Directors: Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal (Occupied Palestinian Territory, Norway).

Summer 2019, the West Bank. A line of bulldozers enters one of the villages belonging to the community of Masafer Yatta, South of Hebron. In a short space of time, they destroy some of the village’s stone houses. Local residents complain, but they are told by the soldiers accompanying the bulldozers that this is all legal, the houses are being removed to make way for a closed military training zone. The soldiers are armed and aggressive. The villagers are not.

Flash back 20 or more years to Basel Adra’s first memory. He was woken by a flashlight carried by an Israeli soldier coming to arrest his father, not for the first time. Within a couple of years, Basel was accompanying his activist parents on demos, and soon he was filming them. He first trained as a lawyer, but what can you do in the Israeli courts? He is now a social media activist who documents the daily brutalisation of Masafer Yatta by soldiers, tanks, and armed settlers.

Early on in the film, Basel meets Yuval Abraham, an anti-Zionist Israeli journalist. Many villagers are suspicious of Yuval – the only Israelis they have met so far have been those who terrorise them. But Basel and Yuval strike up a friendship. As well as documenting the horror of living in the West Bank, No Other Land also shows their growing Bromance. At one point, Basel jokingly suggests that they leave and go to the Maldives. At another, one asks the other when they are going to get married.

Such moments of levity stand in stark contrast to the random daily terror which is inflicted on the locals. One villager says that his family has lived here since the 1830s. This does nothing to stop Israeli soldiers razing people’s homes to the ground. Villagers are not allowed to rebuild them, as that would require a building permit. And to get a building permit you need to apply to an Israeli court. So they rebuild their homes at night until the bulldozers return. Many people are now forced to live in caves.

Basel asks Yuval why, unlike so many of his countrymen, he cares about basic human rights for Palestinians. Yuval attributes his activism to learning Arabic – something which caused the Israeli secret service to offer him a job, which he declined. Maybe Yuval’s radicalisation was down to more than just learning a language, but he has remained true to his beliefs. He spends increasing amounts of time in the village, helping rebuild buildings and trying to motivate himself to write more about the resistance.

The villages are filmed over a period of years, over which the Israelis – led by an obnoxious arsehole in mirrored sunglasses called Ilan – get increasingly confident. After a while, they do not just demolish homes, they confiscate building tools and even power generators. When one young man, Harun Abu Aram, tries to stop the soldiers taking away his generator, they shoot him in the neck, rendering him quadriplegic. They then tear down his home, forcing him to live in a cave. Harun later dies of his wounds.

We actually see the footage of the shooting of Harun, well some of it at least. As with much of the footage here, we first see an altercation filmed on handheld cameras, then the soldiers threatening the people taking the film. As the soldiers get more aggressive, we see more pictures of stony ground as the person holding the camera runs away. In this case, these pictures are accompanied by the sound of  a shot, followed by a woman screaming: “what have they done to my son?”

Many scenes remain uncommented, as there is honestly nothing to say. Children are first locked into their classrooms, then forced out at gunpoint. A playground is destroyed. Basel’s father is arrested and taken to a military prison – again. As a bulldozer approaches a house, a woman shouts out: “my daughters are still in there!” A soldier impassively says “doesn’t matter!” Even if the soldiers are just obeying orders, as they claim, there is no justification for such malevolent indifference.

Basel proudly tells the story of how his school was built – the only one in the village. Normally, any building works were disrupted by Israeli soldiers, but Basel’s mother had a plan. In the daytime, the women and children would work on the building site, and at night, the men would come out and get the job done. Surprisingly, the plan worked, and soon the school was built. Unsurprisingly, the Israelis condemned it to be torn down. And then Tony Blair arrived.

I hate to give any credit to the soulless war criminal, but for once Blair’s actions had a positive effect. He was in Masafer Yatta for just 7 minutes (we see footage of him surrounded by burly bodyguards), and yet his appearance shamed the Israeli government into letting the school stay. Basel ruefully says “This is a story about power.” Even this victory was short-lived. Later footage shows the school being demolished after the television cameras had moved elsewhere.

Basel teases Yuval for wanting a quick solution. When Yuval is worried that an article he wrote did not generate enough clicks, Basel replies: “You want the occupation to end in ten days, and then you go home … You have to get used to being a loser.” Basel accuses his friend of having too much enthusiasm. He says that Yuval thinks that this conflict can be solved by a nice article, but Basel has to live through all this and cannot afford such self-indulgence.

Earlier footage shows that Basel was not always so cynical. We see him early on saying that if his footage of Israeli atrocities could reach an international audience, maybe the US authorities would understand and get Israel to stop. Watching the film in late 2024, when the atrocities have become much worse and much more public, and the USA and Germany continue to fund the destruction, it is easy to understand why Basel has become much less hopeful of any diplomatic solution.

