In my mind, I often replay the moment we learned “No Other Land” had won an Oscar. My cousins and I leaped with joy, racing through our village of Susiya, shouting, “the Oscar is ours!” at the top of our lungs. I was so proud to see pictures of my cousin Basel Adra and his parents Nasser and Kifah wearing traditional Palestinian dress on the red carpet. Videos of the celebration thrown by the Palestinian community in Los Angeles for Basel, Hamdan Ballal, and my father Nasser who accompanied them, filled me with even more pride.
We knew we had succeeded in a powerful act of nonviolent resistance: we made the world pay attention to the state-sponsored violence we endure here in Masafer Yatta on a daily basis.
In Susiya, where I’ve lived all my life, we have faced attacks by settlers and Israeli authorities for decades. My father, Nasser Nawajah, was born in Khirbet Susiya, our ancestral land which sits across the road from where we live now. In 1983, the Israeli settlement of Susya was established on our territory; three years later, the Israeli government expelled all of Khirbet Susiya’s Palestinian residents after an ancient synagogue was discovered — a convenient pretext for ethnic cleansing.
Since then, we have been forced to rebuild Susiya multiple times, trying to remain as close to our ancestral lands as possible. But today, the government and the settlers are trying to expel us even further, to the Palestinian city of Yatta. This is no coincidence; their goal is to force us out of Area C, which is under total Israeli military and civilian control, and into Area A, which is administered by the Palestinian Authority. In other words, Israel wants to concentrate us into a few small urban enclaves surrounded by settlements.
Never in my life have I felt the hunger of the government and settlers to expel us more intensely than these past few weeks. Since Hamdan and my father returned from the Oscars ceremony in Los Angeles in early March, Susiya has endured relentless attacks, each day more brutal than the last. When settlers came and smashed a CCTV camera in our village a week before the latest violence, I felt that it was a harbinger of something much worse.