“There is no other land” and the cruel truth of the Israeli occupation

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November 4, 2024

The unsparing documentary — one of the most powerful films of the year — has yet to find a distributor in the US.

“There is no other land” and the cruel truth of the Israeli occupation — (Courtesy of Anipode Films)

There is no other land tells the story of Basel Adra, a young Palestinian from Masafer Yatta, a collection of 20 villages in the West Bank, who began recording Israel’s destruction of homes in his community when he was 15 years old. Adra worked with Yuval Abraham, an Israeli journalist, and filmmakers Hamdan Ballal and Rachel Szor will make the documentary.

The film demonstrates the banality of “service” under the occupation, showing the men and women of the Israeli army snapping at or losing their temper with Palestinian children even as they commit war crimes in the West Bank. Israel’s scenario in the region is well-known and well-rehearsed: the army that runs Palestinian life declares an area of land closed to Palestinians in order to conduct training exercises; then the settlers are invited to set up their camps in the “military zone”. The whole show, which has led to the presence of more than 700,000 settlers in the West Bank colonies, amounts to a massive theft across the country. Meanwhile, Israeli courts were used to launder the proceeds — and the biggest the fence he is the one clothed in legal robes.

In this case, it took the court 22 years to whitewash the crime; decreewhich for the benefit of the army, was delivered in 2022. Another fact on the ground is the unchanging logic of Zionism. All of this is yet another reminder—as subtle as a rusty nail in the brain—that the ethnic cleansing in Palestine never ended. The Nakba continues; There is no other land makes it very clear.

I hardly looked There is no other land. Melancholy and indignation prevented me from sitting still and focusing on the screen. I wanted to jump out of my skin, be somewhere else and avoid history altogether. But looking away is a privilege that overwhelms the responsibility to bear witness and share grief.

While most of the film’s footage was shot between 2019 and 2023 — before the current genocide in Gaza — several important scenes take place perhaps 10 or 15 years earlier. We see Basel’s father as a young man encouraging the children during a field trip against the fear of Israeli soldiers. Basel himself appears as a boy, and his father explains that the Palestinians are armed sumudor resilience in the face of injustice.

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At one point, Basel reflects on the fact that he is now the same age as his father in that earlier video. In this way, we learn that his family’s struggle is the Palestinian struggle in microcosm: an intergenerational effort to build a life, to imagine a future that overcomes or transcends Jewish supremacy in Palestine. For Basel’s family and for many others, the effort was in vain. The occupation grinds on mercilessly and endlessly.

One of the most heartbreaking scenes in the film depicts the destruction of a school in Masafer Yatta, which was built simply because it was needed. No explanation is given for its demolition, but we don’t need them. The occupying authorities regard the school as an unauthorized building, one of the tricks of the apartheid government. So it was destroyed, and the territory was declared a military zone. Rinse and repeat.

In this scene, a menacing and dangerous phalanx of Israeli soldiers appear at the school, and small children are forced to evacuate through a window. Their trauma is suffocating, and you can’t help but think about their future in a system that diminishes the sanctity of their lives.

Basel and his family are joined in the fight to save their homes by Yuval Abraham, an Israeli Jew who helped make the film. His presence serves as a reminder that there is strength in solidarity. Fairly or unfairly, Yuval must show that some Israelis seek to abandon the system of Jewish supremacy into which they were born. Appearance Gideon Levi– ancient Haaretz a reporter who has served as the voice of lamentable morality in Israel for decades achieves the same goal.

But even solidarity is spoiled by the occupation. At one point, sharp with its resonance, a Palestinian villager jokes with Yuval that he might be a spy. Yuval, who speaks Arabic very well, laughs. But in the occupation, where military spies of Palestinian communications to exploit any vulnerability—poverty or marginalized sexual identity, need for education or medical supplies—it’s hard not to look askance at every Israeli and wonder what they’re here for. Where did he learn to speak Arabic so well? Because if Palestinians learn Hebrew as workers in Israel or in Israeli prisons, Israelis learn Arabic in Shabak, the domestic spy agency.

There are other asymmetries inscribed in the frame. Basel asks Yuval several times if he’s going home—we don’t know exactly where—a question that carries with it an accusation, an opportunity to take the day off. Apartheid means that Yuval can leave: he has a passport and a yellow license plate. He is a free person, which is a sharp contrast to the tied people on the screen.

It’s easy for high-income viewers who spend 90 minutes watching the lives of people on the fringes of the West Bank imagine what’s not being shown on screen. That Yuval would drive home on well-paved roads, through neighborhoods with neatly placed street lamps that muffled the darkness. That when he or someone like him needs medical or dental care, he will be able to maintain his health in a sanclinic or hospital and find a way to save a diseased tooth or at least replace it.

These facts—insidious that itch in the viewer’s subconscious—contrast the fate of the Palestinian who appears in the film: Haroun, who is shot by an Israeli soldier, becomes paralyzed below the shoulders and eventually dies of his own death. wounds in the cave. (The destruction of his home preceded his murder.) The film shows his steady deterioration and his mother’s plea to die in order to find peace—his own and, one suspects, hers as well. Thus, we are reminded of the huge gap in wealth and de-development Palestine: GDP per capita in Israel is 53,000 USD; on the West Bank of the Jordan River and in Gaza it stands on 3000 USDor about 6 percent of the Israeli figure.

There is no other land it is a documentary in the literal sense of the word: Basel and other activists document their disempowerment. As I watched this young Palestinian angrily confront the Israeli soldiers, I felt that for him the camera was a weapon and a shield. But his inadequacy is exposed and glaring. Basel films Haroun being shot dead by an Israeli soldier. He films a settler shooting another man in the stomach. An illustration of the hopelessness of the reality they face comes by chance when Harun’s mother laments her inability to build a room for her son to die. Apparently, she has no intention of bringing his killer to justice. We learn that justice is blind and powerless in Palestine.

The film is almost entirely shot before the beginning of the genocide in Gaza, and it contains moments of tender naivety. In one scene, Basel questions the rallying support of his community in the US Congress, a statement that evokes bitterness more than anything else. An added irony is that the film has so far struggled to find a distributor in the United States, leaving open the question of when US audiences will actually be able to see it. But the reality of Palestinian dehumanization — the complete subjugation of the people — in this case would be illustrated not in Washington, but in Berlin.

There is no other land won awards at the Berlin Film Festival in February. German State Minister of Culture Claudia Roth.clapped when the directors accepted their awards. She was later attacked for this and forced to explain her intention: her applause “was aimed at the Jewish-Israeli journalist and filmmaker Yuval Avraham,” not Basel Adra, a Palestinian standing next to him.

Thus, without apparent irony, the German politician illustrates the reality of apartheid: it separates people from people, as well as hearts from minds.

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Ahmed Moore

Ahmed Moore is a writer and advisory board member of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights.

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