Ania Szremski
An exceptional documentary chronicles the last five years of destruction, violence, and friendship in a community of Palestinian
villages in the West Bank.
Basel Adra in No Other Land. Courtesy Cinetic Media.
No Other Land, directed by Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor, Film at Lincoln Center, New York City,
through November 7, 2024
• • •
In Mihail Sebastian’s 1934 novel, For Two Thousand Years, an autobiographical story of a Jewish university student in Romania living through the horror of anti-Semitic tyranny, Zionism is a contested issue, presented alternately as a dream or a nightmare. A friend of the narrator’s, convinced by Great Britain’s proposal of a new “homeland” for European Jews near the British-controlled Suez Canal, persuades him to attend a meeting led by a Zionist militant. Afterward, another attendee explodes in anger. “How are you going to colonize a land the size of three countries with 15 to 17 million people?” he demands. “And what will you do with the indigenous Arabs, who also have the right to a natural death, rather than an abrupt one by Zionist extermination? . . . Not even Mussolini talks that way. Not even German counterrevolutionaries. Not even Nicholas I, the czar of all Russians.”
Yuval Abraham, one of the filmmakers behind, and a central protagonist of, the harrowing and exceptional documentary No Other Land, did not have the option of refusing to participate in the Zionist proposition—he was born into it. But he has had an awakening to the crimes of apartheid committed by the Israeli government, a reckoning he, somewhat naively, credits to his study of Arabic after finishing university. Yuval now works as a journalist for an activist Israeli-Palestinian newspaper (unnamed in the film), believing that if he can report back on these crimes to his fellow Israeli citizens, they, too, will become awakened, and something will change. (Though, as he notes with frustration throughout the documentary, his articles don’t get many hits.) This is what has brought him to Masafer Yatta, a community of twenty Palestinian villages in the West Bank mountains, which the Israeli military is in the process of demolishing—the largest forced expulsion of Palestinians since 1967. The destruction is executed under the pretext of zoning the land for army tank exercises, but is really (as leaked state documents cited in the film show) aimed at halting “Arab expansion” and driving the Palestinians who have lived there for generations into high-density cities, where they would be easier to control.
Basel Adra in No Other Land. Courtesy Cinetic Media.
It’s here that Yuval has met Basel Adra, a young Palestinian man around his age, who grew up in Masafer Yatta, and who is following in the footsteps of his father in committing himself to activism to save the community. Though Yuval is important to the story, he is secondary to Basel, who is also a codirector of the film (along with Hamdan Ballal and Rachel Szor, who do not appear onscreen). No Other Land is narrated from Basel’s perspective, and is constrained by his constraints. Whenever Yuval comes to visit Basel’s village, under constant siege from Israeli soldiers (as well as civilians—settlers frequently attack the outposts with stones and guns, shirts wrapped around their heads, their peaked ad-hoc turbans recalling KKK hoods), eventually he gets back in his little car and drives home, away from the atrocities. The Israeli military has banned Masafer Yatta residents from owning motor vehicles, and in any event, Basel is blacklisted from obtaining the proper Israeli permit to be able to travel into Jerusalem with his collaborator. We can see Yuval’s car go as far from the village as Basel himself can; we see Basel staying behind. He has nowhere else to go.
Still from No Other Land. Courtesy Cinetic Media.
This is a film of claustrophobia. After the Israeli bulldozers raze Palestinian homes, the residents descend underground to live in cramped, dark caves. This is a film of bored and anxious waiting—but a waiting punctuated by episode after episode of terror. During one bout of waiting, as they sit around smoking shisha, Yuval teasingly asks Basel why he’s always on his phone. Basel drags deeply on the pipe; we have the sense he would like to roll his eyes. He’s bored, he explains. He has nothing to do; he wishes he had something to do. He studied law at university, but now the only professional avenues open to him are helping his father with his small petrol station or working as an underpaid laborer on Israeli construction sites. During a car ride, Basel teases Yuval for his excess of “enthusiasm.” “You want the occupation to end in ten days, and then you go home,” he says, friendly to an extent, but exasperated. Activism takes patience. Activism takes waiting. Activism takes failure. You have to get used to being a loser, he tells Yuval. Wait. Waiting is one of the conditions of occupation, which in turn is a septic state that destroys homes, lives, dreams, futures, possibility, dignity, hope.
Still from No Other Land. Courtesy Cinetic Media.
No Other Land is, further, a piece of activist media that is constructed from other pieces of activist media. It is built out of the new footage shot by the filmmakers, on digital cameras and on cell phones; out of home videos of protests dating from Basel’s childhood; out of clips of Basel and Yuval being separately interviewed on domestic and international news channels. Early in the film, which begins in summer 2019, Basel insists that if he can get his footage of the Israeli atrocities out there, the US authorities will understand the severity of the situation and pressure Israel to stop. Heard in 2024, the statement is devastating.
At its gutting core, this is also, inevitably and necessarily, a film not just of violence, but of death. Basel captures the separate shootings of two men—the first, Harun Abu Aram, gunned down by an Israeli soldier as he tried to keep his grip on an electricity generator the military was confiscating. He will waste away as a quadriplegic, lying in one of those small, dark caves, for two years before he dies of his injuries. His mother begrudgingly allows foreign journalists to visit him to document what has happened, journalists who come and go—horror tourists. She wishes for an end to his suffering. The second man is suddenly, casually, seemingly out of nowhere, shot in the stomach by one of the marauding settlers, acting under the protective eye of an Israeli soldier to ensure the Palestinians don’t fight back. That man was Basel’s cousin. The images are violent past the point of endurability—but they are also the quotidian images of Basel’s life.
Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham in No Other Land. Courtesy Cinetic Media.
Just as inevitably and necessarily, this is, finally, a film of life, of human relations and all their complexities, of random acts of kindness and comfort and humor, of children laughing and playing, because all this also exists among the death and the violence and the waiting and the claustrophobia. Basel and Yuval’s deepening friendship is one example. Yuval can be only an imperfect interlocutor for Basel; that is the nature of the privileged ally. Basel gets frustrated with him, angry, disappointed. But as they sit around together once again, backs against a wall, smoking, Basel jokingly asks him, “When will we get married, Yuval?” They are bound together, despite everything.
At the time of this writing, despite its success in several other international markets, No Other Land has no US distributor. Hopefully New Yorkers will sell out its weeklong run at Film at Lincoln Center. Everyone who is able should go to see this film, as difficult as it is to watch, to witness, at least out of respect to the young people who risked so much to make it, who are so determined to get their story heard, who believe, in defiance of all the conditions that would prevent it, that change may come.
Ania Szremski is the senior editor at 4Columns.