“No Other Land” is one of the most important films of the 21st century; the destruction it follows is historied and ongoing. A documentary effort co-directed by Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, “No Other Land” follows a Palestinian community in the West Bank territory of Masafer Yatta. Shown through a series of vignettes, Masafer Yatta resists forced relocation and the destruction of their village by the Israeli Defense Forces, which intend to turn the territory into a tank-warfare training ground. Abraham, an Israeli journalist and resident of Tel Aviv, travels between Israel and Masafer Yatta, often staying with Adra and his family and working alongside Adra to spread news of the destruction of Masafer Yatta within Israeli and international media.
As “No Other Land” begins, we learn that the residents of Masafer Yatta have spent decades resisting these legally ordered demolitions and forced relocations, an effort which is eventually defeated in the Israeli court system. The film follows all manner of non-violent protest undertaken by the villagers: live-streamed protests, extensive documentation, calls to world leaders, living in caves in order to stay on the land of their villages and rebuilding in the night — none of which has prevented their displacement. “No Other Land” reveals that this ongoing forcible transfer is, in fact, motivated by the Israeli government’s concern over the population growth of Masafer Yatta, and the excuse of needing the land as a tank training ground is perfunctory. The film lingers on Abraham’s presence in Masafer Yatta; there is a tension in his friendship with Adra and other inhabitants of the village; there is a tension between the bravery of his work, his earnest politics and his ability to come and go as he chooses, to go home and to sleep on a bed under a roof and not on a mattress in a cave, and of the possibility of friends and family participating in the destruction of the village he makes profit reporting on. At one point, he praises Adra’s resilience; Adra is silent, perhaps thinking that he has no choice.
Throughout “No Other Land,” the audience is kept relatively guarded from footage of explicit, bodily violence, though the film is populated with its consequences. This avoidance, almost the elephant in the room, is very conscious, considerate of mainstream audiences and international appeal, and Adra, Ballal, Abraham and Szor reserve such violence for the conclusion of the film. A video of Zakaria al-Adra, Basel Adra’s cousin, being shot in the stomach point-blank by an Israeli settler — as a kind of indiscriminate revenge attack following Oct. 7th — is one of the final, haunting shots of “No Other Land.” Settlers, like Zakaria al-Adra’s attacker, enter villages and menace the populations and Israel’s response is little more than permissive ignorance — despite the clear footage of the shooting in the documentary, his attacker has yet to be charged.
Another instance of the violence occurs to one of the documentary’s subjects, Harun Abu Aram. The unarmed Aram, in an attempt to prevent an Israeli soldier from taking his portable electric generator, was shot in the neck — again, point-blank. It paralyzes him from the neck down. Harun was 24 and engaged to be married, but he spends the next two years and 43 days of his life living inside of a cave, popping in and out of the film’s vignettes alongside the other displaced members of his family, before succumbing to his injuries, aggravated by bedsores and infections he developed while in the cave. Insidious rewording cloaks the brutal indignity of Harun’s death: He was living in an illegally erected building — illegal because Palestinians in Zone C of the West Bank rarely acquire building permits from Israel; erected because his family home had, too, been declared illegal and demolished. It’s through these stories that we find the thesis of the film: Little by little, a thousand legal details and ignored cases allow for the obfuscation of a population transfer and replacement which takes place one home at a time, one Palestinian at a time. And how cruelly are these single lives, each of them containing an entire infinite, transcendent human dignity, extinguished.
A constant throughout the film is the limited international response to Palestinian journalism. Decades of meticulous documentation in the form of posts, videos and articles prompt limited response. Even the 2009 visit to Masafer Yatta from English politician Tony Blair only resulted in Israel calling off demolitions in the specific area he spent a handful of minutes in. To loosely paraphrase Adra: People may see the footage and feel something, but then what? This idea works as a meta-commentary on the documentary itself, as international audiences are watching “No Other Land,” and many people are, for the first time, seeing what is going on through a Palestinian lens. What happens now? Sitting in the theater in silence as the lights come up, watching dazed herds of people wander out into their lives, there exists a cruel instinct: to think of the movie as “over” and that real life — far from smoke, rubble, gunfire, expulsion and humiliation — has “resumed.” The quaint goings-on of university lives, now encampment free, are adjacent to Israel’s refusal to honor ceasefire terms, its bombings of declared “safe zones” and Netanyahu’s open musing over “(thinning) the Gazan population to a minimum.”
