About 1,000 Palestinians live in Masafer Yatta, a collection of hamlets on the rocky hills of the southern West Bank, and they have every reason to feel hopeless. They have fought for two decades in the Israeli court system to prove that their homes and fields are their own, while the Israeli government insists that they are squatters in a military training zone. A ruling from the Israeli supreme court in early 2022 sided with the government, evacuation orders were issued, and the lives of these Palestinians have since become an elaborate cat-and-mouse game—the cats in this case bearing down with bulldozers and tanks, and the mice, who have literally moved into nearby caves, using camcorders to record their own destruction.
For an increasing number of people, especially young people, this story perfectly distills the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: powerlessness and dispossession on one side and an inhumane, brutal force on the other. The recent film No Other Land, which is a frontrunner for an Oscar this Sunday in the documentary category, is as intimate a glance at this particular dynamic as one can imagine. Watching repeated violence inflicted on people who have so little, who cling to their land, who see their school destroyed and cement poured into their water well, is devastating.
If the film only reinforced that sense of hopelessness, it would be simply a beautifully made version of a story that most viewers feel they already know. But it also does something prickly and unusual in a moment dominated by reductive thinking, presenting an authentic portrait of a friendship between an Israeli and a Palestinian—two men who are not stand-ins for their people but complicated individuals meeting each other on a human plane.
No Other Land focuses on Basel Adra, a son of Masafer Yatta whose life has been defined by the community’s struggle for survival (he says his first memory, at 5, was of his father being arrested). It follows Basel for four years, from 2019 to 2023, as he attempts to document and draw attention to the Israeli government’s slow dismantling of his home, building by building. He is joined early on in the film by Yuval Abraham, an Israeli activist and journalist who comes to report on Masafer Yatta and finds himself drawn to its people and their fight.
The two—skinny, scruffy, soft-spoken guys who look like they could be cousins—defy stereotypes. Yuval speaks fluent Arabic, meaning that he approaches Basel and his family on their terms, in their language. And Basel is no supplicant. In his first encounter with the journalist, he sternly warns him, “Yuval, please be sensitive with the people.” Though he has a quiet charisma, Basel is not solicitous of Yuval’s help. He can be standoffish, frequently engulfed by a cloud of smoke from his hookah pipe and scrolling aimlessly on his phone. And Yuval is not performatively contrite or defensive. He has come to observe and to help. He wants the occupation to end, but he doesn’t spout political statements of solidarity, spending more time listening and absorbing the emotions of the Palestinians around him. (“It’s your relatives who are doing this to us,” one man tells him; another asks Yuval how long his family has been on this land, but the answer, “1900,” doesn’t really end the argument.) The only time we see Yuval become angry is when an Israeli soldier gets in his face and demands to know what business he has being there. “I care because it’s all done in my name,” Yuval yells back with uncharacteristic assertiveness.
Over the course of the film, we see a closeness develop between Yuval and Basel, even if neither forgets the power dynamic—and the fact that Yuval can leave when he wants and Basel can’t. They follow the subdued choreography of young male friendship, feigning indifference but sneaking quick glances to try to understand what the other is thinking. Their body language and their emotions loosen over time, as they begin to speak their mind without fear of offense. “You want everything to happen quickly, as if you came to solve everything in 10 days and then go back home,” Basel says to Yuval in one scene as they drive through the lunar-like landscape of the Hebron Hills. The car is filled with tension, with Basel’s frustration and Yuval’s exasperation. “I don’t think it will all end in 10 days. What am I, stupid?” Yuval says. The moment does not resolve itself, except for Basel making clear that “patience” is something Yuval still needs to learn. “Get used to failing. You’re a loser,” Basel tells him.
The openness and honesty, the absence of sentimentality, the intimacy of their sitting silently side by side on a moonlit night in front of Basel’s house—all of it made me feel as if the unrelenting misery of Masafer Yatta was not the end of the story. The friendship is hard-won, over years of Yuval showing up and Basel welcoming him. And it is delicate. But it exists.
From the outside, the Istraeli-Palestinian conflict tends to be reduced to simple shorthand—genocide or apartheid or anti-Semitism or barbarism. The categories are easy to apply and seem to have gotten only easier since the October 7 attacks and the war in Gaza that has followed. No Other Land has been similarly categorized. It failed to find a distributor in the United States even after winning major awards internationally and being nominated for an Oscar (the producers eventually opted to self-distribute). After an acceptance speech he gave at the Berlin International Film Festival, Yuval received death threats, and his family’s home in Israel was surrounded by a mob looking for him.
But Basel and Yuval don’t resort to jargon or slogans. They confront each other and their situation based not on political commitments but on what they see and experience. The different license plates that exist in the West Bank—yellow for Israelis, green for Palestinians—are explained in order to make clear the inequality between the two friends, the roads that only Yuval can drive down. Yuval’s feelings for Basel and his family in Masafer Yatta come from a sense of sympathy for the grandmothers and children he has gotten to know, who sleep now on mattresses in caves, or for the man who is shot while trying to hold on to a generator that the army is dragging away. Yuval witnesses the brutality of the nearby settlers who commit violence with impunity (sometimes, it seems, with the protection of Israeli soldiers). And Basel, likewise, comes to care for Yuval because he recognizes a man who gets his hands dirty helping rebuild houses brick by brick under the cover of night, someone who makes the effort to speak Arabic and to face the community’s anger when he could easily run away. What both seem to tacitly acknowledge is a central truth of the conflict so seldom acknowledged: Neither is going anywhere.
Between the two of them, Basel is the more reticent, the one less willing to dream out loud. But near the end of the film, while smoking another nighttime cigarette, reclining against a wall beside his friend, he wonders when they might get married, as if these were just two men in their 20s anywhere. It’s too hard, Basel then says, to plan anything at the moment. But Yuval fantasizes: “It would be so nice with stability one day. Then you’ll come visit me, not always me visiting you. Right?” “Maybe,” Basel deadpans with a smirk. All the mutual trust and friction of their relationship is here. Basel begins to talk about the Israelis. “They shouldn’t forget how once they, too, were weak,” he says. And then, without seeming to realize it, he shifts to a hopeful first-person plural, one that includes his friend: “I hope we’ll change this bad reality.”
