In 2009, Tony Blair visited Masafer Yatta, a collection of hamlets in the Palestinian West Bank. He had come to see a school that had gained attention for having been rebuilt in defiance of Israeli attempts to tear down the village. After he returned home, Israel cancelled the demolition order for the school. “This,” Basel Adra says, “is a story about power.”
Adra is one of the directors of No Other Land, a documentary about the experience of living through, and attempting to defy, Israel’s attempts to erase Masafer Yatta to create an IDF “firing zone”. Last week, it won an Oscar. In the 1980s, Israeli authorities designated part of the area as “Firing Zone 918”, a closed military area. In 1999, the government issued eviction orders against Palestinians in the area for “illegally living in a firing zone”. Two decades of court battles ended in 2022 when Israel’s supreme court ruled the villagers could be expelled.
The documentary is a collaboration between Adra and three other co-directors: Israeli journalist and activist Yuval Abraham, whose growing, tense friendship with Adra forms a key thread in the film; Hamdan Ballal, a Palestinian farmer and photographer; and Rachel Szor, an Israeli cinematographer.
Shot mainly between 2019 and 2023, it is a film about power. The power of Israel to assail Palestinian lives; the lack of power of Palestinians trying to resist. Even Blair’s tepid intervention was temporary. In 2022, the IDF forced children and teachers out of the school, moments before bulldozers flattened it.
Though this part of the story is not told in the film, documents unearthed in the state archives reveal that the IDF “firing zone” was deliberately created as a pretext for ethnically cleansing the area to create a “buffer zone” between Jews and Palestinians. To force the villagers to accept defeat, soldiers confiscate vehicles, pour concrete into wells, cut water pipes, support armed settlers attacking residents. When one young Palestinian, Harun Abu Aram, protests about soldiers seizing a generator, he is shot at point-blank range. Paralysed from the neck down, denied proper treatment and, like many residents whose homes have been bulldozed, forced to live in a cave, Abu Aram died shortly before the filming was completed. The soldier who shot him knew he was being filmed. With power comes impunity.
The Oscar win has provoked a furious, and often poisonous, debate. Supporters of Israel have damned the documentary as “antisemitic”. Israel’s culture minister Miki Zohar condemned its “defamation of Israel”. Others have dismissed it as “a carefully crafted piece of demagoguery” and congratulated “Hamas for its Oscar win”.
To describe No Other Land as “antisemitic” is to degrade the very meaning of the term, turning it, in the words of Kenneth Stern, one of the drafters of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, in response to an earlier debate, into “a blunt instrument to label anyone an antisemite”, wielded by those who “seek out binary good/bad, black and white thinking”. It’s a means of silencing pro-Palestinian voices and of dismissing attempts to expose Israeli treatment of Palestinian people.
When No Other Land triumphed at the Berlin film festival last year, there was much condemnation of its supposed antisemitism. The German culture minister, Claudia Roth, was criticised for applauding its success; in response, her office claimed she had applauded only “the Jewish-Israeli journalist and film-maker Yuval Abraham”, not Adra. So normalised has anti-Palestinian racism become in certain circles that the sheer bigotry of this argument seemed to pass Roth by.
On the other side of the debate, some pro-Palestinian voices have dismissed No Other Land as Israeli propaganda and Abraham as a “liberal Zionist” who “hops on the back of Palestinian pain and rides that wave as he makes a name for himself, and money”, engaging “in egregious publicity stunts to… soothe their own rotten conscience”. The BDS movement – which campaigns for the boycott of Israeli goods and culture – has called for the film to be shunned, seemingly because Abraham is not pure enough in his condemnation of Israel. Such claims are not just profoundly unserious but undermine possibilities of building solidarity across the Israel/Palestine divide. Certainly, there are inevitably deep tensions when Palestinians and Israelis seek to collaborate, tensions created by the gross inequalities and imbalance of power that shape relations across the divide. Abraham possesses rights and freedoms denied to Adra, who is continually surveilled, harassed and restricted in his movements.
Abraham spoke of these tensions and inequalities in his speeches at the Oscars and in Berlin. They are explored in No Other Land, too. In one scene, Abraham bemoans the lack of views for one of his articles about the demolitions. “You want everything to happen quickly,” Adra responds, “as if you came to solve everything in 10 days and then go back home. This has been going on for decades. Get used to failing.”
Yet, for all the tension, Palestinians at the sharp end of Israeli rule have no doubts about the importance of figures such as Abraham. The writer Samah Salaime visited Masafer Yatta to gauge reactions to the call for a boycott. To a person, all were supportive, indeed proud, of Abraham. “Yuval,” one local activist told her, “is far more Palestinian than most of these online commentators attacking him… He is Jewish and Israeli, but he understands exactly what’s happening here just as I do, and he chose to stand with us.”
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The debasement of the debate over No Other Land comes partly from confusing a desire for simple narratives of “black and white, good and evil”, as Salaime puts it, with taking a principled stance.
For many Israelis and their supporters, the horrors of Hamas’s 7 October attack, and the continued incarceration of hostages, justify the obliteration of Gaza and the denial of rights to Palestinians on the West Bank, a denial that long preceded the Hamas assault. For many supporters of Palestinian rights, the butchery of Hamas has come to be viewed as “resistance”, a claim that only demeans the Palestinian struggle for freedom.
In a shared land that can survive only if the rights and dignities of both Jews and Palestinians are recognised, the significance of No Other Land is not just that it exposes the realities of Palestinian lives but also that it provides a small glimpse of how solidarity can be forged.
Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist
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