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\u201cNo Other Land\u201d 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, \u201cNo Other Land\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
As \u201cNo Other Land\u201d 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 \u2014 none<\/a> of which has prevented their displacement. \u201cNo Other Land\u201d reveals that this ongoing forcible transfer is, in fact, motivated by the Israeli government\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s resilience; Adra is silent, perhaps thinking that he has no choice.\u00a0<\/p>\n Throughout \u201cNo Other Land,\u201d 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\u00a0for the conclusion of the film. A video of Zakaria al-Adra, Basel Adra\u2019s cousin, being shot<\/a> in the stomach point-blank by an Israeli settler \u2014 as a kind of indiscriminate revenge attack following Oct. 7th \u2014 is one of the final, haunting shots of \u201cNo Other Land.\u201d Settlers, like Zakaria al-Adra\u2019s attacker, enter villages and menace the populations and Israel\u2019s response is little more than permissive ignorance \u2014 despite the clear footage of the shooting in the documentary, his attacker has yet to be charged<\/a>.<\/p>\n Another instance of the violence occurs to one of the documentary\u2019s subjects, Harun Abu Aram<\/a>. <\/strong>The unarmed Aram, in an attempt to prevent an Israeli soldier from taking his portable electric generator, was shot in the neck \u2014 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\u2019s vignettes alongside the other displaced members of his family, before succumbing<\/a> to his injuries, aggravated by bedsores and infections he developed while in the cave. Insidious rewording cloaks the brutal indignity of Harun\u2019s death: He was living in an illegally erected building \u2014 illegal because Palestinians in Zone C of the West Bank rarely acquire building permits<\/a> from Israel; erected because his family home had, too, been declared illegal and demolished. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n