BDS has denounced ‘No Other Land’ for ‘normalization’ – what does that actually mean?
The movement’s statement condemning the Oscar winning documentary has stirred up confusion among the film’s supporters.
Basel Adra, left, and Yuval Abraham, winners of the best documentary feature award for No Other Land, holding their Oscars. Photo by Monica Schipper/Getty Images
By Olivia Haynie March 14, 2025
When the Boycott Divestment Sanction movement released a statement on their website condemning the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land for violating its guidelines, some of the film’s supporters were shocked. Specifically BDS’ Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) has accused the film of normalization, which they define as “making occupation, apartheid and settler colonialism seem normal and establishing normal relations with the Israeli regime.”
Responding to the announcement, Palestinian activist Ihab Hassan wrote on X, “Are these people serious?” A number of West Bank residents criticized BDS’ stance in a +972 Magazine article. Nidal Younis, who heads the village council in Masafer Yatta, where the events of No Other Land take place, said the film’s Oscar deserves to be celebrated.
“No film can bring about historical justice to our people,” Younis told +972. “But it is one of the available means in our struggle, and must be used in our international efforts.”
According to BDS, Israeli-Palestinian projects engage in normalization unless the Israeli side publicly recognizes the inalienable rights of Palestinians and the projects co-resist “the Israeli regime of occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid.”
Emily Schneider, a professor of Criminal Justice at Northern Arizona University, explained that resisting normalization, in part means questioning the inherent power imbalance between Israelis and Palestinians in the peace process, and rejecting the systems that foster inequality.
PACBI’s statement highlights the fact that No Other Land was made with the help of Close Up, an initiative that supports films with underrepresented narratives and was funded in part by the Israeli-government sponsored Greenhouse Film Centre. According to Close Up’s website, the group split from Greenhouse in 2019.
On March 10, PACBI responded to a number of questions that had been raised about their initial statement, including concerns that they were condemning a film that brings attention to Palestinian oppression. They clarified that they had not yet officially called for a boycott of the film “in mainstream circles” since doing so “could be counterproductive.” However, they discouraged showing the film in “the Arab world and the Global South.”
“Essentially any kind of peace building initiative, any kind of joint initiative that included Israeli organized participation is vulnerable to accusations that it is normalizing,” Ned Lazarus, a professor of international relations at the George Washington University, told me.
From 1996-2004, Lazarus was the Middle East Program Director for Seeds of Peace, a peacebuilding and leadership development organization. He says he saw up close how anti-normalization strategies can affect peace initiatives.
“Many people who have been involved in that think it has a negative effect and that it is applied extremely broadly and really is more about preventing cooperation,” he said.
Schneider, whose upcoming book American Jews in Palestine: Tourism and the Limits of Liberal Sympathy discusses the relationship between empathy and political behavior, thinks the guidelines are trying to address the gap between awareness and activism.
“A lot of people like to take empathy for granted as inherently productive in terms of politics,” Schneider said. “But both my research and other studies show that people can hold really deep and genuine empathy with a group that’s oppressed and still essentially support that oppression.”
If the film is not pushing audiences to action beyond feeling empathy, it may not meet BDS’ standards of resistance.
“What I think the PACBI statement is trying to do is it’s trying to hold the Israelis involved in this film accountable to fully support Palestinian liberation,” said Schneider “And I think that is a different thing than saying that there should be no collaboration between Israelis and Palestinians, which is not what the BDS movement says.”
Given the complex, confusing, and – according to some – contradictory nature of the anti-normalization movement, some may doubt it as an effective method of pressuring Israel to meet BDS’ demands.
Lazarus said that while the BDS movement has not been successful in terms of “hard power” – influence on the Israeli economy or military activity in Gaza – it has helped shift Western public opinion about Israel.
“Calls to cut off arms to Israel or limit arms to Israel and things like that, became very widespread, both in the U.S. and Western Europe,” Lazarus explained. “I think that sentiment is also probably shorter term, meaning it’s more connected to the current war, but it will probably also have some lasting effect.”
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