The myth of Masafer Yatta
From Hollywood to the BBC, a genocidal narrative of lies is promoted as factually true.
By Melanie Phillips
JNS
Mar 6, 2025
The regular outbreak of narcissistic anti-Zionist derangement among Hollywood’s useful idiots plumbed new and hallucinatory depths with this year’s Oscars.
The award for Best Documentary Feature Film at the annual Academy Awards ceremony on March 2 went to “No Other Land,” a film created by a Palestinian Arab activist, Basel Adra, and an Israeli Jewish activist, Yuval Abraham.
The film depicts the apparently heroic resistance by Palestinian Arabs against Israel’s alleged attempt to destroy Adra’s community in Masafer Yatta, a collection of Arab settlements in the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria.
To whoops and cheers from the audience, Adra spoke of the need to stop “injustice and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people,” and of “always fearing [Israeli] settler violence, home demolitions and forcible displacements” in Masafer Yatta “under the harsh reality of occupation.”
For his part, Abraham called Adra his brother, denounced the “atrocious destruction of Gaza and its people which must end” and in the next breath linked this to “the Israeli hostages brutally taken in the crime of Oct. 7, which must be freed.”
At least he mentioned them.
The reality of Masafer Yatta, however, is radically different. The area was never under Palestinian Arab control. The only people with any legal or historical claim to it are the Jews.
In the 1920s, the Jews alone were promised a homeland by the League of Nations throughout what is now Israel, the disputed territories and the Gaza Strip—a binding treaty obligation that has never been abrogated.
In 1999, Arabs illegally erected homes in Masafer Yatta but failed to obtain building permits from Israel’s civil administration. This violated the Israel and Arab agreed-upon Oslo Accords that gave Israel full control over this area.
In 2022, Israel’s High Court ruled that these homes must be demolished. As a result, the residents moved into nearby alternative dwellings. Many of these condemned structures, however, remained in place in order to provide the illusion of a permanent Arab presence.
None of these facts, of course, was mentioned in the film because they would instantly destroy the lie of helpless Arabs victimized by cruel Israeli oppression.
Masafer Yatta has produced numerous terrorists who have murdered Israeli civilians. Moreover, with the connivance or backing of NGOs such as B’Tselem and Amnesty, its activists harass Jews living in the area by trespassing, damaging property and provoking fights that they film and post online with titles like “settler violence” and “Jewish supremacy.”
In 2021, during a violent incident in Masafer Yatta, an Israeli Defense Forces officer filmed a young Arab setting fire to Arab structures and shouting: “The Jews did it.”
The Jewish Voice reported that this young Arab was none other than the future Oscar-winner Basel Adra, whom it described as a B’Tselem activist and “a known provocateur in the Hebron mountains.” In a succession of contradictory claims, Adra later denied that he had committed arson.
The mythology that has developed around Masafa Yatta is one of many lies that have shaped support for the Palestinian cause throughout the West, investing it with the status of a heroic fight for justice. Obscenely, this big lie has come to define the claim by Western “progressives” to moral and centrist attitudes.
In Britain, the BBC, whose endemic animus against Israel has caused it for decades to transmit Palestinian propaganda demonizing Israel as entirely credible, has finally been caught in such an egregious abuse of its duty to tell the truth that even the Palestinian-supporting Labour government is demanding an explanation.
Last month, BBC TV aired a documentary entitled “Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone.” This was directed by a production company in London that relied on two cameramen based in Gaza.
The synopsis described the documentary as “following the lives of four young people trying to survive the Israel-Hamas war as they hope for a ceasefire—a vivid and unflinching view of life in a war zone.”
It took the indefatigable pro-Israel blogger David Collier just three hours to discover that Abdullah, the 14-year-old narrator who had been schooled as a Palestinian child propagandist for years, was the son of a senior Hamas government minister in Gaza who had supported the murder of Israelis by Hamas terrorists.
Collier revealed that the BBC show was “one of the worst Palestinian propaganda pantomimes you will ever get to see.” One of the co-directors in London was a Palestinian propagandist. One of the cameramen had saluted the Oct. 7 massacres and in 2021 had shared “resistance” videos full of terrorists, rockets and Israeli funerals. Two girls who took part in the film were the daughters of a Hamas police officer. Another child was pictured standing next to a Hamas terrorist holding weapons.
The child narrator, Abdullah, has said the production company gave him a script to read and paid him $1,000 for his performance. The police are now investigating whether the BBC has broken the law by paying members of a terrorist organization—with public money originating in the BBC license fee imposed on all who watch its output.
The Hamas links to this film should have come as no surprise. Every media report drawing on information from Gazan sources has to adhere to what the terrorist group wants to be said on pain of either death or withdrawal of access.
Neither the BBC nor any other media outlet issues a routine health warning on reports out of Gaza advising the public that these are produced under duress. Instead, they report these falsehoods (and staged “Pallywood” tableaux of Israeli brutality) as credible, while routinely suggesting that Israeli statements are not to be believed.
Worse still, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA) found that on several occasions, the BBC Gaza film mistranslated the Arabic words “Yahud” or “Yahudi” (meaning “Jew” or “Jewish”) as “Israeli.” The words of one individual who praised Hamas’s former leader, Yahya Sinwar, for waging “jihad against the Jews” were translated as Sinwar “fighting and resisting against Israeli forces.”
The intention was to conceal the fact that the Palestinian Arabs are driven not just by the aim of destroying Israel but by the desire to exterminate Jews. Arab antisemitism gets in the way of the Palestinian narrative.
Over the years, the BBC has repeatedly mistranslated the Arabic for “Jew” as “Israeli” in this wicked way. And it can’t claim to be unaware of what it’s doing.
In 2015, the news outlet’s chief international correspondent, Lyse Doucet, defended a similar translation, saying: “We talked to people in Gaza, we talked to translators. When [the children] say ‘Jews’, they mean ‘Israelis.’ … We felt it was a better translation of it.”
In a controversy of unprecedented seriousness for the BBC over the Gaza film, it has admitted to serious flaws but so far has failed to hold anyone to account.
It’s clearly hoping that it can contain the damage by treating this as a one-off aberration. It is not. It is rather the most blatant example of its profound animus against Israel—a distorted view to which it is so deeply wedded that it treats all factual evidence to the contrary as proof of extremism.
Through its unique global reach and reputation for fairness and balance, as a result of which millions around the world trust it more than any other broadcasting organization, the BBC has been responsible for gross incitement to hatred and worse against Israel and the Jewish people. It has blood on its hands.
As the broadcasting arm of the intelligentsia, however, the BBC merely reflects a view that cultural elites regard as axiomatically true. They believe that Palestinianism is a just cause and that the “Palestinian people” are the victims of Israeli colonialism.
As a result, from the Hollywood red carpet to BBC Broadcasting House in London, the people who shape the West’s cultural narrative have been promoting genocidal antisemitism posing as conscience.
They aren’t in fact useful idiots at all. They are instead active accomplices of evil.
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