Would government ministers have intervened as they did in this case? Hell, BBC News embeds with an army accused of genocide. It platforms the ICC-indicted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu who has had an arrest warrant against his name since 21 November 2024. Sometimes the double standards beggar belief.

Controversies like the one over the BBC’s latest Gaza documentary have been quite frequent over many years, illustrating the efforts invested in controlling pro-Palestine narratives as a fundamental element in the struggle. The Israeli state pumped an extra $150m into Hasbara, or public diplomacy projects, at the end of 2024, which was seen as a sign of growing panic about the erosion of its once-dominant narrative. But the Oscar win, even for a co-production between “the slayer and the slain”, would have been inconceivable before October 2023 and its aftermath, and shows just how much the ground has shifted in the last year and a half.