'No Other Land’ Shows Why Palestinians Must Be Allowed to Tell Their Own Stories

 

Zainab Firdausi

25/Oct/2024

5 min read

The film, made by a group Palestinian and Israeli journalists, captures how Palestinian villagers are policed in a language foreign to them, by soldiers foreign to them.

On October 5, some 100 of us filed into the Walter Reade Theatre at Lincoln Center during the 62nd iteration of the New York Film Festival to watch No Other Land, a documentary released in 2024 by a group of Israeli and Palestinian journalists and filmmakers. The film chronicles the life-consuming efforts of Palestinians in a group of villages in Area C of the West Bank, known as Masafer Yatta, resisting eviction from their homes by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF). I found myself in tears scarcely five minutes into the film and struggled to stay dry-eyed for its remainder. 

In the opening seconds, we are introduced to Basel Adra, a 28-year-old resident of Masafer Yatta whose earliest memories as a child involve encounters with the IDF as his family attempts to resist eviction from their village. Throughout the film, one sees Basel in various lights: as a loving son and elder brother; a trusting friend; someone who herds goats in the South Hebron Hills; someone with a law degree; someone cagey about the idea of marriage, and so on.

A still from ‘No Other Land’. Photo: Screengrab from video.

For a moment, one might just believe that he is like any other young man. But No Other Land is a film like no other. It condenses the historical act of bearing witness into a powerful 90 minutes. As a viewer, you are both immobilised and made complicit in the erosion of Basel’s aspirations for a fuller life – because to live in a world where such an injustice takes place is to be complicit. The film makes it abundantly clear that no aspect of a Masafer Yatta resident’s life is left untouched by the fact that they were born under an unbearable occupation, which repeatedly devours not only land but all other human aims and ambitions that might arise from it. 

The film is unique because it is the most recent consolidation of such evidence solely from a Palestinian perspective, proving without a doubt that the land-grab impulse of the Israeli state is ever-growing. Films and investigative assessments on settler violence by Israeli or Western journalists – in an effort to show “both sides” or portray the rationale of settlers – humanise and legitimise their revisionism by allowing them a platform equal to their victims. No Other Land demonstrates the importance of having editorial input from Palestinians themselves, not simply because this is honourable, but because only by doing so are the existential stakes of these land-grabbing measures made visible. 

A still from ‘No Other Land’. Photo: Screengrab from video.

Masafer Yatta has been in peril since the Six-Day War in 1967, when it came under Israeli occupation. In the 1980s, in contravention of the Geneva conventions, nearly 7,500 acres of the occupied villages were declared a practice zone for IDF tanks, necessitating people’s expulsion since apparently no civilians, especially Palestinians, are allowed near military zones. Born in 1996, Basel has only known an insecure existence with his parents constantly protesting the military’s incursions onto their land. His life is measured in increments between opposing the IDF’s attempts to break homes and infrastructure; protecting his mother from soldiers; and following his father around lest he get arrested. We see Basel document these moves by the IDF and his fellow villagers, struggling to craft a life beyond them. As tensions in Masafer Yatta heightened over the last few years, Basel befriended a sympathetic Israeli journalist, Yuval Abraham, who explained to him that he was initially going to work for the IDF’s intelligence units but later withdrew. Yuval attributed his change of heart to the fact that once he started to learn Arabic for his future job, he became exposed to Palestinian media and literature. Consuming this media radically altered his understanding of the occupation, pushing him to become a journalist, wanting to speak with Masafer Yatta residents and to write of their expulsions.

These are the circumstances under which No Other Land comes into being: Basel’s dedication to a constant chronicling of this dangerous and precarious life, and Yuval’s deep care towards being a resolute ally. 

Together, Basel and Yuval plot ways in which to amplify the news of intensifying encroachments onto Masafer Yatta, both by the IDF and armed settlers. They record IDF bulldozers’ unsparing spree of demolishing everything in their paths: from modest homes to outdoor toilets, children’s playgrounds, chicken coops, and goat pens; while soldiers slash water pipes and fill wells with cement. They exhibit the inhuman expectation made of Palestinians, where they must simply endure and silently observe the levelling of their homes and livelihoods. Needless to say, all depictions of these efforts to prevent demolitions include guns toted routinely in the direction of unarmed men, women, children and the elderly.

