Yuval Abraham facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Yuval Abraham
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Abraham at the 2024 Berlinale
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| Born | 1995 (age 29–30) Beersheba, Israel
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| Occupation | Journalist, film director |
| Years active | 2017–present |
Yuval Abraham (Hebrew: יובל אברהם; born 1995) is an Israeli investigative journalist, film director, and Arabic–Hebrew translator. He rose to international prominence when he co-directed the Oscar–winning documentary No Other Land (2024) about the Israel Defense Forces and settler violence in the West Bank and gave a pro-equality speech at the 2024 Berlinale.
Early life
Based in Jerusalem, Abraham was born to an Israeli middle-class family in the southern city of Beersheba. He is of Mizrahi Jewish and Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry; his Jewish Yemenite grandfather was a fluent Palestinian Arabic speaker. One of his grandmothers was born in an Italian concentration camp in Libya, and one of his grandfathers lost most of his family in the Holocaust. At 19, Abraham was enlisted and assigned to the Israel Defense Forces's Intelligence Corps, but he never assumed his role: after a week in training, he refused to serve for political and personal reasons and decided to leave the army. The process of leaving took a few weeks, during which he was assigned to be a quartermaster in the Air force. After he left the military he did volunteer work with Israeli and Palestinian children at schools for two years.
Learning Arabic and meeting Palestinians in the West Bank, including staying with families as their homes were demolished by the Israeli Defense Force, is how Abraham became an outspoken critic of the military occupation of Palestinians. He has worked in language education and taught Arabic.
In 2019, Abraham reached out to London-based journalist Ahmed Alnaouq, who runs the Gaza writers' collective We Are Not Numbers (WANN), for an interview, and helped Alnaouq, who wanted the stories to reach a wider audience, connect with translators. Together, Abraham and Alnaouq founded Across the Wall, a platform where Palestinians' stories are translated into Hebrew with the aim of humanising Palestinians and challenging mainstream Israeli narratives that demonise them. The webpage reportedly received over a million visitors in 2021. The project was put on indefinite hiatus in November 2023 after 23 members of Alnaouq's family, including young children, were killed by Israeli bombing.
As of 2024, Abraham works as a journalist and investigative reporter for the independent media outlets +972 Magazine and Local Call, having called them "the only places" he can "try to use my privilege to expose the mechanisms of oppression in our country, whether it's by documenting the demolition of a Palestinian family's home in Jerusalem or speaking to refugees in Jenin". He also worked for Social TV, contributed to publications such as The Guardian, The Nation, and appeared on networks like Democracy Now and CNN.
No Other Land
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Abraham co-directed, co-filmed and featured in the documentary No Other Land with Basel Adra alongside Hamdan Ballal and Rachel Szor, about Adra's long-term attempts to resist Israeli settler violence and displacement from his home in Masafer Yatta. The group had no experience in documentary filmmaking and initially approached the story as activists and journalists. Working together for over five years, with Adra and Ballal having footage including home videos from Adra's family, the documentary depicts Adra befriending Abraham and juxtaposes Adra's life under occupation with Abraham's life of freedom. No Other Land opened in February 2024 to critical acclaim at the 74th Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale), where it won two awards: The Panorama Audience Award for Best Documentary Film and the Berlinale Documentary Film Award.