For most of the time, Basel is indefatigable, but occasionally he too feels defeated. At one point, he says he doesn’t want to end up like his father, not because he isn’t proud of his parents’ activism, but because he isn’t sure whether he has his father’s staying power. He considers stepping back from activism, as he is tired, and after his father’s arrest someone’s got to look after his petrol station (in truth, a single pump) and ensure that the family has the money it needs to survive.

You’d be forgiven for asking if Basel’s activism is worth it. We see several scenes of him telling IDF soldiers that he’s filming them, but they don’t care. They know the courts are on their side. In one scene, Basel shouts out that he has press ID, but this does not protect him from a vicious beating. And yet, however futile it may seem, Basel says that the fact that the villagers are still there is proof of their resilience. Their very existence is valid and necessary resistance.

Despite their camaraderie, the film shows the asymmetry of Basel and Yuval’s relationship. At the end of the day, Yuval can drive home and take a shower. Basel cannot do this for a number of reasons. Firstly, the authorities have banned cars with Palestinian number plates in Masafer Yatta. Secondly, Basel also has a personal driving ban. And even if he could drive away and leave his home, he would not get far because of the checkpoints. He certainly could not drive along the roads which only allow Israeli drivers.

Besides which, even taking a shower at home is becoming increasingly difficult. Emboldened by the previous repression and by a government – and a society – which supports them, Israeli soldiers destroy not just houses but all sources of water. Concrete is poured into the main well, hoses are chopped up, pipes and any other source of water are physically attacked. The villagers look on helplessly. One says “they are trying to starve us”. Or as Basel later says: “they destroy us slowly”.

If the constant attacks by soldiers aren’t enough, then the settlers arrive, armed with guns and baseball bats. Unlike the protesting Palestinians, the settlers are not attacked by the army – indeed we see soldiers accompanying them as they go on the rampage. In one of the final scenes, we see them shooting someone in the stomach, resulting in immediate death. A soldier watches on indulgently. We later learn that the victim was Basel’s cousin.

Why is all this happening? Why does Israel need to expel Palestinians from their traditional homelands? The official excuse is that the Israeli army needs room to train (how much space do you need to practise shooting unarmed civilians at point blank range?). We even see Israeli news coverage implying that the villagers are encroaching on military land – that is, that the army was always there and the villages which have existed since the early 19th Century are just a myth.

Towards the end of the film, leaked documents explain what is really going on. The expulsions are aimed at stopping “Arab expansion”. This is a topsy-turvy world in which “expansion” is used to describe staying where you are. The aim is to force the villagers into cities like Ramallah, where they are easier to control. And the sad fact is that these policies are starting to take effect. Later, we hear that many villagers cannot take any more brutality and have indeed moved out.

In amongst the grainy handheld footage, some scenes are beautifully shot, especially evening scenes from inside the village after the Israeli soldiers have gone. In the background, we see glorious landscapes, in the foreground ordinary people trying to get on with their lives in an impossible situation. If it wasn’t for the occupation, these lives could be idyllic. This film is about the relentlessness of the occupying forces but it is also about Palestinian indefatigability.

The film’s title is taken from what one of the villagers says to the soldiers who try to evict her from her home: “We have no other land.” And yet, I don’t know if it’s intentional, but it has a second meaning. Is there another country on Earth which could carry out such barbarities with impunity, while other governments, including our own, do not just ignore what is going on, but continue to provide Israel with the weapons and bulldozers used to destroy people’s lives?

Although No Other Land won both the jury and audience awards for Best Documentary at the Berlinale, it was recently used as the justification for a new “antisemitism resolution” passed by virtually all parties in the German Bundestag (the other justification was the Indonesian art collective Taring Padi, who exhibited at the most recent Documenta exhibition. In a country where the second most popular political party is full of fascists, it is not a good look to blame antisemitism on foreigners).

Before the film was screened today, a message from the cinema owners, Yorck Kinos, flashed up. It wasn’t on long enough for me to read it all, but it said something like: “we hope no Jews are offended by this film, blah blah, German history, blah blah, please don’t be antisemitic”. I don’t know whether the statement was voluntary or the result of government pressure, but the idea that your main take-home point from this film could be antisemitic says much more about Germany than about the film itself.

No Other Land was supposed to wrap in early October 2023. There is a cautionary post script in which we are told that since 7th October, things in the villages have got worse. But the villagers remain resilient. As Basel says, “We have to raise our voices, not be silent as if no human beings live here.” This film is part of this resistance, it allows us to hear the voices that are usually silenced, particularly in Germany. It isn’t showing in many cinemas, but the one I saw it in was full. Try and see it if you can.

Hello, Henry. Thanks for talking to us. Could you start by introducing yourself?

