A quick look at last month’s shortlist for many of 2025’s Academy Award nominations reveals that the facade of Palestinian nationhood has never been stronger.
A handful of pro-Palestinian documentaries are poised to make the final cut for next year’s Oscars – movies such as No Other Land, which focuses on the destruction of a Palestinian village by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank, and From Ground Zero, an anthology of 22 “video diaries” from Gaza.
Missing from the list, however, are any contenders from Israel – one of the most robust film-making nations in the world.
Such official nods to Palestinian creativity are not merely limited to cinema. ARTnews recently reported about the return of the Ramallah Art Fair in December. The event’s fourth edition – provocatively titled “Voices of Resilience” – is being mounted at Ramallah’s Zawyeh Art Gallery for the next few weeks.
And like those potential Academy nominations, the fair’s artworks, many visually striking and historically compelling, reference a laundry list of supposed Palestinian injustices – from the Nakba in 1948 and on through Israel’s Gaza military campaign of the past 15 months.
The global media likes nothing more than to imbue all things Palestinian with the imprimatur of legitimacy and propriety. But missing from reports like the one from ARTnews or the ballyhoo accompanying those potential Oscar nominations is any sense of responsibility or, most crucially, accountability on the part of Palestinians themselves.
Palestine and the Palestinians, it seems, are concepts that demand a world’s worth of respect and authority – yet little of the duties or obligations expected of most other nations.
From Gaza and the West Bank – UNRWA to Al Jazeera – it’s all impunity and entitlement, rather than duty and respect for international law, which is why the greatest gift the world could give the Palestinians for 2025 is the gift of accountability.
The Palestinians have never done accountability particularly well. But who can blame them, given that it’s so rarely been asked of them? From the Oslo Accords to Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, Palestinian nation-building has mostly been about Israel facilitating change, as the other side stands by passively (and often violently).
Since the October 7, 2023, Hamas invasion of Israel, there have been calls for everything from an immediate ceasefire to the recognition of Palestinian statehood by nations who should know better, such as Norway, Ireland, and Spain. In every instance, Israel is demanded to withdraw and concede, yet little is asked of the Palestinians in return.
No end to Hamas hostilities, no proper hostage deal, no political leadership or corruption-free institutions to do the hard work of actual governing is ever expected.
Media's anti-Israel bias
FOR MANY of the world’s leading media outlets, there isn’t even the need for an honest accounting of the war dead. Hamas says 45,000 have been killed – who cares how many are militants or if the numbers are massaged with calculated impunity? Hamas says yet another Israeli attack has killed journalists – never mind if they’re also freelancing as Islamist terrorists.
Meanwhile, despite being the elected leader of a Western democracy, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been branded a genocidaire – unable to enter Poland to honor the 80th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation owing to an international arrest warrant by a bogus global court.
And Israeli cultural and civic groups are being banned from global gatherings. Most recently, the delegation to the World Bowls Tour was forbidden from participating in the event in Great Britain next month after an outcry from the pro-Palestinian Action Network, which branded Israel an “apartheid and genocidal state.” (The World Bowls Tour has since reversed its decision.)
And yet much of Hamas’s leadership still travels freely across the Middle East, while pro-Palestinian films continue to be hyped out in Hollywood.
As Hamas refuses to confirm its hostage count, both Israel and the world are forced to negotiate with literal terrorists so that terrorized civilians might go free. Gleeful murderers must be set loose so that Israel may bring their innocent back home.
Nothing is demanded of those murderers to go free, no conditions imposed to ensure they, like Yahya Sinwar, don’t re-offend in an even bloodier and more spectacular fashion. Lots of impunity – little accountability.
For many, a Palestinian state remains the ultimate goal – possibly as a byproduct of Israel’s eventual normalization with Saudi Arabia. Both are still possible.
But even if statehood were achieved, how would Palestinians govern if they never learned the most basic building block of sovereignty – accountability? There can be no sovereignty without accountability to its citizens, neighbors, regional allies, and, ultimately, the global community. Once again, accountability has never been something Palestinians have done particularly well.
As 2025 arrives, both increased military activity in Gaza and yet another potential hostage deal are crowding the headlines. Israel, as always, is being pressured to compromise while the Palestinians continue to play hardball.
This may be business as usual – but it’s a bad business. It’s bad for Israel, which lacks a serious negotiation partner; for the Gaza civilians forced by their craven leadership to jockey for martyrdom; and for the Palestinian nation that so many pretend already exists.
Many hope it never will, but for those who believe that it must, the era of carte blanche diplomacy must end in Gaza, Doha, and Ramallah. And in its place, the gift that no one has dared to demand – the gift of Palestinian accountability.
The writer is an editor and columnist at the New York Post and an adjunct fellow at The Tel Aviv Institute.