Drama is conflict. Good drama is conflict with resolution. Without resolution you have the ongoing drama of the Middle East. Tragedy beyond measure.
NO OTHER LAND is a horror movie, a documentary of destruction and displacement. Does expulsion equal extermination? The equation becomes part of the callous, calculated demolition and diaspora-making policy of the Israeli government in this gut wrenching, head scratching, heart sinking film.
Basel Adra, a young Palestinian activist from Masafer Yatta, in the southern West Bank has been fighting his community’s mass expulsion by the Israeli occupation since childhood. He has inherited resistance and protest from his father. Like all that goes on in that part of the world, its is a long festering feud.
Armed with a camera not a Kalashnikov, a cinematic sling aimed at the Israeli Goliath, Basel records the gradual erasure of the region of Masafer Yatta, as Israeli soldiers bulldoze the homes of Palestinian families, the largest single act of forced transfer ever carried out in the occupied West Bank.
Ashamed of his country’s actions, Yuval, an Israeli journalist, joins Basel’s struggle, and for over half a decade the two rage against the expulsion. Their complex bond is haunted by the extreme inequality between them: Basel, living under a brutal military occupation, and Yuval, unrestricted and free.
NO OTHER LAND is the product of a Palestinian-Israeli collective of four young activists, was co-created as an act of creative resistance to Apartheid and a search for a path towards equality and justice.
The Collective comprises of Basel Adra, a Palestinian lawyer, journalist and filmmaker from Masafer Yatta, Rachel Szor an Israeli cinematographer, editor, and director from Jerusalem, Hamdan Ballal, a Palestinian photographer, filmmaker and farmer from Susya, and Yuval Abraham. an Israeli filmmaker and investigative journalist from Jerusalem.
Back in 1999, a startling quarter of a century ago, the Israeli military ordered all Palestinians living in Masafer Yatta to leave, so soldiers could use their land as a military training ground.
That’s how a struggle began to save the villages from expulsion, led by Basel’s parents and neighbours. The Palestinian residents of the area, who have no voting rights and are living under occupation, also approached a group of Israeli lawyers who petitioned Israel’s high court against the forced expulsion in 2000.
In 2022, after a two decade long legal battle, the high court gave the military a green light to carry out the expulsion – which is the largest single act of forced transfer carried out in the West Bank since it was occupied in 1967 an astonishing sixty years ago.
The decision to destroy the Palestinian villages and evict around 1,800 people so the military can use their land for tank training exercises triggered worldwide condemnation and a continued determination by the locals to protest the policy of systematic home demolitions.
The Israeli Civil Administration in the West Bank rejects almost all Palestinian requests for building permits, while allowing settlers in the area to build freely. This policy uses military law to force entire families in Masafer Yatta to leave their historical lands, since they are unable to build anything legally. All of their homes, schools, water wells, and roads are considered “illegal” by the army and marked for destruction. Their mere existence, on their private land, is illegal.
After Israel’s victory in the 1967 war, the Israeli minister of defence, Moshe Dayan, declared, “We are now an empire.” To the victor, the spoils, so the saying goes. But what good is the spoils if it spoils any sense of decency, any source of resolution, and demolishes any hope for a future.
