A collaborative project between four filmmakers (Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, who are Israeli, and Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal, who are Palestinian), No Other Land documents the fight to save Masafer Yatta – a collection of villages in the southern Western Bank where thousands of people face eviction, in a situation which has been ongoing for decades and only escalated since October 7. The violence captured in the film is harrowing: one resident, Harun Abu Aram, is shot by a soldier while attempting to hold onto his tools as they are being confiscated. He is left paralysed from the waist down and later dies from his injuries. Basel’s cousin, Zakriha Adra, is murdered during an unprovoked attack by settlers, who are a terrifying, almost Klu Klux Klan-like presence whenever they appear. While it’s hardly surprising, the aggression and cruelty that Israeli soldiers inflict upon Masafer Yatta’s residents is still shocking. Throughout the course of the film, the area’s constructions – from playgrounds to sheep pens – are steadily destroyed, leaving families forced to live inside caves. We see children cower in a classroom as a battalion of soldiers arrive to demolish their school, then sobbing as the building is levelled by bulldozers right before their eyes.
No Other Land depicts the kind of evil that you read about in history books and wonder how it was ever allowed to happen. But the film is also a celebration of the resourcefulness, ingenuity and determination of Masafer Yatta’s residents as they resist a decades-long process of ethnic cleansing. These efforts range from protests, activism and political organising, to the smallest acts of care for the land: in one scene, a group of children rush to save a pigeon trapped underneath a demolished structure.
No Other Land has earned widespread critical acclaim, but it has also been denounced and attacked by Israel’s supporters. This backlash reached extreme lows at the Berlinale Film Festival earlier this year, where it won an award for best documentary. After Germany’s culture minister was criticised for applauding Yuval and Basel’s acceptance speech, she defended herself by explaining that she was only clapping for Yuval, who is Israeli, and not Basel, who is Palestinian. It is a testament to the film’s moral clarity that those with an interest in maintaining Israel’s brutal system of occupation and apartheid feel so threatened by it.
We spoke with Yuval and Basel about whether documentation can change the reality on the ground, the limits of Israeli-Palestinian solidarity, and more.
No Other Land is partly about the effort to protect Masafa Yatter by documenting events and spreading information. In the last year, it seems like more people than ever – particularly in the West – are aware of what’s happening in Palestine, but at the same time the situation on the ground is only getting worse. Do you still have faith in the power of information to change things? And if so, where does that faith come from?
Basel Adra: I’ve been doing this documentation for many years and for different reasons, but mainly it is to change people’s minds by showing them the truth of what’s happening and how brutal the occupation is. Today, I think there is a change in public opinion in the UK and different countries around the world, where people have seen the truth.
But in the past year, people have seen so much of the killings in Gaza, tens of thousands of people massacred and bombed by Israeli warplanes, and still nobody can stop it. Things are changing for the worse for us as Palestinians on the ground, and countries like the UK, US and Germany are giving Israel diplomatic cover against the international courts, and supporting it by delivering more weapons, more bombs, more jets and more money. It’s not easy. But it’s still important to change people’s minds and to show them the reality, even with what’s happening, even with the hypocrisy of these governments.
Yuval Abraham: It’s true that it’s only getting worse, but we don’t know what it would have looked like without the documentation. It’s also a personal question: what else can one do, when this is the situation? I think it’s always better that the information is out there, and I think it can definitely have effects in the short term. If you look at the big picture, it’s just horrific, but there can be smaller policy changes that are happening as a result of documentation, certain policies which the Israeli state could have taken but perhaps didn’t, or which they did a more minimised version of. You’re right that it’s not doing what it’s supposed to, and it’s not leading to the change that we wish it would. It’s very frustrating and these are questions that I ask myself all the time. But the alternative of not documenting is probably going to be even worse.
The film portrays the friendship and solidarity which exists between you both, but it’s also quite clear that people with Yuval’s politics are a minority within Israeli society. What do you think are the limitations of solidarity between Israelis and Palestinians?