My name is Henry Urmann. I live in Frankfurt. I am married to an Indonesian woman and that’s how I took an interest in Indonesian culture. As many others, I was outraged by the—I have to say—xenophobic media and political response to the documenta fifteen. With a dear friend, Hans-Jürgen Weißbach, we started to do some research and published our book last year. We also started a blog, www.peoplesjustice.de. And hopefully next year we can hold an exhibition to show and explain the painting to the German public.

The so-called “documenta scandal” has suddenly come back into the news in Germany, after the government justified pushing through an antisemitism resolution because of “antisemitic scandals like those of the Berlinale and documenta”. For people who haven’t been following this, what happened at Documenta?

At documenta, Indonesian artists, the Indonesian curators and organisers were accused of antisemitism, and it was claimed that several pieces of art contained antisemitic visual code. The explanations of the curators and artists were not taken into full consideration. 

The painting that caused the outrage was created by the Indonesian art collective Taring Padi 20 years ago. Members of Taring Padi were participants in the democratic overthrow of the last dictator of Indonesia in 1998. At the documenta they were pressured to remove this huge painting of 100 square metres which was in the middle of Friedrichsplatz in Kassel. In the documenta exhibitions before, the artworks which were placed in Friedrichsplatz became part of the art canon so this was really significant. Removing works of art is something that authoritarian governments do. It was a blatant act of censorship that we had to wrap our heads around.

How did German media and German politics react to the mural?

Without further investigation, they repeated the most superficial and raw accusations against People’s Justice. This was to be expected from the notorious Bild Zeitung, but what was fascinating and shocking was that the allegations were also expressed by the left liberal media, like taz, Frankfurter Allgemeine or Süddeutsche Zeitung. 

People who would usually be seen as moderate and even very progressive participants in the debate, like Meron Mendel, took a hard line against this painting and accused the whole of documenta of having an antisemitic atmosphere. 

Specifically, the accusation was that part of the mural had antisemitic content. What was your answer to that accusation?

It remains a tricky thing to depict a Jewish character with the insignia of the SS. I am convinced that it was painted with a very provocative intention to display the realities of a nasty world where victims like Henry Kissinger who lost a big part of his family in the Holocaust can become monsters while they fight their monsters. 

What happened next was that not just Taring Padi were banned—there was also censorship of other artists who were exhibiting at Documenta. How did that happen?

Taring Padi were not completely banned. They still held a big exhibition in the Hallenbad Ost. But other artworks were also criticised. There were demands to end the documenta completely and demands to remove other pieces of art for being antisemitic. 

And there was a public hostility towards the community of foreign artists from the Global South fueled by German politicians. In his opening speech, [German president Frank-Walter] Steinmeier said that there are boundaries, and that these boundaries were crossed. [Author: Steinmeier accused documenta of “thoughtless and reckless approach to the State of Israel.”]

The artists and other participants of the opening event were appalled by this initial statement and the climate it helped to create. The British artist Hamja Ahsan expressed this when our chancellor, Olaf Scholz refused to visit documenta. 

How did you get personally involved?

Our friends in the German-Indonesian community in Frankfurt were quite upset about the behaviour of the artists themselves. They criticised the artists for not defending themselves in response to the media coverage. They found the artists’ response to be too weak and also dishonest. This viewpoint is also shared by some people who were working at documenta. They said there was a lack of contextualization and of explanation. 

They were also outraged, of course, at the accusations of antisemitism. These accusations did not only relate to the artists and the artwork, but also to the whole community. My friends were shell shocked by the turn of events, the statements of Steinmeier, and the defamation of the artists and the artwork. 

After we talked about it in our circle of German-Indonesian friends, I started researching a little bit deeper into Indonesian history. I looked at the People’s Justice painting, and I had an idea. The painting depicts concrete historical figures, like Henry Kissinger, Muammar al-Gaddafi, and Queen Elizabeth. That helped me to understand the painting, but also the strange reaction of the artists. 

In the book, we first focus on everything that is depicted in the painting. It contains so many references to art history, Pop Culture and the Indonesian understanding of their history and world history after World War Two. 

So we explain what’s depicted in the painting, the whole narrative. We explain the historic context of when the painting was made, following 9/11 and during the war on terror, which began in Afghanistan. We explain how this played out in Indonesia at that time. We also talk a little bit about the artists, the Taring Padi collective and their friends and the whole art scene there.

We also give an interpretation of how this weird kind of coalition developed that we see now, between the Springer Presse and the ‘woke’ Left came into being.

Do you see a parallel between what happened at documenta and the current discussion about ‘cancel culture’?

Definitely, it’s part of cancel culture. I think Salman Rushdie explained very well in his speech last year about the cancel culture that comes from the Left and from the Right. 

