No Other Land (Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, and Rachel Szor, 2024).
The poster for No Other Land (2024) shows Palestinian activist Basel Adra lying on a rock-studded hill, his handheld camera on the ground nearby. Adra’s gaze is set on the earth immediately in front of him; he faces away from the sun, his shadow collecting where his hand picks at blades of grass. We can’t see his face, not clearly. A bulldozer traverses the horizon line in the distance. Native, settler. The Palestinian, his body still, has his hands, his camera, his witness. The Zionist machine has the power to destroy—and, however unlikely, the power to change course.
The film the poster advertises, produced by a collective of Palestinians and Israelis, is a documentary about Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian villages that make up Masafer Yatta, under Zionist military occupation since 1967. In the 1980s, Masafer Yatta was declared a “firing zone” by the Israeli government, and those living there were ordered to evacuate. Israeli documents have since revealed—as Palestinians knew and said all along—that the designation was a pretense to aid Zionist expansion. In meeting minutes from July 1981, Ariel Sharon, who had recently been made Israel’s minister of defense, is recorded to have said, “We have an interest in expanding and enlarging the shooting zones there, in order to keep these areas, which are so vital, in our hands. … Many additional areas for training could be added.”
Masafer Yatta is designated under the Oslo II Accord of 1995 as part of so-called Area C, which constitutes about two-thirds of the West Bank. (Area C was to be “gradually transferred to Palestinian jurisdiction” under the agreement, but today remains under full Israeli control.) In the years since the designation, a legal battle ensued in Israeli courts about whether Israel had the right to ethnically cleanse the villages. Meanwhile, the pace of ethnic cleansing mostly accelerated, slowing only at such times as a veneer of commitment to the peace process was demanded by Israel’s backers du jour. On May 4, 2022, Palestinians officially lost the legal battle, although Israeli soldiers had already been showing up daily or weekly to demolish one or two homes at a time for years. Since the documentary was filmed over five years, beginning in 2019, the producers of No Other Land had their pick of evidence. The result is a complex layering of footage from inside and outside Palestinian homes, personal archives, Israeli and international news clips, conversations between individuals—Palestinian and Palestinian, Palestinian and Israeli, Israeli and Israeli—in Arabic and in Hebrew. Adra acts as intermittent narrator, delivering voice-overs in English.
The documentary captures how ethnic cleansing serves the Zionist state-building project. The Palestinians of Masafer Yatta lack building permits, and so their Israeli overseers are legally—and, in a state shaped to suit the eyes of a vindictive god, morally—obligated to lay down the law, to destroy everything. In No Other Land we see that for the Palestinian to have “no permit” means the Israeli has license to fill water wells with cement, to clumsily take military-grade hedge-clippers to water pipes, bulldozer to schoolhouse, gun to Palestinian. And we see the mundanity of these exercises of state power: soldiers shuffling off to carry out orders, almost bored by their tasks.
No Other Land was directed by a collective of Israeli and Palestinian activists from Israel and the occupied West Bank. Two of the four, Yuval Abraham (Israeli) and Adra (Palestinian), feature as protagonists, leading us through the story. The film has received wide acclaim since its premiere last February at the Berlin International Film Festival. Despite having no US distributor, it has been nominated for an Oscar. A question to ask is whether this would have been possible were one of its two main characters not Israeli. And if not, why not?
No Other Land (Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, and Rachel Szor, 2024).
Adra was forced into his role as an activist. He studied law in a country whose occupier doesn’t recognize him as human. Abraham, an Israeli journalist, was compelled into his role after witnessing the horrors his state is committing in his name.
The film’s title begs the question, no other land for whom? We hear it in the Palestinians pleading with the Israeli soldier aiming a bulldozer at their homes. But its echoes are also the film’s subtext, the possibility of a future shared between settler and native. A settler has come to help the natives, hoping to redeem himself and, implicitly, the horizons of the settler-state. Where are we supposed to go?, we can imagine an Israeli asking a Palestinian, having been made a guest in their home, once political reality enters their conversation.
Much of the film, which is ostensibly about the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian villages, is spent tracing the friendship of Adra and Abraham. Several scenes find Adra and Abraham driving in a car, smoking hookah in a restaurant, sitting simply in conversation about the present and the future (the past, beyond that of Masafer Yatta, is generally left alone). Toward the film’s end, during one of these heart-to-hearts, Abraham offers a vision of Israel that no longer denies Adra his rights. He asks Adra to dream with him of a future in which Palestinians and Israelis live side by side. “Inshallah,” Adra half-humors his friend. Over the course of the documentary, by talking to Palestinians and witnessing the actions of fellow Israelis, we see the settler growing, learning from the native. We see the settler recognizing, in his limited way, the nature of Zionism at a pace the Palestinian, here exceedingly patient, can’t afford.
No Other Land (Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, and Rachel Szor, 2024).
