Amy Cassidy and Chris Stern, CNN.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Israeli journalist and film director Yuval Abraham said he is receiving death threats and has canceled his flight home from the Berlin International Film Festival amid backlash to an acceptance speech in which he decried the \u201csituation of apartheid\u201d and called for a ceasefire in Gaza.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Abraham and his Palestinian co-director Basel Adra accepted the Best Documentary award for their film \u201cNo Other Land,\u201d which chronicles evictions and demolitions of Palestinian homes in the occupied West Bank by Israeli authorities, on Saturday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Their speeches were met with accusations of antisemitism by high-level German and Israeli officials, including the mayor of Berlin and Israel\u2019s Ambassador to Germany.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cA right-wing Israeli mob came to my family\u2019s home yesterday to search for me, threatening close family members who fled to another town in the middle of the night,\u201d Abraham alleged in a social media post Tuesday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI am still getting death threats and had to cancel my flight home. This happened after Israeli media and German politicians absurdly labeled my Berlinale award speech \u2014 where I called for equality between Israelis and Palestinians, a ceasefire and an end to apartheid \u2014 as \u2018antisemitic\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Accepting the award on Saturday, Abraham\u2019s West Bank-based co-director Adra said it is \u201cvery hard for me to celebrate when there are tens of thousands of my people being slaughtered and massacred by Israel in Gaza.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Speaking alongside him, Abraham highlighted the inequality between himself and Adra, despite living just \u201c30 minutes from one another.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI am living under a civilian law and Basel is under military law,\u201d he said. \u201cI have voting rights; Basel (does not have) voting rights. I\u2019m free to move where I want in this land; Basel is, like millions of Palestinians, locked in the occupied West Bank.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He continued: \u201cWe need to call for a ceasefire. We need to call for a political solution to end the occupation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Berlin\u2019s mayor Kai Wegner said in a post on X on Sunday that the speech was \u201cunacceptable relativization\u201d and urged the film festival\u2019s management \u201cto ensure that such incidents do not happen again.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cBerlin stands firmly on Israel\u2019s side, there is no doubt about that,\u201d he continued, adding that \u201cfull responsibility for the deep suffering in Israel and the Gaza Strip lies with Hamas.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ron Prosor, Israel\u2019s ambassador to Germany, branded the comments \u201cblatant antisemitic and anti-Israel discourse\u201d and accused the German cultural scene of \u201cshowcase(ing) its bias,\u201d in a post on X on Sunday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Abraham said the \u201cappalling misuse\u201d of the word antisemitism, \u201cnot only to silence Palestinian critics of Israel, but also to silence Israelis like me who support a ceasefire that will end the killing in Gaza and allow the release of the Israeli hostages \u2014 empties the word antisemitism of meaning and thus endangers Jews all over the world,\u201d he wrote on X Tuesday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Amy Cassidy and Chris Stern, CNN. Israeli journalist and film director Yuval Abraham said he is receiving death threats and has canceled his flight home from the Berlin International Film Festival amid backlash to an acceptance speech in which he decried the \u201csituation of apartheid\u201d and called for a ceasefire in Gaza. Abraham and his …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":9079,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[184,307,172],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international-issues","category-main-news","category-172"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9078"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9078\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9081,"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9078\/revisions\/9081"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9079"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}