James Y. Lee
Following the Berlinale 2024 premiere of No Other Land in February—a straightforward, harrowing docu-testimony about the struggle of Palestinian village Masafer Yatta against Israeli settlers and military—the film, helmed by a collective of four Israeli and Palestinian directors, quickly found itself at the center of political controversy. It’s not difficult to see why; No Other Land is a straight-faced, irate confrontation of the abuses that Palestinian civilians have suffered for decades under Israel’s ethnic cleansing, rightfully unwilling to coddle any kind of equivocal illusions about the face of Israeli occupation and the violence it brings. But with that strength of activist conviction brings willful misinterpretation, much of which, at the time, was brought on by German politicians themselves.
When the film wound up receiving the Berlinale Documentary Film Award during the festival’s final night, two of the film’s directors—Palestinian lawyer/documentarian Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham—each decried Israel’s persistent bombardment and slaughter of tens of thousands of Gazans following Hamas’s horrific massacre of over 1,000 Israeli citizens on October 7, 2023. Only one was applauded by Germany’s minister of state for culture, Claudia Roth—she insisted she was clapping for Abraham only. Kai Wegner, the conservative mayor of Berlin, would later condemn the festival, placing the blame of Israel’s killing of over 45,000 Palestinians (at the time of writing—a disclaimer I cannot believe I still have to clarify) squarely and solely on Hamas; an ignorant rejection of the decades of cyclical violence, oppression, and extremism that have reached a tragically climactic peak with this dire current hour in the Gaza Strip.
In a sense, No Other Land functions as a sliced-out, four-year microcosm of the kinds of decades-long injustices that the Israel Defense Forces have been responsible for as they forcibly colonize land from Palestinian villagers. The people of Masafer Yatta have been fighting for their right to exist for decades. Despite predating Israel’s statehood by some 60 years or so, their community’s existence has been deemed less than that of squatters since the 1980s, after their land was turned into a military training zone for tanks, their autonomy reduced to that of un-washable human stains. Their refusal to be washed, so to speak, informs on their deep resilience. Year after year, Israeli soldiers and bulldozers arrive on the grounds of Masafer Yatta, tearing down homes, schools, and other such institutions. Year after year, the villagers take it upon themselves to rebuild as much as they can salvage the second the Israeli vehicles leave.
No Other Land‘s central narrative follows that of Adra, whose struggle to preserve Masafer Yatta has been inherited from his activist father—a man who’s stood at the forefront of the fight to keep Masafer Yatta alive, and a man whose energy Adra fears he cannot replicate as that fight only seem to tip further and further towards despair. The film’s central documentation of footage begins in 2019—in Adra’s words, “when we started to end,” but also when Adra first met Abraham and Rachel Szor, the former of whom forms a meaningful yet tenuous friendship with Adra, and the latter of whom is predominantly also credited as a camera operator. Adra and Abraham’s friendship exists on a fine edge between allyship and privilege. They are contrasted not just by their coexistence as Palestinian and Israeli, respectively, but also by their status on this land, by the fact that they live 30 minutes apart from each other, and yet Abraham has political rights such as voting, as well as an apartment to comfortably sleep and shower in, that Adra simply cannot possess.
Early on in the film, Adra and Abraham both express hope about finding a way to end the brutality of the occupation—both naïve, but one more grounded than the other. Abraham frets over a drought of views on his online reportage, which he sees as key to immediately getting the word out about the occupation, while Adra, who pokes at Abraham’s more privileged impatience and self-indulgence, thinks on a more practical, long-term scope and holds out hope that the attention of major world powers, specifically naming the U.S., will help put meaningful pressure on Israel. But anyone who has been even remotely privy to the United States’ functionally unconditional support of Israel—even despite their war crimes driving a moral wedge through their alliance—will be unsurprised to learn that No Other Land is also a portrayal of how persistent conflict can wear down optimism and resolve. Almost a year after this exchange of hope, a villager named Harun Abu Aram is shot in the neck by an IDF soldier in January 2021 and rendered paraplegic from the shoulders down, an act of stark violence shot in horrific detail and whose eventual deterioration is also rigidly documented in the two years that ensue.