While No Other Land tells the story of one Palestinian community’s depopulation, it also stands in for the liberal’s long-sought-after Roadmap for Peace. Abraham introduces himself to the Palestinians with whom he works as yahudi, Jewish. He offers them his time and energy, and risks his safety, to tell their story. “I need to write something about the protest today,” Abraham tells Adra from the passenger seat, while the latter, driving, focuses his eyes on the road. “I have to write more. The article I wrote on Harun’s mom didn’t get many views.” “I feel you’re a little enthusiastic…” Adra says, and Abraham asks him to clarify. “You want everything to happen quickly … as if you’ve come to solve everything in ten days, then go home.” Adra snaps his fingers before returning his hand to the wheel. Abraham remains committed to ending the program of ethnic cleansing committed in his name, but in the film and elsewhere, he attributes those horrors to the “occupation” rather than to Zionism. His condemnation of the former serves to preserve the latter. This distinction is artificial: from the standpoint of its victims, Israel is its occupation, the Zionist project necessarily one of ethnic cleansing and genocide, of total erasure.
Abraham attempts a rehabilitation of an iteration of Zionism that doesn’t exist but could, a familiar settler hope (think, imagine what America could be). In one clip, Abraham appears on Democracy Now! to say, “As an Israeli, it’s very, very important for me to stress that I don’t think we can have security if Palestinians do not have freedom.” The possibility of this future depends on the actions of individuals like Abraham, although the film itself reveals the futility of this vision. After the Democracy Now! clip, the film cuts to Abraham on Israeli TV. Here, Palestinians are the other: “They have no voting rights under military occupation,” Abraham says. “Basel, a guy my age who lives there, can’t even leave the West Bank, and we destroy their homes every week—” Here, he is cut off by another Israeli on the panel, calling in remotely: “You’re against Jewish people, in everything you do.” Abraham sighs, then pushes back, calling the man a liar, only to be interrupted by him again: “They’re invaders in a military training ground.” This thinking, not Abraham’s, is at the heart of Zionism. Israeli soldiers and settlers taunt Adra and Abraham repeatedly, goading them to upload the videos they record to see if this might change anything on the ground. In the final footage recorded for the film, we hear Adra on the phone with Israeli authorities, asking for protection. We see armed settlers descend on Masafer Yatta, then Adra’s cousin shot point-blank in his abdomen by a man in a T-shirt. Words flash across the screen, informing us that, since October 2023, many such attacks have continued to take place, prompting Palestinians to flee their homes.
In the film, Israeli soldiers protect armed settlers, watching without intervening as they carry out the state’s bidding. Since October 2023, Israel has distributed over 120,000 guns to settlers across occupied Palestine. “We intend to continue arming Israel,” National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir announced, drawing no distinction between state and soldier and settler.
No Other Land (Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, and Rachel Szor, 2024).
I can’t stop thinking about the woman whose son was shot by Zionists and paralyzed from the shoulders down. Hers is the story of Israel, and of Palestine. She and her family live in a cave because their home has been destroyed. Every day after her son is shot, the mother turns his body to prevent him from developing bed sores. Every day she watches his muscles atrophy, and every chance she gets she begs the Israeli authorities, those who have come to destroy her people’s homes, for another home in which she might care for her son properly. She recognizes the absurdity of the request, and still she asks because she is a mother and this is her child. One scene shows her hugging her daughter at night, whispering love into the girl’s ear. In their cave we see Palestine, a world beyond Zionism, a world that each Palestinian home holds and, after Zionist bulldozers or planes collapse our walls, a world that each Palestinian carries. A world where this woman’s son might have grown old, taken care of her.
The goal of the Palestinian activist is small: to save their village.“Can this exchange go on, where I’ll keep simply watching as my house is destroyed, and then I rebuild, and it’s destroyed, and I rebuild?” a Palestinian man from Masafer Yatta asks Abraham. “That isn’t a life. My whole life’s purpose becomes to have a home.” Occupation, here in the shape of Zionism, is incompatible with life. Still, every time an Israeli soldier—the principal, imposed interface between Zionism and Palestine—destroys, the Palestinian rebuilds. Every few hours, the woman turns her son. Sympathetic Israeli journalists come to the woman’s home to interview her. She answers their questions, however hesitantly—she is willing to go to the edges of the earth to keep him alive, even as, she says, she wishes for God to take him, to end his suffering. Near the end of the film, we are informed of his death.
No Other Land (Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, and Rachel Szor, 2024).
The film doesn’t engage with other ways this suffering might end. The only resistance we see is nonviolent demonstration. Adra is an activist, a term whose configurations are vague except vis-à-vis violence. The film matter-of-factly captures plenty of violent Israelis, settlers and soldiers, armed and sustained by the state, their bulldozers and their unmoved expressions, or their twisted smiles as lives are destroyed, but no Palestinian fighters, no direct Palestinian response. Instead, Palestinians and their supporters are “armed” with their cameras, committed to capturing an aftermath to which a sympathetic Western audience might choose to respond on their behalf. At the film’s start, Adra’s father, who has been imprisoned and abused by the Israelis multiple times, describes a desire to throw rocks at Israeli soldiers, then apologizes to his Israeli guest, explaining that sometimes he finds himself so angry. The woman’s son was shot at a peaceful protest.
Before the footage capturing the settler attack on Masafer Yatta, during which Adra’s cousin was shot, the producers inform the viewer through an intertitle, “We finished this film in October 2023.” The implications here are obvious, a Pandora’s box that the film, committed to the possibility of a future that accommodates both settler and native, must bend over backward not to touch.