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.
