At the time I am writing this, we are sixteen months into Israel’s vicious assault on the Palestinian people; Gaza has been leveled, nearly all of its institutions and infrastructure destroyed, an entire population displaced, and we are only now seeing an unsteady ceasefire that is sure to end with even sterner strife. 46,000 are dead, a good chunk of them children, and this number is very likely a vast underestimate.
At the time that Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham premiered their documentary No Other Land at the Berlin Film Festival in February, the war was just five months old but even by then had claimed the lives of some 28,000. A potent time for it. And yet the controversy out of that festival surrounded the film’s alleged anti-Israel bias and visceral critiques of the Israeli government by Abraham, subsequently labeled an anti-Semite by several political authorities -this of a Jewish descendant of Holocaust survivors. The irony of this happening in Germany was not lost. The film has been met with a similar backlash elsewhere, though just as much acclaim and adulation. Still, in western countries like the U.S. and Canada, with highly influential Zionist organizations, the film has failed to find distribution on any kind of a large scale. It is a movie the Israeli government, their allies, and special interests don’t want general audiences seeing.
At the time that No Other Land was filmed, between 2019 and 2023, the war had not started, and yet the conflict, the suppression, and the desperation had been going on for decades, especially in Adra’s home of Masafer Yatta in the West Bank. It is an old region with a deeply embedded community that has had to watch ever since the occupation began as more and more of their land is taken by Israel to be given to settlers. A lifetime of this status quo has made Adra, a born activist, determined to both fight back and raise awareness. In the aftermath of the first of several forced displacements he and his villagers are made to endure without recourse, he meets a young Israeli journalist in Abraham who is sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.
Informed by the frustrations of the modern Israel-Palestine conflict, the heart of the piece and the entry-point of its humanity is the friendship that develops over the years between Adra and Abraham. No Other Land is not a Palestinian film, rather it is the product of an Israeli-Palestinian collective, Adra and Abraham co-directing with Hamdan Ballal, one of Adra’s fellow activists, and the Israeli Rachel Szor who shoots much of it. This cooperation mutes notions of Palestinian partisanship and makes it more difficult for those inclined to equate its reproaches with anti-Semitism (though again that hasn’t stopped some). Abraham comes to Adra already on his side, their narrative isn’t one of conversion but of finding deeper understanding and empathy. Abraham does the right thing in never rebutting or defending the actions of his country when Adra’s friends confront him passionately about it. He sits and he listens, and he acknowledges his own culpability and privilege -often he leaves the site of what’s left of Adra’s village to return to a comfortable home in Jerusalem while many of those he interviews don’t have that luxury. Of course there’s not a lot he could do -he can move freely, but Adra, his family and community, are restricted to the ever-dwindling plot of land allotted to them by a foreign government, land that has been theirs far longer than it has been Israel’s.
Adra and Abraham are united as activist-journalists, and while this is not a movie with many scenes of levity, warmth, or hope, what shreds we do get come from their friendship; which in itself and in their relative youth posits some chance of a broader reconciliation. Certainly that must have been the idea when they set out making the movie, before it become exponentially more complicated. Even in those times though, we see integrated clips of global news reports, some modestly objective, others nakedly biased -and both Adra and Abraham have sat for interviews; one particularly notable beat shows Abraham on Israeli television debating a hard-line conservative accusing him of being anti-Jewish. And of course juxtaposed against these is the blatant evidence against the ideologue’s argument.
To see this movie is to see colonialism in action. Again and again, the Israeli military -sometimes with settlers either in tow or watching from a hillside- comes into Masafer Yatta to demolish its infrastructure. We see them lock up a playground, bulldoze an elementary school mere hours after kids had been in there learning. An old woman cries over a home that was destroyed with many of her possessions still in it. Szor takes note of a little girl wandering the rubble as Israeli soldiers chat idly mere feet away. Perhaps most infuriatingly is a scene where they plug up a well, the chief source of water for the community, and as villagers challenge them, asserting their human right to water they are told that they need permit. Yet as the Palestinians point out, they apply for permits all the time and they are never granted.
Capturing this footage, this undeniable first-hand evidence of the Israeli regime's brutality, was dangerous. The Israeli soldiers are always armed and we do see several instances of them using violence against civilians, firing into crowds of them and in at least one case injuring somebody. Off-screen, Adra is beaten by Israeli soldiers, and in a few moments the invaders notice themselves being filmed or their actions loudly decried for an audience, and charge at the person (whether Adra or Szor) with the camera. It is miraculous the guerrilla footage managed to survive, a powerful document of the desperation and urgency of the situation in the West Bank that cannot be ignored or diminished. It is noted that exposure to their plight has had an impact before -a visit from then British Prime Minister Tony Blair that turned the international community onto Masafer Yatta resulted in a period of relative restraint in Israel's control. Clearly the hope is that documenting everything so starkly will bring about some reckoning, that if the world's eyes are turned on them, change will happen. Adra believed in that while making the film, I'm not sure he does so now.
The movie touches on and sets the context of the broader history and more pervasive struggle for Palestinian liberation -how could it not?- but the focus remains sharply fixed on its subject, the people of Masafer Yatta, their lives and their pain. We see Adra's family -fleeting glimpses of his childhood in home video recordings- a range of people in the community, from children to the elderly, hearing their stories of past traumas and displacements. And yet we see in them too a powerful resilience that Adra finds strength and solidarity in:
“They destroy us slowly. Every week a home…every week a new family must decide: endure or leave their land. If a family leaves, they lose their land. Most rent an apartment in the crowded city. There the army aims to concentrate us. But most villages endure. The hardest struggle is to stay on the land. Masafer Yatta exists for one reason: people who hold onto life.”
Filming on No Other Land initially wrapped in early October 2023. After the escalation started, Adra, Abraham, Ballal, and Szor felt obligated to go back and film an endnote, one that marks a terribly bleak punctuation on a film that otherwise endeavoured to go out on some morsel of hope. We see a couple more clips of increased settler violence in the region -an IDF soldier bluntly kills Adra’s cousin- and one of the showcased figures in the film, Harun Abu Aram, a man paralyzed by the IDF, who resorted to living in a cave after his home was torn down and whose mother gave arguably the film's most powerful testimonies, has died. It is distressing to think about how many others seen in this film have now been lost. How the apartheid and genocide of the Palestinian people has only been ramped up rather than drawn back. No Other Land may now be a critical work of cultural preservation, a defiant statement that these people were here and they mattered, whatever their future may hold. It is hard to get away from the palpable rage this movie evokes as it pleads for the humanity of this brutalized populace; but it is necessary that it evokes that -it is necessary that the film is seen as widely as possible. Damned be those who seek to smother it. The courage of its filmmakers cannot be understated, the power of its story in this and any time is monumental.
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