The legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida and a constitutional lawyer in Miami Beach told Axios that a city can’t withhold funds because it disagrees with a point of view.

Meiner had urged the theater to cancel the screenings.

In a newsletter to residents on Tuesday night, the mayor called the film, which won the Academy Award for best documentary feature on March 2, “a false one-sided propaganda attack on the Jewish people that is not consistent with the values of our city and residents.”

Meiner is planning a regularly scheduled virtual Town Hall on Tuesday night.

And he will introduce a resolution next Wednesday to terminate the lease agreement with the cinema, which rents space from the city at the old City Hall and to immediately cut all city funding.

The city originally agreed to fulfill two grant agreements with O Cinema — $25,831 and $54,071 — and has already paid half of those amounts, according to the proposal obtained by the Miami Herald.

Meiner wrote a letter to O Cinema CEO Vivian Marthell, urging the theater to cancel scheduled screenings of the film, noting its critiques from Israeli and German government officials.

Some Palestinians say that the film “uplifts our spirits,” according to a report by NPR and it may even help prevent future displacement.

Marthell initially said the theater would not show the film.

“Due to the concerns of antisemitic rhetoric, we have decided to withdraw the film from our programming,” Marthell wrote in a letter to Meiner on March 6. “This film has exposed a rift which makes us unable to do the thing we’ve always sought out to do which is to foster thoughtful conversations about cinematic works.”

But Meiner, who is Jewish, the next day changed his mind.

“But let me be clear: our decision to screen NO OTHER LAND is not a declaration of political alignment,” the mayor said in an email to the Herald late last week. “It is, however, a bold reaffirmation of our fundamental belief that every voice deserves to be heard, even, and perhaps especially, when it challenges us.”

Meiner said the film conflicts with the city’s values.

“I am a staunch believer in free speech,” he wrote in the newsletter. But normalizing hate and then disseminating antisemitism in a facility owned by the taxpayers of Miami Beach, after O Cinema conceded the ‘concerns of antisemitic rhetoric,’ is unjust to the values of our city and residents and should not be tolerated.”

The city commission includes seven members, including the mayor.

Miami Beach City Commissioner David Suarez is a supporter of Israel.

“A religious Jew was voted as Mayor, along with a Zionist city council. Unlike other cities, we have zero tolerance for pro Hamas/terrorist propaganda,” Suarez wrote in a message to the Herald. “The City of Miami Beach will continue to stand up for our Jewish population, home to holocaust survivors, and while most people use ‘Never Again’ as a platitude, we mean it.”

Commissioner Kristen Rosen Gonzalez is critical of the mayor’s decision, calling it “knee-jerk reactions.”

“The Mayor cannot send a letter condemning a film and then cancel O Cinema’s contract days later,” she wrote in the newsletter. “Doing so would result in an expensive lawsuit we will lose.”

Rosen Gonzalez proposed showing another film, Screams Before Silence, a documentary on Israeli women attacked by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023.

No Other Land, which was made from 2019 up until days after that attack, documents the destruction of Masafer Yatta, a group of Palestinian villages in the southern West Bank, at the hands of the Israeli military.

Also, the film highlights the alliance and growing friendship between two unlikely parties: Palestinian activist Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, who are two of the film’s directors.

“We call on the world to take serious action to stop the injustice and to stop the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people,” Adra said during his Oscar acceptance speech. “About two months ago, I became a father, and I hope for my daughter that she will not have to live the same life I’m living now.”

Abraham said: “We made this film, Palestinians and Israelis, because together our voices are stronger,” Abraham said from the stage. “We see each other in the atrocious destruction of Gaza and its people, which must end, in the Israeli hostages brutally taken in the crime of Oct. 7, which must be freed. When I look at Basel, I see my brother, but we are unequal.”

Daniel Tilley, legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, told Axios the mayor’s retaliation is unconstitutional.

“The government does not get to pick and choose which viewpoints the public is allowed to hear, however controversial some might find them,” Tilley said in a statement.

And Alan Levine, a constitutional lawyer in Miami Beach and a South Florida Jewish Voice for Peace member, said Miami Beach “has a history of not only tolerating but welcoming dissenting points of views or differing lifestyle choices. Now the mayor is sending a message that, at least with respect to Israel and Palestine, the city will do what it can to suppress opposing ideas.”