No Other Land is hard to watch — it should probably include a trigger warning. The 92-minute documentary is based on years of footage from Masafer Yatta, a collection of Palestinian villages in the hills south of Hebron in the West Bank.1 The villagers are resisting the Israeli army, which enters periodically with bulldozers to demolish homes — they want the land for training grounds and Jewish settlements. An old woman provides the film’s title: She is being forced off her land, but she has “no other land.”
We see lots of scuffles with soldiers and settlers (it is hard to tell the difference). Two different scenes end with Palestinians being shot. These shootings lack the drama of a Hollywood movie — we the viewers, just like the people on the ground, are left in shock wondering if this could have really happened. Compared to the horrific images coming out of Gaza and Lebanon, this violence seems muted. Yet in this documentary, we get to know people from Masafer Yatta, who are trying to live their lives when soldiers burst in. We see not just an eruption of the violence, but also years of suffering as a paralyzed man slowly dies from his injuries.
Scandal
When this film premiered at the Berlinale film festival in February, the German bourgeoisie was outraged — but not at the depictions of ethnic cleansing. After the film won both jury and audience awards, the two-co directors, Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham, a Palestinian from Masafer Yatta and an Israeli from Jerusalem, gave speeches lasting just 36 and 21 seconds respectively. Abraham said:
In two days, we will go back to a land where we are not equal. I am living under a civilian law, and Basel is under military law. We live 30 minutes from one another, but I have voting rights, and Basel is not having [sic] voting rights. I am free to move where I want in this land. Basel is, like millions of Palestinians, locked in the occupied West Bank. This situation of apartheid between us, this inequality, it has to end.
These speeches were a moving plea for equality — yet German politicians only saw “Israel hatred” and “antisemitism.” These politicians are deeply complicit in the crimes portrayed in the film: the German government is second behind the U.S. in providing weapons for this colonial project.
