Watching No Other Land, the 2025 Oscar winner for Best Documentary, brought to mind the phrase “Israeli apartheid” again.

I don’t know when that phrase first came to mind. Probably sometime during the latest Gaza War, which started when Hamas-led militants attacked Israel on October 7th, 2023.

The combination of these two words—the first a Palestine homeland for Jews; the second best associated with almost fifty years of South African near slavery, is flabbergasting. I have a hard time reconciling that phrase with what I know of the history of the Jews in Palestine/Israel.

Growing up in the Catskills Borscht Belt with a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, I knew about the thousands of years of antisemitism that was weaponized by Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists in Germany to massacre 6 million Jews during World War 2. I know about the declaration of the State of Israel in 1948. I know about Israel’s decades of conflict with its Arab neighbors and the chimera of the on-again, off-again peace processes.

Until recently, I never thought much about the Israeli and Palestinian conflicts. Somehow, I thought, each group would eventually see beyond their legitimate grievances going back generations to somehow build a peace together. But the wishes of individuals always seemed stymied by the political agendas of their leaders.

Watching Israeli authorities demolish Palestinian homes in Masafer Yatta, a village in the occupied West Bank, made it apparently clear of the Israeli government’s unquenchable quest for Lebensraum, living space at the expense of Palestinians who have lived on the land for generations, land the Israeli’s now covet. The tables have turned with a Jewish David becoming an oppressive, violent Golem that will smash everything in its path.

Perhaps this is the fate of those who forget the entirety of their history and only remember the lessons of hate taught to them by past monsters.

03/25/25 Update - Hamdan Ballal: Oscar-winning Palestinian director attacked by Israeli settlers and arrested

03/27/25 Update - It took an Oscar winner’s ordeal for the world to see the truth of settler violence. This is how to stop it

03/28/25 Update - ‘This is no isolated event’: attack on Palestinian director brings rising settler violence into focus