Not a review, a response: “No Other Land”

 

“We have no other land, that’s why we suffer for it.” - A Palestinian Woman in No Other Land

First, the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences deserves respect for choosing No Other Land for Best Documentary Feature. Second, the River Oaks Theater in Houston deserves a vote of thanks for bringing it to the public when it cannot seem to find a distributor in this country. 

I need some more time to myself to sit with this and process this document. I really don’t feel like this is one of those films that gains in being analyzed as a film; it’s power is in its immediacy and what it shows us. 

Let me be clear about something else; being against Israel’s policies of occupation, erasure, and let’s call it what it is, genocide, is not antisemitic. Yuval Abraham, one of the film’s co-directors, is Israeli ano of course, faced backlash for his support of the Palestinians. But the story is Basel Adra’s, if we’re looking for a central figure. Adra has been documenting the Israeli occupation for as long as he’s been aware. His father, an activist, was arrested in front of him when Basel was seven. 

I also want to be clear that this has nothing to do with Hamas’s bombing of Israel. It has everything to do with an oppressor who views the occupied as.less than human. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) destroy houses one by one in the community of Masafer Yatta in Hebron. As Basel says late in the film, “they destroy us slowly.”

Also to be very clear, this I snot “misery porn”; the Palestinians are possessed of too resilient a spirit to wallow, but the evidence is clear, from the moment that the IDF begins its takeover of a land that the paestinians have lived on for at least 200 years, as one of the villagers noted that his family first came there in 1830. The Israeli government has argued that no one lived there prior to the 1990s; that there was “no consistent agricultural cultivation or orchards” and “no permanent houses that are visible to the eye” (1). 

Masafer Yatta has been under Israeli occupation since the June War of 1967 and fourteen years later, Ariel Shron declared that the area would be used for the purpose of training the Israeli army, using that definition of Masafer Yatta as part of “Area C” (meaning that Israel has full military and civil control over the area) to expel fhe Palestinians residents. 

For. The record, Area C is not recognized as legitimate by the international community, and the United Nations holds that Israel’s construction of settlements there violates the fourth Geneva Convention.  I present all this as backfgoung and context.

The fact remains that in No Other Land, Palestinians are subjected repeatedly to demolition off their houses and we watch as an elementary school is razed, without warning, before the children and faculty. We are inside the school when IDF shuts the door on a classroom and forces the kids and teachers to escape through a window.

The repeated indignities take a tool on everyone, but we see the heaviest on a woman whose son is shot in front of her. Haroun is. paralyzed from the shoulders down, shot while defending his home. He is transferred to a hospital, but he and his family relocate to a cave, as others have done. 

Basel and Yuval become friends over the course of the filming and Yuval is met with no small degree of welcome, but also significant skepticism. He is, after all, an Israeli, and after each demolition, you sense an additional strain on relationships, regardless of how much he writes and advocates for the Palestinian people. Nevertheless, both he and Basel are adamant in documenting and telling the world about what is happening here. 

Basel often pokes at Yuval because they both know that Yuval can travel as he pleases. His car has yellow plates. Those are for Israelis; green plates are for Palestinians. As Basel notes in the film, “there are yellow men, and there are green men” over footage of Israeli police scrutinizing licenses of stopped drivers along a road.

The film was shot over a period of four years between 2019 and 2023, during which time the IDF appears randomly, without warning and expels families from their houses and tear them down in front of them. At one point, Basel’s father is arrested and taken away and he tells Yuval that he doesn’t have his father’s energy and that he needs to take a break to provide for the family, particularly while his father is imprisoned. Basel tells Yuval that while his father has been arrested before, this is more of a psychological ploy on the IDF’s part. Basel himself is threatened with arrest several times and at one point, Yuval is threatened by an Israeli settler later in the film. 

None of this can give the remotest idea of what watching this film is like. It is a crushingly intimate work, in so many ways. There are moments shared in conditions similar to villages I’ve stayed in across South Asia, however, in much less precarious circumstances; but the camaraderie is similar. Yet, another kind of intimacy is that sense of impending threat that can come at any time.

We see the repeated futility of Palestinians appealing to the sense of justice of various soldiers and are rebutted with “what we’re doing is legal, now get out of the way”, the inference being that the Palestinians’ existence is somehow illegal or at least, not worthy of acknowledgement. Told to go to court, more than a couple of Palestinians respond with the futility of that endeavor.

There is no fancy montage, nothing but bare bones, straightforward shots that gives us the immediacy of the indecencies visited upon the various villagers. We see home after home give way before bulldozer after bulldozer, villagers told to leave their homes, that they don’t belong there, that their presence is illegal.

There have been maybe a dozen documentaries that have helped move needles a little. Morris’s The Thin Blue Line, Moore’s Bowling for Columbine, DuVernay’s 13th, all these come to mind. Some have had some impact; some have had led to investigations of malfeasance, some have even helped form legislation, and some have changed public perception on issues of grave public concern. 

 

Basel, Yuval, and their co-directors and co-writers, Hamdan Ballal and Rachel Szor, are presenting a situation, a dire, ugly situation and if they aren’t offering feel-good solutions, it’s because none exist, until or unless Israel evacuates the West Bank. At one point in the film, Yuval muse about a time when Basel won’t need a permit to visit Yuval. Do either believe that day will come? Neither says. Yuval is seen by Basel early on, as “enthusiastic”; he ribs him about thinking that Yuval’s journalism will end the occupation and he can return to his home in ten days. It’s amusing, for sure, but it’s also pointed. 

At one point, Tony Blair visited Masafer Yatta where Basel’s family lived and for a long time, there were no demolitions on that street. That changed. 

According to IMDb, “Two days after ‘No Other Land’ was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, Israeli settlers invaded Masafer Yatta, burning and breaking homes."

Note

Boxerman, Aaron. Losing Battle with IDF, Palestinians in firing zone face largest expulsion since ’67. The Times of Israel. 12 August 2022. (Retrieved 14 March 2025.) https://www.timesofisrael.com/losing-battle-with-idf-palestinians-in-firing-zone-face-largest-expulsion-since-67/.

Additional reading

Applied Research Institute — Jerusalem (ARIJ). At Tuwani and Mosfaret Yatta Profile. (PDF download). 2009. http://vprofile.arij.org/hebron/pdfs/At%20Tuwani%20&%20Mosafaret_pro.pdf

Halper, Jeff. The Meaning of Israel’s Massive Housing Demolitions in East Jerusalem. The Nation. 8 August 2019. (Retrieved 14 March 2025). https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/israel-occupation-palestine-housing-east-jerusalem/.

Hass, Amira. Israel Blew Up Their Houses in 1966. Now It Claims Their Village Never Existed. Haaretz. April 27, 2021. (Retrieved 14 March 2025). https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2021-04-27/ty-article-magazine/.premium/israel-blew-up-their-houses-in-1966-now-it-claims-their-village-never-existed/0000017f-f319-d497-a1ff-f399e2e50000.

McKernan, Bethana and Kierszenbaum, Quique. Israeli court paves way for eviction of 1,000 Palestinians from West Bank area. The Guardian. 5 May 2022. (Retrieved 14 March 2025). https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/05/israeli-court-evict-1000-palestinians-west-bank-area