By Peter McGregor
The Oscar-winning No Other Land, directed by Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, is 92 minutes of documented ethnic cleansing and all that comes along with that – death, destruction and resistance. No Other Land focuses mainly on Masafer Yatta’s destruction and its residents’ forced displacement between 2019 and 2023. Still, the terror inflicted on its people and Palestine generally stretches back to the foundation of the Israeli State and the occupation of the West Bank in 1967.
Filming for No Other Land wrapped just days before 7 October 2023, after which the Israeli State commenced its genocide against Gaza. This four-year detailed account of the grave injustice meted out to Palestinians in one part of the West Bank gives a stark view of the realities faced by Palestinians.
Harassment, punishment and murder
Embedded within this story of harassment, punishment, and murder is a streak of hope. Watching this documentary, you are struck by the determination and spirit of ordinary Palestinian people who are fighting daily, tooth and nail, against the genocidal Zionist regime to protect their homeland. Throughout the film, we also witness the budding friendship of two documentary makers: Basel Adra, a Palestinian activist, and Yuval Abraham, an Israeli journalist. These two young men develop an unlikely relationship and document the internal strife, turmoil, and despair, as well as the hope and yearning for justice they experience in their fight against the destruction of Palestinian life.
Despite Basel and Yuval forming a bond, the documentary highlights an important point – the difference in conditions experienced by Palestinians and Israelis. Despite their unity in wanting to end the onslaught, Basel cannot visit Yuval in Be’er-Sheva, cannot use the same roads as Yuval and can never switch off from his daily reality. In their Oscar acceptance speech, Yuval drove home this reality by stating: “When I look at Basel, I see my brother. But we are unequal. We live in a regime where I am free under civilian law and Basel is under military laws that destroy lives, that he cannot control”. This speaks to the obvious reality that the Israeli State, whose writ effectively stretches over historic Palestine (from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea), is an apartheid state.
Generational oppression
Basel comes from a family of activists – he saw his father arrested when he was five and attended his first protest when he was 7, after which his father was arrested again. Basel’s mother helped to build a local school, which arch-imperialist war criminal Tony Blair later visited. Adra recalls that after Blair’s seven-minute visit, the destruction orders were paused, and the school was able to function, but this was only temporary. Later in the documentary, we see the IOF (Israeli Occupation Forces) attack the school with students and teachers sitting in lessons. As Basel says, the Israeli State “destroy us slowly”.
Masafer Yatta is a collection of villages in the West Bank that have been facing Israeli state terror for decades. In the documentary, we see swathes of heavily armed IOF goons claim that Masafer Yatta is an IOF training zone – a designation which was made specifically to allow the Israeli State to steal the land from Palestinians, and which is evidenced by the building of settler homes on the same land. As Basel puts it in the documentary, the villagers took their fight to a “court which isn’t theirs”, and despite efforts over many years to stop what is internationally recognised as a war crime, an Israeli court ruled in favour of the continuation of ethnic cleansing in Masafer Yatta.
One of the first scenes is of the IOF attacking a village and destroying homes – a shocking scene, but one all too common for Palestinians. Even before the all-out genocidal onslaught on Gaza, Palestinians faced IOF and settler terror almost daily – from 2004-2016, settler attacks nearly quadrupled to 2,100, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
One particularly evil lackey of the Zionist state is featured in the film, referred to only as Ilan. This brute is seen several times throughout, taking great glee in terrorising Palestinians and whipping up IOF soldiers to continue the clearing of villages. Ilan is the personification of the policy of ethnic cleansing that the Israeli state and settlers have pushed – he is but one of many Israeli officials who inflict horror on Palestinians every day and, as one woman featured in the documentary says, to make Palestinians “strangers in their own land”.
Continuing genocide
Throughout the documentary, we see Yuval struggle to fully understand the sheer size of the fight he is partaking in. He grows impatient and is even naïve at times, especially after his article on Harun Abu Aram, a man paralysed by an IOF bullet, which didn’t get many views. Basel insightfully and in jest tells Yuval that he is ‘a little enthusiastic’ and manages Yuval’s expectations that the occupation cannot be ended in just 10 days.
By the end of the film, one thing becomes abundantly clear: the Israeli war against the Palestinian people’s right to exist did not end after the Nakba and restart after 7 October 2023. It has been continuing every day since then in every part of Palestine.
It would be incredible to watch this documentary and not come out the other end with enormous sympathy and solidarity for the Palestinian people, who in the face of tanks, guns and extreme violence, fight back steadfastly armed with only mobile phones, stones and their voices. Unless, of course, you are a shameless apologist for and backer of the Israeli Zionist State and its crimes, which clearly the capitalist and imperialist establishment in Europe and the United States are.
Hence, No Other Land has failed to find a distributor in the latter, despite winning an Oscar. The US ruling class is determined to hide the horrific reality of Palestinian oppression. Likewise, in Britain, the BBC has shamefully pulled their documentary Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone from its iPlayer for fear of exposing the truth of the Gaza genocide to a broad public. This reveals a very important conclusion that we must draw from this documentary—the struggle to tear down Israeli occupation and apartheid is the struggle to rid us of this entire genocidal system.
