‘No Other Land’ Review: A Sobering Doc Chronicles Violent Evictions of Palestinians in the West Bank
One of the many devastating moments in No Other Land, a jolting documentary created by a collective of Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers, is a scene of bulldozers demolishing the only school in Masafer Yatta, a rural village in the occupied West Bank.
Right before the machines knock the walls down, a group of school children, locked inside the building by the Israeli military, escape through open windows. The institution — a modest one-story building with alabaster walls — was founded when Basel Adra, one of the film’s primary subjects, was a young boy. His mother and father helped lead the effort, which symbolized community resistance against state violence.
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The people of Masafer Yatta built this school together despite multiple attempts to stop them. Earlier in the film, Adra recounts how his mother devised a plan to circumvent the Israeli Defense Forces’ antagonism. She instructed women and children to work at the construction site during the day, while the men took over at night. Darkness would give them security and shroud them from the army.
When the townspeople finished the project — a slow, arduous process — it gained international attention. Tony Blair, then prime minister of the United Kingdom, flew to Masafer Yatta and walked around the newly erected structure. After his visit, Israel paused its demolition plans in the area. “This is a story about power,” Adra says after sharing that memory. “This” applies to multiple subjects — the fight to build the school, the occupation of Masafer Yatta and the West Bank and the future of Palestinians living under the iron fist of what is widely considered apartheid.
No Other Land is a documentary about who wields power under occupation. The film, which premiered at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, is a sobering offering for this politically urgent moment. For the last four months, the world has witnessed the destruction of Gaza and increased violence in the West Bank. The Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip following Hamas’ cross-border raid on Oct. 7 has killed more than 28,000 Palestinians (many of them women and children), displaced 80 percent of the area’s population and provoked a ghastly humanitarian crisis. Recently, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threatened a ground invasion of Rafah, the city where the government previously ordered more than a million Palestinians to seek shelter. The events in Gaza have emboldened Israelis in the West Bank, leading to a surge in settler violence against Palestinians there. According to the U.N., the area is facing its own economic and humanitarian crisis too.
No Other Land focuses on the decades-long legal battles, chronic injustices and daily humiliations faced by Palestinians in the West Bank. It shows the impact of 75 years of occupation, from checkpoints and permits to racist laws and policies. The documentary, like the school in Masafer Yatta, is modest in appearance but channels a radical spirit.
Adra, a lawyer, journalist and activist from Masafer Yatta, and Yuval Abraham, an Israeli journalist, are our interlocutors and their conversations about state-sanctioned inequalities make up a majority of No Other Land. The doc, which they both helped direct, edit and produce, is also filled with images — sometimes gruesome, frequently frightening and always shattering — chronicling the displacement of the Palestinians in Masafer Yatta. Interspersed throughout is footage of military intimidation and Israeli settler violence, shot by Adra, Abraham and the other two members of their collective, Palestinian photographer Hamdan Ballal and Israeli cinematographer and editor Rachel Szor. These elements are held together by an unfussy visual language; the straightforward cuts maintain the integrity of the events unfolding on screen.
No Other Land is a vérité project and a witness testimony. It operates within the logic that visual evidence will galvanize the public to acknowledge the brutality faced by Palestinians. The filmmaking quartet began working together five years ago when Abraham and Szol came to Masafer Yatta for a story about Israel’s attempts to evict the area’s residents. The Israeli journalists asked Adra and Ballal for help with the piece — both men were Masafer Yatta natives and had been chronicling their community’s 20-year legal battle against a 1980 military declaration that marked the area as part of a training zone. In 2022, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled against the residents, allowing the army to carry out one of the largest expulsions in the West Bank since the late 60s.
The film is organized by seasons and opens in the summer of 2019. Military tanks and IDF soldiers roll into Masafer Yatta as Palestinian residents rush to collect their belongings. Some families transfer their livelihoods — mattresses, clothes and food — into caves. Adra and Abraham meet in the midst of this devastation, and their first encounter is weighted by the realities of their differences. As Adra leads Abraham to meet some members of the community, he asks the Israeli journalist to be sensitive with his people.
Adra measures his life by moments of resistance instead of years. Through a voiceover, we learn that the young lawyer descends from a family of activists. He has inherited a struggle, and in No Other Land, we see how Adra must negotiate a present defined by the same battles as his parents. He spends his days organizing protests and demonstrations; documenting abuse against Palestinians by the IDF; and later, when Masafer Yatta’s story gets more attention, sitting for interviews with international press. The film doesn’t shy from the tense conversations between Abraham and Adra about how racist policies impact their lives. Whereas Abraham can move freely throughout the country, Adra is restricted, surveilled and harassed by authorities.
No Other Land also chronicles the tragic story of Harun Abu Aram, a young man shot in the neck by an Israeli soldier who tried to confiscate his electric generator. The attack paralyzed him and Harun spent the final two years of his life living in a cave, where conditions only increased his suffering. In the film, we see his mother Farisa trying her best to care for him while fielding questions from journalists eagerly writing down her story without, it seems, understanding her pain. There’s no shortage of stories like Harun and Farisa’s in No Other Land, which shows the ubiquity of injustices against Palestinians. The film stays close to its subjects and testifies to the resilience of the Masafer Yatta community. It takes courage and conviction to rebuild after every act of destruction.
But rebuilding also takes a toll, and No Other Land communicates the emotional and mental impact of oppression. The film is not a document of solutions, but it does position itself as a step in the movement toward a future where Palestinians are just as free as Israelis. How will that be achieved? I think about the school that Adra’s parents helped build, and how after one visit from Prime Minister Blair the Israeli government paused its demolition plans. I weigh the power of that moment against the fact that the United States Senate recently approved $14 billion in aid to Israel as the Palestinian death toll mounts and people starve. If we are to heed the mission of the No Other Land filmmakers then we, as witnesses, must not only acknowledge present-day violences; we must speak out and act against them.
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