Indeed, the events of the film continue as this article is being written, edited and read. Shortly after co-director Hamdan Ballal returned home from the Oscars, he and two of his elderly neighbors were attacked by a mob of Israeli settlers outside of his home. Following the attack, he says the Israeli army arrived, handcuffed him, blindfolded him and took him to a detention facility where he was beaten and mocked. When the Academy first posted about the abuse of the man they had just awarded an Oscar, they did not use Hamdan Ballal’s name — nor did they mention “No Other Land.”
Student readers have at this point likely thought of our own university’s relationship to Israel. The University of Michigan invests in companies such as Boeing, Group 4 Securicor, Hewlett-Packard and United Technologies, which Students Allied for Freedom and Equality claims “supply weapons and equipment used in Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territories and in violation of international human rights law.” They will be thinking of student encampments across the country, and certainly of our own University’s encampment, in protest of the Israeli response to the Hamas attack on Oct. 7th — a response which has caused the death of over 50,000 Gazans, preceding the events of the film. They may also be thinking of the campus-wide vote requesting the University to investigate its potential relationships to any apartheid regime, which was canceled and shelved permanently. More recently, a call by the University Faculty’s Senate Assembly “to divest from … (holdings in companies) Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza” was declined by the Regents, who cited the University’s desire for a diverse investment portfolio: “To do otherwise would be to increase our investment risk and decrease our investment returns,” University Regent Sarah Hubbard (R) said.
The severity of responses to student-led speech and protest, particularly concerning Palestine and thus making “No Other Land” that much more urgent as a point of reference, has increased with the advent of the President Donald Trump’s Administration. Citizen and non-citizen students have had their degrees revoked from institutions like Columbia University for their involvement with pro-Palestinian demonstrations, and many have had visas canceled. Yet, it’s unclear in many of these cases what the charges are, made foggier by wording such as “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences” and more suspicious through the observed waiving of due process, leading to the wrongful deportation of immigrants with protected status on at least one occasion.
While members of the current administration have been accused of bulldozing Chesterton’s fence, a different critical angle might suggest that, through vague wording and deceitful tactics, the administration is manufacturing the consent to magically spirit away student dissenters like Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk. This bulldozing is intentional and exactly the point, with green card and visa holders who, by dint of non-citizen status are “easier,” and perhaps initial, targets of this crackdown. In the case of Ozturk, who is a Fulbright scholar and a doctoral student in Child Study and Human Development, friends allege she is being punished for co-authoring an article mentioning the “Palestinian genocide” and calling for Tufts University to divest from Israel. If these allegations are correct, will any student who puts their name near “wrongthink” become subject to expulsion and accusations of “adverse foreign policy consequences?”
This review has left the screen, yet reviewing “No Other Land” with intellectual honesty demands this interrogation of our own lives. How hypocritical and useless could the discussion of this film be with no mention of our own campus’ and country’s tangible relationships to its subjects? And what is next for free speech on campus and for student activism, particularly toward Palestine? It seems as though students pose demands and requests to deaf ears, with no clear path toward their desired answer of divestment; encampment and protest success has been mixed. Students in many scenarios seem to have no reasonable avenue to dialogue: At Michigan, the permanent canning of AR 13-025 means students cannot democratically vote to request the University investigate its own relationship to “any apartheid regime.” Discussion, speech and protest seem to have less of an avenue than ever on the American campus; young people, many of whom, for the first time in their lives, are becoming politically involved (and thus, for the first time in their lives, experiencing political defeat) are perhaps more prone than any to a lapse into defeatism.
At the same time, the tide of public opinion is turning, likely due to voices like Adra’s and generational differences in associations with Israel — and universities being considered the vanguard of culture means that the currents of today’s campuses become the Overton Window of tomorrow. A short exchange between Adra and Abraham condenses what students concerned with recent crackdowns on “acceptable speech” on campus and for justice for Palestine must ultimately glean from “No Other Land.” The former says to his friend and co-director: “I feel you’re enthusiastic. You want to solve everything quickly and go home in ten days. You want it all so fast … you’ll fail. You need patience.”
Daily Arts Writer Max Resch can be reached at nataljo@umich.edu.