Yuval Abraham: It was very important for us to examine this in the film. On the one hand, Basel and I share the same values: we share the same opposition to the occupation, we believe in a future where Palestinians achieve their freedom, and where both people, Palestinians and Israelis, have the same rights and security. But what we try to show in the film is that, even if we share these political beliefs, the differences between our ability to exist in the land are so stark. We’re both under the control of the Israeli state, but under two different systems of law. We wanted to show these apartheid conditions. Under military law, soldiers can enter Basel’s home at any moment, confiscate whatever they want and arrest his family members – as they did constantly – whereas under civilian law l can move freely in the land. I have voting rights, which Basel does not. I can use an airport and Basel, like millions of Palestinians, cannot. In the film, we’re asking whether co-resistance is possible under these conditions. It worked for us, but there are different answers to that question.
We’re finding it very difficult to find distribution for the film in the US because of the film’s positions. We have both been attacked, again and again, for our very clear positions against the apartheid and against military occupation – Yuval Abraham
The film is very explicitly rejecting a politics of normalisation [a term describing anything which presents Israel’s military occupation, apartheid system and settler-colonialism as normal], and that it’s grounded in an ethos of co-resistance rather than co-existence. But it was made with the help of Close Up, a film initiative which has faced criticism and a boycott campaign for allegedly normalising Israeli apartheid. Do you think there’s a conflict there with the message of the film and if so, how would you account for that?
Basel Adra: From the beginning, we were very clear that we were not going to be getting financial support from any Israeli institute or the Israeli government. We made it as a co-resistance action, and from the perspective that we are activists. We participated in Close Up because we didn’t have experience making documentaries, and it’s an initiative that supports movies from the Middle East. I don’t think its involvement means that the film is pro-normalisation.
We totally respect the BDS principles, which we’re not violating, and we are against any form of normalisation: I will not normalise occupation and apartheid, especially while I’m living this brutal life. The movie is about the community; it’s not about us – we’re not trying to show a nice friendship between an Israeli and a Palestinian, and that life can be nice. No, life is horrible, and even our characters in the movie are showing the power imbalance, as a way to explain the apartheid which exists between Palestinians and Israelis. We’re trying to address the story to millions of people so that there will be enough political pressure on the Israeli government not to erase this community.
Yuval Abraham: Close Up is not an Israeli organisation. It’s based in Belgium and works with filmmakers from all over the Middle East, including from Palestine, Syria and Lebanon. I’m very happy that we participated there, because they helped us immensely and I think they are advancing filmmakers from all across the Middle East. People also need to understand that it’s not easy to make a film like this under such brutal conditions, for Palestinian filmmakers especially. We’re finding it very difficult to find distribution for the film in the US because of the film’s positions. We have both been attacked, again and again, for our very clear positions against the apartheid and against military occupation. People may disagree politically with us, but the film’s whole essence is resisting the occupation and imagining a future of equality and justice, so I think it’s far-fetched to label it as normalisation.
The settlers that were coming to burn our homes, smash our cars and throw stones at children going to school are today the commanders – Basel Adra
What are things like in Masafer Yatta now?
Basel Adra: We finished filming before October 7, but the film shows some of what took place afterwards. My cousin got shot on October 13, and that’s a scene in the movie. Our communities are fleeing from their homes. Many of the settlers around us – the extremist settlers that the US, the UK and France have placed sanctions on – have become the soldiers, and that means that they are now the power that controls everything about our lives. The settlers that were coming to burn our homes, smash our cars and throw stones at children going to school are today the commanders.
They started going to people’s houses at night and threatening them that, if they didn’t leave their house in 24 hours, they would come back and kill them. That led to six communities fleeing from their homes. They’ve prevented people from harvesting their olive trees, planting the land with seeds and going out with their sheep. They’ve destroyed so many structures, water wells and homes for Palestinian people. They are expanding settlements, shooting people and kicking them out of their homes. So for them, it’s a really good time. They’re happy about what’s happening.
I found the ending quite bleak, because the film shows decades of activism and resilience, then ends at a point when things are worse than ever before. How were you thinking about how to conclude the narrative?
Yuval Abraham: For us, it was not an easy decision to end the film on this note of uncertainty, fear and the escalation of the horrors and the atrocities. But it was a reflection of the state that we were in when the film ended and the state that we are still in now, and that’s why we chose to do it.
No Other Land is out in the UK now
