A lot of press attention has gone to the superb documentary No Other Land about the struggle of local Palestinian activists of Masafer Yatta in the occupied West Bank against the Israeli state working to expropriate their lands. Much of that attention in the western media has focused on the photogenic presence of director Basel Adra, the activist from Masafer Yatta, and co-director Yuval Abraham, the Israeli activist and co-director. But they are, in a sense, incidental to the film. The moral core of the film is the struggle to organize local and international opposition to the destruction of Masafer Yatta, a collection of some 19 (?) isolated villages in the South Hebron Hills. No Other Land feels like a feature film with two attractive antagonists. If anything, the focus on Adra and  Abraham in the western/U.S. media misrepresents this remarkable film. The actual two protagonists of No Other Land are Masafer Yatta itself and the Israeli state.

The legal struggle surrounding Masafer Yatta in the Israeli court system began in the 1980s. The basic information, from which I am freely cribbing is from here,. In the 1980s, the State of Israel designated a part of Masafer Yatta as closed military zone, putting residents at risk of forced eviction. In 1999, the Israeli High Court of Justice issued an interim injunction allowing most of the people to return, pending a final court decision. On 4 May 2022, the Israeli High Court ruled that there were no legal barriers to the planned expulsion of Palestinian residents from Masafer Yatta putting the community at imminent risk losing their homes. Since then, Israeli authorities have increasingly intensified a coercive environment for Palestinians in Masafer Yatta. In the wake of October 7 the villagers and villages of Masafer Yatta have witnessed intensified state and settler violence and evictions.

Produced in 2024, No Other Land was shot over the course of 5 years. The film includes ongoing and crushing scenes of violence, the destruction of homes and of a school and a playground, the shooting of a young man, Harun Abu Aram, who was paralyzed in the attack and died in agony two years later, and, finally, the  expulsion of residents leaving their homes in the dark middle of the night. Without a scintilla of hope, the film is self-aware about the power of video to communicate the inhuman legal apparatus of the state and its agents, the cold brutality of IDF soldiers, the methodical work of land excavators, andthe eruption of the brazen and terrifying violence of religious settlers who descend on Masafer Yatta like wild demons.

Some critics from the anti-Zionist left have faulted No Other Land for allegedly promoting co-existence, not co-resistance, by which, in this day and age, they might conceivably mean armed resistance and Hamas terrorism. There is a kernel of truth to this claim. The film is, indeed, anti-occupation, not especially anti-Israel. No Other Land was produced prior to October 7. In the film, Israelis are agents of the state, soldiers and settlers, and faceless people on the other side of the Green Line, represented by Abraham, who are free to come and go and live their lives as they please. For all the points of sharp bitterness, the single-minded focus of the film is local, not Israel or “settler colonialism.” The film’s analytic is absorbed by the land itself, homes and schools, an isolated rural community with no political power beyond the limits of their own human agency. No Other Land is Masafer Yatta itself and the desperate struggle to hold out against the violence of Israeli state power and settler terrorism.

No Other Land touches deeply upon the politics of recognition and self-recognition.  In this article at +972, Adra details the surge of abuse by soldiers and settler terror after October 7 and the struggle for recognition as the movie works its way through the 2024 festival circuit leading up this year’s nomination for an Oscar.  Also here at +972, Hamdan Ballal Al-Huraini, an activist and co-producer of the film, addresses the international reception of No Other Land, but more important, the screening of the film at At-Tuwan in the Masafer Yatta district in March 2024, and the potential power of the camera. “In fact, several kids told us that it was the first time they had seen their own lives laid out like a story. It gives the feeling that your story is important, that it deserves to be seen, and that people are with you…I grew up in this situation, but seeing it on the big screen broke my heart, and broke Masafer Yatta’s heart,” one friend said to me after the screening. “How can we continue to live like this?”

No Other Land is an unflinching and frankly bitter work documenting dispossession and state violence, demanding demanding recognition. About an unrolling nakba, the camera elicits empathy, not enmity.

See it in a theater with people if you can, but it’s also available for rent at Prime Video