The Oscars Academy has rightfully drawn backlash over its abysmal statement over Oscar-winning Palestinian director Hamdam Ballal’s lynching by far-right Zionist settlers and subsequent abduction and detainment by Israeli occupation forces. Ballal is co-director of the powerful film No Other Land, which won Best Documentary Feature at the award ceremony in early March. However, Academy board members couldn’t even bring themselves to mention him – or his documentary – by name in its pitiful and hollow condemnation of the attack.
Hamdam Ballal: Oscars issue shameful statement on abduction
As the Canary previously reported, Israeli settlers and state forces targeted Ballal on 24 March. To start, there was no information on Ballal’s whereabouts – nor his condition after the assault – in Israeli custody. Ballal remained blindfolded at an Israeli army base for 24 hours, until Israeli forces released him on Tuesday.
From his hospital bed, Ballal told ABC News about the attack:
They continue attacking me for 15–20 minutes. I bleed from everywhere… I feel pain in every part of my body
According to his Israeli co-director Yuval Abraham on X, Ballal recounted how soldiers detaining him had joked about his Oscar while torturing him.
Initially, the Oscar Academy declined to make a public statement in support of Ballal. Abraham shamed it on X, alongside others, pressuring it to eventually put one out:
Sadly, the US Academy, which awarded us an Oscar three weeks ago, declined to publicly support Hamdan Ballal while he was beaten and tortured by Israeli soldiers and settlers.
The European Academy voiced support, as did countless other award groups and festivals. Several US…
— Yuval Abraham יובל אברהם (@yuval_abraham) March 26, 2025
Then, when the Academy issued this feeble statement – it didn’t even mention Ballal by name. Academy CEO Bill Kramer and president Janet Yang made the statement which preemptively and inexcusably justified its failure to unequivocally call out Israeli settlers and state forces. It did so under the calculated guise of representing the “unique viewpoints” of its 11,000 members.
In short, it sent the unconscionable message that Palestinian lives and rights are a matter for debate, and expendable. Moreover, it disgustingly signals to Israel that it can continue its colonial tyranny with impunity – all after awarding the film-makers for exposing this very violence on screen.
Oscars Academy: ‘many unique viewpoints’ on Zionist settlers beating its Palestinian award-winner
Predictably, it drew warranted ire. Abraham criticised its silence and reduction of Palestinian lives to appease Zionist members:
after our criticism, the academy’s leaders sent out this email to members explaining their silence on Hamdan’s assault: they need to respect “unique viewpoints” pic.twitter.com/69mdp4aE9m
— Yuval Abraham יובל אברהם (@yuval_abraham) March 27, 2025
Documentary branch Academy member AJ Schnack also lambasted the statement. As Variety reported, he wrote:
I am shocked and angry that you are now letting us, your members, know that you view the abduction and beating of a recent honoree as something that members will have ‘many unique viewpoints’ of. With respect, it’s a truly heinous suggestion.
Now, more than 800 Academy members have also come out in defiance against the dire response from the institution’s leadership. In a scathing letter, currently signed by 838 members at the time of publication, they condemned the “brutal assault and unlawful detention” of Ballal and said that:
As artists, we depend on our ability to tell stories without reprisals. Documentary filmmakers often expose themselves to extreme risks to enlighten the world. It is indefensible for an organization to recognize a film with an award in the first week of March, and then fail to defend its filmmakers just a few weeks later.
To win an Oscar is not an easy task. Most films in competition are buoyed by wide distribution and exorbitantly priced campaigns directed at voting members. For “No Other Land” to win an Oscar without these advantages speaks to how important the film is to the voting membership.
The targeting of Ballal is not just an attack on one filmmaker—it is an attack on all those who dare to bear witness and tell inconvenient truths.
We will continue to watch over this film team. Winning an Oscar has put their lives in increasing danger, and we will not mince words when the safety of fellow artists is at stake.
A non-apology to save face
On Friday, the Academy followed up with a second statement apologising for its failures. This read:
We regret that we failed to directly acknowledge Mr Ballal and the film by name.
It continued with the classic gaslighting “I’m sorry YOU feel this way” non-apology:
We sincerely apologize to Mr Ballal and all artists who felt unsupported by our previous statement and want to make it clear that the Academy condemns violence of this kind anywhere in the world.
We abhor the suppression of free speech under any circumstances.
In short, its half-assed ‘apology’ was arguably too little, too late, and too obviously to save face. And of course, it still couldn’t name the perpetrators – Israel. Instead, it opted for a general condemnation of violence to cover its ass.
The Oscars: a symbol of US white supremacy and patriarchy
What this whole sordid saga has demonstrated is that solidarity from Hollywood for the Palestinian struggle is the superficial, temporary, not even flavour-of-the-month kind, that quickly recedes when it really counts.
Yes, more than 800 members have since spoken out against their spineless leadership. However, let’s be real. The Academy comprises nearly 11,000 members. Those 838 signees so far make up less than 10% (a little under 8% to be more precise) of the total membership.
In reality then, over 90% of the Academy has so far failed to speak out.
But then, this is the famous institution of the entertainment industry that in 2015 inadvertently invited the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite for its atrocious lack of diversity. Since its founding in 1929, white, cisgender men have dominated the nominations and award winners. Between 1929 to 2025, just 6% of nominees were from underrepresented racially minoritised groups, and only 7% have won an Oscar. Less than 2% of nominees were women of colour. This has little shifted in nearly a century. Just 12% of nominees were from underrepresented racially minoritised demographics in 2025; only 4% were women of colour.