In those two years, Israel’s efforts to evict the residents of Masafer Yatta only intensify further. Armed, masked settlers are brought in alongside the IDF forces to accelerate the destruction of Palestinian property. Israel’s courts counter a petition against Masafer Yatta residents’ expulsion, further empowering the demolitionists and IDF soldiers to grow ever more violent in their pursuit. Even as Masafer Yatta’s civilians’ attempts to resist intensify in turn—Adra, for one, finds himself more frequently at the center of brawls between villagers and the IDF, evading attempts at his arrest by a hair—a breaking point is eventually reached. After decades of fighting, Adra finds himself staring down the threat of encroaching despair, as multiple villagers depart the land that they feel they can no longer defend. At one point, Hamdan Ballal, Adra’s co-director and another resident of the village, has a standoffish argument with Abraham, who reinforces his genuine anti-Zionist allyship and continued devotion to the Palestinian cause, only to hear Ballal’s terse retort—“How does that help me?”
Formal critiques on a film as painfully human as this may seem moot, but it bears saying that those familiar with the crop of vérité documentaries that so frequent the likes of indie-oriented film festival selections—the likes of which include Madeleine Gavin’s Beyond Utopia and Andrew Zeman’s Checkpoint Zoo—will admittedly find very little to be formally new about this film. Though it’s evidently edited to a rigidly refined degree, it’s also clear that the expected audience for this film consists of people who find themselves having been very recently thrust into the cultural consciousness of the Israel-Palestine conflict following the October 7 massacre and the year-plus-long assault on Gazan civilians, who possess little context on the persistent Israeli occupation and Nakba that contributed so predominantly to the cyclical violence of our current hour. But the tragic thing about a film like No Other Land is the ascribing of “urgency” to its testimony, which is displayed in such agonizingly grounded detail that one has to remain conscious of the intended endgame for the risks taken during its production. Thus, its relative lack of interest in providing further context on the conflict, while understandable yet still necessary to possess, is instead substituted by a persistently powerful treatise on the necessity of documentation and of political acts of witnessing.
Towards the back half of No Other Land, Adra and co. present two scenes of strikingly quiet potency that illuminate the dichotomy of power and powerlessness that comes with witnessing a plight as historically bleak as this. The first is that of a visit that former British Prime Minister Tony Blair paid to Masafer Yatta, for which Adra recounts that he was only there for seven minutes—but those seven minutes had an outsized impact on the community, as Blair’s presence and the widespread international attention it afforded helped to stall Israel’s eviction plans. The second is that of Harun Abu Aram’s mother, who, in the midst of tending to a deteriorating Aram in the nearby caves that villagers have been sheltering in, is visited by a variety of international journalists who want to broadcast Aram’s story, and seems to be quietly despairing at the fact that there is no genuine attempt from any of them at understanding the agony of her and her son’s suffering. The journalists, as we soon find, brought no meaningful help. Aram died in February 2023, two years after the IDF shot and paralyzed him.
As Adra concludes his narration of the former sequence with Blair, he buttons it with a statement that seems to define the ethos of No Other Land—“this is a story about power.” What this film intuits is the fact that who gets to witness the suffering of the Palestinian people, how that suffering gets framed in spite of existing narratives, and how many people get to witness that suffering, can either reinforce via apathy, or contribute to resistance against, that power. To that end, it is overwhelmingly frustrating to realize that a film as contextually necessary to our current moment as this still has not found a U.S. distributor. It is a barrier of accessibility to a potential audience whose witnessing of this film will be sure to take on a different kind of cultural weight, primarily by merit of their existence in one of Israel’s staunchest allies, but also by merit of their proximity to an industry that has proven to be severely hostile to perspectives even slightly ambivalent on Israel’s war crimes.
No Other Land possesses no illusions that things will meaningfully improve from here. Its epilogue is a textual acknowledgement of the bombardment of Gaza that followed the October 7 massacre, the month when production on the film wrapped, and the last image that greets us is footage of Adra’s cousin being shot at point-blank range by a rifle-armed Israeli settler. But the film’s faintest glimmer of world-worn resilience is in its truly courageous production and riskily polemic existence, as well as its awareness that witnessing abuses of power is not power itself—it is the understanding that power must constantly be questioned, taken into account, and confronted for everything it inflicts. As of December 10, 2024, 44,768 Palestinians are dead. 1.9 million Gazans are internally displaced. We are collectively numbing to the sheer scale of these numbers of death and suffering. No Other Land is a plea to feel again the humanity lost in those statistics, before it all becomes too late.