No Other Land shows how, in Masafer Yatta, justice, legality, and the rule of law bear no resemblance to their supposed liberal conceptions. In the early 2000s, local Palestinians petitioned an Israeli court to stop the demolitions and evictions – by virtue of being in Area C they are under Israeli military control and law. While the case’s arbitration took nearly two decades, its judicial panel comprised a judge who himself was a settler in Ramallah. In the interim period, permits for any building activity were issued only by the IDF, who denied requests by native villagers while authorising construction by settlers. Here, we see the most tangible form of resistance mounted by Palestinians in Masafer Yatta: attempts to rebuild small bits of their homes so as to not cede the land to the Israeli state. Unsurprisingly, the IDF returns to demolish those too, under the pretext of “illegal building activity”. Straddling this line between resistance and survival, several villagers relocate to ancient caves in the South Hebron Hills near their razed villages. In just these instances, Basel, Yuval, and a new associate in their project, Hamdan Ballal, detail Palestinian life under intense dispossession and segregation.

A still from ‘No Other Land’. Photo: Screengrab from video.

No Other Land captures how Palestinian villagers are policed in a language foreign to them, by soldiers foreign to them. It shows how, in the search for some kind of justice, they must submit themselves to the laws of their occupier. It demonstrates to us reasons why they might be distrusting of even well-meaning Israelis such as Yuval or Gideon Levy, clips of whose visit were included in the film. And it reveals the burdens that “homeland” brings with it in the face of a brutal occupation. In one scene, we see Basel discuss with Yuval fantastical plans to escape to the Maldives, knowing very well that he could never leave. Committing these instances to film is indispensable to our understanding of the human cost of the occupation. 

Lastly, though not explicitly addressed in the film, No Other Land portrays the material potential and worth of the occupied land. Among news of ballistic missiles and crushed hospitals, it is easy to forget that a large number of Palestinians live in poverty or are dependent on the Israeli economy for their subsistence. The average daily wage in the West Bank is $37, and the equivalent is $15 in Gaza, compared to $79 in Israel. No Other Land unequivocally shows that dispossession is not an abstraction but a means by which to push Masafer Yatta villagers further into poverty, compelling them to submit to Israeli rule. 

The land enables their sustenance and most residents in the area earn their income through livestock rearing. Thus, when their grazing permits are revoked, so are any chances of sustaining themselves in their homeland. In Masafer Yatta, families of four and more live huddled in room-sized homes. Old ripped-out car seats function as outdoor seating. Coal stoves furnish full meals inside caves. And a single gas kiosk, owned by Basel’s father, serves as the “gas station” for several villages. It is no coincidence that Basel is a goatherd despite having a law degree. As he explains to Yuval, the Palestinian economy is crippled and the only available job for Palestinians in Israel is as construction workers. Ironically, he had to put himself through university in Be’er-Sheva by working construction jobs in Israel. And then a victim of cyclical cruelty, he possessed no avenues by which to practise law, thereby being compelled to turn to construction jobs in the West Bank to prevent military expropriation of their land. 

The medium of film is not incidental to this project. I had read about Masafer Yatta in 2022, when an Israeli high court upheld the military order to clear the collection of hamlets. But neither writing nor photographs could have conveyed the depth of despair in Masafer Yatta. From the highest points in the South Hebron Hills, villagers can peer down into Israel beyond the vast collection of checkpoints and militarised gates, where visible in plain sight is a fuller and richer existence built on the same land.  Where some struggle to eke out a meaningful existence, others find revelry in the dominance of Israeli state and society. This spectre of violence that merely haunts other portraits of illegal settlement and military expulsion in the West Bank is on naked display in No Other Land. In response to the October 7 attacks in Israel, settlers, drunk on the power afforded to them by the Israeli state, descended upon Masafer Yatta and amidst provocations shot Basel’s cousin in the stomach. 

Neither Basel, Yuval, nor Rachel Szor, another listed collaborator, could stay for the October premiere of the film in New York City due to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. When the film premiered and won an award at the Berlin International Film Festival earlier this year, both Basel and Yuval were panned by German and Israeli politicians for their “anti-semitic” remarks in which they described the situation in the West Bank as apartheid. In response to Yuval’s emphatic support for his Palestinian associates, a right-wing mob attacked his family home in Israel. While a German minister went so far as to say she only clapped for “the Israeli film-maker, not his Palestinian colleague”. The fortitude of the No Other Land’s team is commendable, they have withstood much scorn from those disbelieving of Israeli-Palestinian collaboration. 

The film will open at ‘Film at Lincoln Center’ on November 1 for an exclusive one-week run but beyond that it is currently without a primary distributor in the US. As a public, we would be robbed if No Other Land does not get a popular release. If we cannot do anything else, we must bear witness to Palestinians’ own truth about their existence.

Zainab Firdausi is a PhD student at Yale University.