Moreover, the membership of the Oscars Academy is little better. As Digital Spy wrote, of its 10,910-strong membership in 2024:
35% of members identify as women, 20% are from under-represented ethnic and racial communities, and 20% are from outside of the US.
That is to say, the Oscars is largely a model of US white supremacy and cisgender heterosexual patriarchy. Its letter omitting Ballal should be recognised in that context. The Academy is accustomed to maintaining this status quo, and evidently operates token diversity over genuine solidarity.
Not the first time Oscars members have thrown Palestine under the bus
And needless to say, the Oscars has form on this already.
Despite Israel’s ongoing assault and war crimes in Gaza, the March 2024 Oscars saw mostly tumbleweed from the award-winners. The sole exception was a speech by Jonathan Glazer who decried the instrumentalisation of Jewishness and the Holocaust in justification of Israel’s genocide. It’s worth noting however that Glazer’s speech was at best, a tentative criticism since it preposterously equated Israel’s brutal genocidal onslaught in Gaza and the murder of more than 50,000 Palestinians, to 7 October.
The reaction? A letter signed by more than 1,000 Hollywood creatives, stars, and executives denouncing his speech for – ludicrously without a hint of irony – ‘hijacking’ their Jewishness:
for the purpose of drawing a moral equivalence between a Nazi regime that sought to exterminate a race of people, and an Israeli nation that seeks to avert its own extermination.
Hollywood operating as a vehicle of US imperial hegemony
However, none of this should come as any surprise either. Hollywood is – and always has been – a vehicle of US imperial hegemony. Films operate as a mechanism of US propaganda for its militaristic colonial expansionism across the globe.
It was only the start of this year that film mega-franchise Marvel put out its propagandistic new Captain America film. This hitched US imperial supremacy to Israel through the introduction of superhero Sabra – in essence, a personification of Israel’s apartheid regime. This was in spite of, and amid, the settler state’s continuing genocide in Gaza.
The Pentagon’s entanglement with Marvel and Hollywood studios more broadly only cements the entertainment industry’s collusion with the US military industrial complex further.
In this way, Hollywood movies serve as a soft power strategy for subtly reinforcing US cultural domination on an international stage. Hollywood promotes the US’s white imperial project through screen. It sanitises the US and West’s militaristic expropriation of foreign territories, and its deliberate programme of destabilisation and domination throughout the globe using glorifying imagery and narratives to seed this in the psyche of international audiences.
A settler colonial ‘solution’ that maintains the status quo
Despite the powerful portrayal of Israel’s ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, No Other Land doesn’t evade this co-option in service of US corporate capitalist empire either.
There’s no denying that No Other Land is a powerful feat of Palestinian cinematography and autobiographical storytelling. The lived realities of Palestinians under Israeli occupation breaks through Hollywood’s largely impenetrable imperialistic cultural hegemony.
However, as the Canary’s Maryam Jameela underscored, its acceptance within the Oscars Academy and Hollywood sphere owes in part to the palatable face of the project – its Israeli co-director Yuval Abraham.
The film is punctuated with Abraham’s views, and in that way, his presence throughout presents Palestinian freedom through a settler colonial gaze. Throughout, it’s clear he’s wedded to the idea of a two state solution – and arguably, that’s what his role in the film, and at the Oscars, is there to sell.
For instance, in one scene, Abraham asks Palestinian co-director, lead narrator and focus of the documentary Basel Adra:
If there’s stability and a democratic state, you’ll get all the permits you want. You won’t need to ask for army permits anymore. Right?
However, his comment is jarring against Adra’s lived experience of occupation documented in the film. “If” he heartbreakingly replied – instantly shattering the basis of Abraham’s question. Adra then went on to express the painful reality that Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing in his Masafer Yatta community only articulates for Palestinians more broadly:
They deprive us of our rights. They have great military and technological power. But, they shouldn’t forget how once, they too were weak. They suffered like this. And they won’t succeed,
with all their strength they will fail. They will never make Palestinians leave this land.
At best then, Abraham’s invocation of the two-state solution is an ignorant, ahistorical, and naive notion that fails to contend with the vast disparity in power dynamics, and a socio-political climate in which Israel’s officials have repeatedly derided any such possibility anyway. At worst, it’s loaning legitimacy to the long-time Western imperialist foreign policy fiction that has propped up the Zionist settler colonial project for decades.
Moreover, Jameela also drew attention to the false equivalence Abraham invoked over 7 October and the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Both the documentary’s ending and Yuval’s speech at the Oscars is characteristic of this shameful and obtuse both siderism that pervades the Western political-media establishment discourse.
Solidarity in big showbiz is conditional for Palestine
Now, the Oscars meek apology is this in action once again. That it took the criticism of No Other Land’s Israeli co-director for it to issue even this half-hearted response speaks volumes once again. When push comes to shove, Hollywood only recognises Palestinian voices speaking to their own story when it’s convenient. Support for Palestinian award-winners like Ballal is and always will be conditional to the elitist circles of US stardom.
What Ballal’s lynching and kidnap indisputably underscores is that, not even the highest symbol of US showbiz acclaim can protect a Palestinian from settler Zionist pogromists and colluding state forces. Now, the Academy’s appalling treatment also makes one other thing abundantly clear: nor will the Oscars Academy step up to protect them either.
At the end of the day, Hollywood at large is the effective popular culture propaganda apparatus of US imperialistic soft power. It is the cultural embodiment of its colonial domination and white supremacy writ large.
Ultimately then, is it any wonder Oscars Academy leaders disgracefully closed ranks to defend US strategic geopolitical capitalist interests that Israel represents in the region, over its Palestinian award-winner? By now, the answer to that should be glaringly obvious.
Featured image via the Canary
