Yuval Abraham (r) and Basel Adra (not in the picture) receive the Berlinalet Audience Award at the closing gala in the Berlinale Palast. (archive image)
Photo: dpa/Monika Skolimowska
Two hours before the screening of their film “No Other Land” at the Berlin Academy of Arts, the two directors learned that Berlin’s official city portal “berlin.de” was announcing it as anti-Semitic. The page read: “The focus is on the lives of Palestinians in the West Bank and their lives under Israeli occupation. The film, which has anti-Semitic tendencies, was completed in 2023, after the Hamas attack on Israel, which is not reflected in this documentary.
The directors, the Palestinian Basel Adra and the Jewish Israeli Yuval Abraham, were shocked by this on Tuesday when they were connected online during the subsequent conversation in the cinema. It is the third time that German politicians have accused their film of anti-Semitism this year: for the first time in February at the Berlinale, where it won the audience award in the Panorama section and the directors called for a ceasefire in Gaza, as a reference in the Bundestag resolution, which is intended to “protect Jewish life in Germany”, where there was talk of an anti-Semitism scandal at the Berlinale and now in the film announcement.
Yuval Abraham blamed Berlin’s governing mayor Kai Wegner (CDU) for this: “After the Berlinale, after the mayor and other politicians incited against me and Basel, a right-wing mob came to my family’s house and my mother had to flee,” reported he in the Academy of Arts. Wegner had described the directors’ Berlinale acceptance speech as “unbearable relativization” and “anti-Semitism”, while Senator for Culture Joe Chialo (CDU) had spoken of “anti-Israel propaganda”. Yuval Abraham, whose grandmother was born in a concentration camp and whose grandfather’s family was almost completely wiped out, received death threats after the Berlinale.
The fact that the official Berlin website is again associating him with anti-Semitism makes him feel “unsafe and unwelcome” as a Jewish Israeli. He said, agitated: “How you use the word anti-Semitism as a weapon (…) to silence criticism of Israel’s occupation; To hear that you are using the death of my family to legitimize this (…) is so wrong and unjust.«
The incident was heavily commented on on social networks and made waves as far as Tel Aviv, where Germany’s ambassador to Israel, Steffen Seibert, felt compelled to clarify on the “X” platform: “The film shows a harsh reality. He is on the side of the Palestinians, whose homeland is being destroyed. You can argue about it politically. But “anti-Semitic tendencies”? The accusation is simply false.” Abraham himself was even more direct on Tuesday: “History is knocking on Germany’s door again. And you fail. You’re failing again.”
The passage on “berlin.de” has now been changed. Now it reads: “An earlier version of the text stated that this film ‘has anti-Semitic tendencies’. This review was incorrect and inadmissible. It was therefore removed.”
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