Do you think it’s the same thing? Do you think the Left and Right are as bad as each other? 

I think that while the right-wing cancel culture is an authoritarian response to the current crisis, this left-wing cancel culture which has a bit of a Kamala Harris vibe, but is also fueled by this specific German arrogance and sense of superiority. We call it politisch-korrekte Fremdenfeindlichkeit in our book, ‘woke xenophobia’ you could say, stereotyping people from the Global South with misogyny, authoritarianism and antisemitism.

This all happened in 2022. It was a long time before October 7th. How do you think attitudes in the art world have changed since?

I think it’s very clear now to more people than before, that the charge of antisemitism is weaponized against opinions and art that does not fit into a certain narrative.

Surprisingly enough, even Stefan Ripplinger, one of the early anti-Deutsche who was co-founder of Jungle World, shared our interpretation of the painting in his new book, Kunst im Krieg. He clearly says now that the charge of antisemitism is weaponized—I know that even people in the Green Party see that this is happening in the parliament, and it’s happening everywhere.

Do you think this is a specifically German thing?

No. It’s also happening in the Anglo-Saxon world, just look at what Donald Trump plans with the universities.

What do you think the role of an artist is during a genocide?

The painting People’s Justice is dealing with the anticommunist genocide of millions of innocent civilians that happened in Indonesia in 1965, 1966. A mass murder programme with the complicity of the western powers and under the cover of the western media. Does that sound familiar?

Reflecting on this trauma the Indonesian artists of Taring Padi created a strong message about the state violence in the last cold war. The painting emphasises the transnational character of the perpetrators and therefore the necessity of transnational solidarity and remembrance, it’s warning the spectator of complicity and also shows a path towards reconciliation and a future where victims and victimizers can live together peacefully again. 

Going back to the question about what the artist should do, art is never simplistic and does not contain only one message. Art is the effort to turn something bad into something good. I think what always changes in times of crisis is that in good times, an artist sees life through the lens of art. And In a time of crisis, you see art through the lens of your life. You may come to different conclusions.

Documenta is a long running institution. The event in 2022 was the 15th documenta. Do you think the festival can survive the scandal?

There was a struggle about the code of conduct, and it ended with a compromise, which everyone can live with at the moment. The artists are not supposed to sign anything or give a big declaration that they will do this or not do that. It was on the verge of collapse, but I hope the next documenta in 2027 will go smoothly. 

Will all artists take part? There’s been talk of boycotting both documenta and Germany.

I’m a very optimistic person in general. Since the Ampel-coalition started, we’ve seen a lot of well intentioned, badly executed things going on in Germany. I can’t yet imagine that things will continue like this much longer. But of course there is a realistic danger that artists will turn away from Germany.

Although it looks like we won’t have an Ampel-coalition for much longer

For me the bigger context is what documenta and the Ampel-coalition stood for. Look, I am from Frankfurt and there we achieved to become this cosmopolitan, progressive and prospering city not with, but of immigrants. My hopes for Germany to get there are diminished for some time to come and that has to do with this xenophobic climate that the documenta scandal helped to produce.

To finish off, could we go back to where we started? Documenta was cited as a reason for the antisemitism resolution. What does this resolution mean for the progressive immigrant country that you’re talking about?

Like I said, it’s just another well-intentioned, badly executed piece of politics. I don’t know what it will bring. We had a BDS resolution that did not have a very strong influence in Germany. You can’t push out the reality of mainstream opinions in other countries for too long. It doesn’t work. Like you can’t have a Linke that is the only socialist party in the world that does not express solidarity with Palestine.

We are still excluding the world, and excluding the mainstream opinions of other countries. But people consume media from different countries. This has to be part of the German debate again, and I’m sure it will. It’s going to happen after the war and the violence come to an end, and this will come to an end.

You have said a couple of times that you’re hopeful. With everything that’s going on, how can you keep hope?

Understanding the Indonesian perspective, studying and deciphering this painting was an incredible pleasure and I was just in Indonesia, not only the weather, but also the political and economical outlook is so much brighter than here. They had the best 20 years of their last 500 years. They are looking at a bright future. 

We are having so much trouble coming to terms with the fact that while, of course, the Holocaust was the most terrible event of the 20th century, decolonization was the most important one. One event makes you incredibly pessimistic, the other fills you with hope. And this is still an ongoing process.

So optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect?

No, it’s like a double vision. Western decline is not the decline of the so-called rest of the world which is now the majority of the world. There is a prosperous world out there. We have to accept that there are not only amazing artists in Indonesia, in Africa, in Latin America, China and in the Middle East. But there are also more scientists, doctors, managers and pilots in all these countries than in Europe and USA. 

We can’t unmake the past, but the future for the global majority is bright. That’s also what I see expressed in the painting.