Israeli filmmaker gets death threats after calling for Gaza ceasefire at Berlin film festival

German politicians label filmmaker’s speech ‘antisemitic’

An Israeli filmmaker said he has been receiving death threats after decrying a "situation of apartheid" in Gaza and calling for a ceasefire during the closing ceremony of the Berlin Film Festival.

Yuval Abraham, a 29-year-old journalist and filmmaker, said the threats prompted him to cancel his return to Israel and his family to flee overnight due to right-wing intimidation.

Abraham and Palestinian filmmaker Basel Adra were awarded the Berlinale’s best documentary prize on Saturday for their joint film No Other Land – which charts the Palestinian resistance to Israel's occupation in the West Bank.

Adra said it was "very hard" to celebrate the award “when there are tens of thousands of my people being slaughtered and massacred by Israel in Gaza". He called upon German lawmakers to "stop sending weapons to Israel".

Abraham, during his acceptance speech, said: "I am Israeli, Basel is Palestinian. And in two days, we go back to a land where we are not equal.

"I am under civilian law; Basel is under military law. ... This situation of apartheid between us, this inequality, has to end."

The speech triggered a political row after German politicians and Israeli media labelled the statements antisemitic.

Kai Wegner, the conservative mayor of Berlin, argued that the filmmakers’ statements were filled with “intolerable relativisation" as they left out any mention of Hamas.

German culture minister Claudia Roth, who was in the audience during the ceremony, said the “shockingly one-sided” speeches were “characterised by a deep hatred of Israel".

German defence export approvals to Israel rose nearly tenfold in 2023 from the year before, with Berlin treating permit requests as a priority since Hamas militants attacked Israel, according to Reuters.

Abraham in a social media post said Israeli media aired just 30 seconds of his speech and called it "antisemitic", which opened the floodgates of death threats. "I stand behind every word," he added.

Abraham had to cancel his flight back home after a right-wing mob arrived at his family home in search of him and threatened his family members, forcing them to flee to another town in the middle of the night, he said.

“To stand on German soil as the son of Holocaust survivors and call for a ceasefire – and to then be labelled as antisemitic is not only outrageous, it is also literally putting Jewish lives in danger,” Abraham told The Guardian.

“I don’t know what Germany is trying to do with us,” he said, adding: “If this is Germany’s way of dealing with its guilt over the Holocaust, they are emptying it of all meaning.”

More than 30,000 Palestinians have died in Israel’s offensive in Gaza, according to the local health ministry, which began in retaliation for the 7 October attack by Hamas in southern Israel. Hamas militants killed 1,200 people and abducted at least 250 during the offensive, according to Israeli tallies.

At least one quarter of Gaza's population – 576,000 people – were one step away from famine and virtually the entire population desperately needs food, Ramesh Ramasingham, a top UN official said Tuesday.

He said that 1 in 6 children under the age of two in northern Gaza are suffering from "acute malnutrition and wasting", where the body becomes emaciated.