It didn't arrive after three minutes.
But, a week later, the speeches at the Berlinale by the Israeli Yuval Abraham and the Palestinian Basel Adra still reverberate, having become a matter of security (Abraham has not returned to his country due to death threats) and of debate about what is a balanced discourse on the Middle East conflict and how Germany manages its historical responsibility for the Holocaust.
Last Saturday, Abraham and Adra, both journalists and activists, received the prize for
best documentary as co-directors of
No Other Land.
The film, not yet released on the commercial circuit, tells how the friendship between the two emerged, Adra's personal story and the expulsions and demolitions of the homes where she lives: Massafer Yatta.
It is an inhospitable area in the southern West Bank whose thousand Bedouin inhabitants can be expelled at any time, after the Supreme Court recognized it as a shooting range last year.
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Controversy in Germany over criticism of Israel during the Berlinale awards gala
On stage, the Palestinian was the first to speak: “It is very, very difficult for me to celebrate something while tens of thousands of my people are being massacred in Gaza right now.
As I am here in Berlin, I would like to ask Germany to do one thing: respect the calls of the UN and stop sending weapons to Israel.”
Then Abraham did it, to denounce that both will return (he believed then) two days later to a land in which they are not equal.
“I live in a civilian regime and Basel [Adra] in a military regime.
We live 30 minutes from each other, but I have the right to vote and Basel does not.
I can move freely around the country, but Basel, like millions of Palestinians, is trapped in the West Bank.
“This apartheid
situation
between the two, this inequality, has to end,” he noted.
The Berlinale room erupted in intense applause that has brought problems to the Minister of Culture, Claudia Roth.
To support him, she has had to listen to calls for her resignation.
On Monday, his ministry surprisingly came out to clarify on peaceful coexistence in the region.”
An image from the documentary 'No Other Land', about the destruction of a West Bank community, directed by a collective of four Israeli and Palestinian directors.
The matter has taken on such a dimension that Abraham has stopped speaking to the media.
“He wants to lower his profile, in light of everything that is happening,” says a friend who prefers to remain anonymous.
Nor does Adra respond to interview requests.
Earlier this week, Abraham spoke to the Israeli newspaper
Haaretz
, just after canceling his flight back to Israel due to death threats.
"I'm receiving dozens, if not hundreds, of anonymous messages, like 'When you get back, we'll be waiting for you, son of a bitch,' 'I'll hunt you down at the airport.'
I am a journalist and I have written things more critical than what I said in the speech, but I have never experienced anything like this […] I am afraid.
It has been very stressful,” he added.
Abraham - 29 years old and a journalist in left-wing media in his country and abroad - has remained active on social networks, where on Tuesday he published a tweet - which has already accumulated 26,000 reposts and 59,000 likes - in which he denounced that a A right-wing crowd went to his house the day before to look for him and threatened his immediate family, who had to flee to another city during the night.
“I continue to receive death threats and had to cancel my flight home,” he writes.
His friend confirms that he has not yet returned to Israel.
A right-wing Israeli mob came to my family's home yesterday to search for me, threatening close family members who fled to another town in the middle of the night.
I am still getting death threats and had to cancel my flight home.
This happened after Israeli media and German…
— Yuval Abraham יובל אברהם (@yuval_abraham) February 27, 2024
All this has happened, he laments, after Israeli media and German politicians “absurdly labeled his speech as anti-Semitic.”
“The terrible misuse of this word by the Germans, not only to silence Palestinian critics of Israel, but also Israelis like me who support a ceasefire that ends the killings in Gaza and allows the release of the Israeli hostages, empties the word anti-Semitism of meaning and, therefore, endangers Jews around the world,” he points out.
After recalling that his grandmother was born in a concentration camp in Libya and that most of his grandfather's family was murdered in the Holocaust, he points out: “I find it particularly outrageous that German politicians in 2024 have the audacity to use this term as weapon against me in a way that has endangered my life,” he says.
And “much more” that of Adra, living under military occupation and surrounded by violent settlers.
“You can harshly criticize what Basel and I said on stage without demonizing ourselves.
If this is what you are doing with your guilt for the Holocaust... I don't want your guilt,” he concludes.
The same night as the Berlinale, Israeli public television, Kaan, reported the news with a banner with the text: “The anti-Semitic speech of the Israeli creator.”
On Abraham's behalf, two lawyers demanded by letter a rectification on the air.
Kaan simply removed the phrase on the website and social networks, without apologizing for the error.
He conceded that “it would have been better to put the label differently” and reproached the filmmaker for not having made “reference to Hamas, to October 7 and to the Israeli hostages” in Gaza, “which hurt many Jewish and Israeli ears, and is a shame".
Solidarity
On Monday, 40 Israeli filmmakers, including Ari Folman (
Waltz with Bashir, The Congress
,
Where's Anne Frank
...) and Guy Nattiv (Oscar for best short film in 2019 for
Skin
and recent author of
Golda),
expressed their solidarity with the duo.
They accused public television of “cheap populism and incitement in public discourse” and stressed that nothing in Abraham's speech was anti-Semitic, but rather a “factual description of reality in the West Bank.”
This Monday, in an opinion column, the head of the channel's Culture section, Dorit Assaraf Mizrahi, criticizes Abraham, “who claims to be a journalist,” for not mentioning in his speech the Hamas attack that triggered the Israeli offensive. , which has left more than 30,000 dead.
“An entire country was dragged into war on October 7 and you, coward, didn't bother to say a word,” she writes.
The absence of references to the attack - in which hundreds of militiamen entered Israel and killed around 1,200 people, mainly civilians, and kidnapped more than 240 - is one of the main criticisms, both in Israel and in Germany.
The German Chancellor himself, Olaf Scholz, has regretted “such a unilateral position,” according to a government spokesperson.
The organizer of the festival, Mariëtte Rissenbeek, has come out to say that she understands the “outrage” caused by some speeches “perceived as too partial and, in some cases, inappropriate.”
She would have preferred, she says, “more differentiated statements” on the Middle East conflict.
Israel's ambassador in Berlin, Ron Prosor, has taken advantage of the controversy to accuse the German cultural scene of "rolling out the red carpet exclusively for artists who promote the delegitimization of Israel."
“At the Berlinale, anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli speech was received with applause […] Disguised as freedom of expression and artistic freedom, anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli rhetoric is celebrated,” he tweeted.
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