‘No Other Land’ is true for Israelis and Palestinians alike
Palestinian demonstrators blocking the road in front of Israeli soldiers at Masafer Yatta in the West Bank, June 2022.
The lead editorial in Haaretz on 3 March 2025:
The film “No Other Land” won the Oscar for best documentary on Sunday. When the Israel-Palestinian conflict is at one of its lowest points ever, when hope has almost been lost of any possibility of a joint future in which both peoples share the land, the film’s victory offers a ray of hope. Maybe all is not lost.
The source of this hope isn’t the film’s content, but the identity of its creators. It’s a Norwegian-Palestinian production created by four Israeli and Palestinian writers and directors – Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor and Hamdan Ballal. Adra and Abraham are also the movie’s stars. Both of them are journalists who write for the online publication Local Call (its English version is +972 Magazine). This is also the platform on which Israelis can watch the film. That’s because after it was shown at the Berlin International Film Festival a year ago and Abraham’s speech there caused a scandal in Israel, almost no Israeli theaters have dared to show it. On Monday, Culture Minister Miki Zohar even urged directors of cultural institutions not to screen it.
Israel doesn’t want people to watch the film because it depicts the lives of residents of Masafer Yatta, a collection of villages in the West Bank’s South Hebron Hills. They have been fighting against their expulsion since the army declared the area a live-fire exercise zone, and the Supreme Court upheld this decision. The film shows how residents cope with the occupation’s multitentacled octopus of oppression, the abuse they suffer from the Israeli authorities, their clashes with the army and their vulnerability to settler violence. Or in short, everything official Israel wants to hide in its backyard, and everything the Israeli public prefers to turn a blind eye to lest it crack the wall of self-righteousness that encompasses our national identity.
The film also provides a glimpse into what has happened in Masafer Yatta since the war broke out – specifically, residents’ accelerated expulsion from the villages under cover of the war, with violent settlers serving effectively as contractors to carry it out.
The creators’ speeches at the Oscar ceremony encapsulated the only alternative for a sane life for two peoples that have no other land. “When I look at Basel, I see my brother. But we are unequal. We live in a regime where I am free under civilian law and Basel is under military laws that destroy lives, that he cannot control,” Abraham said honestly. And he promptly added, “There is a different path, a political solution without ethnic supremacy, with national rights for both of our people.”
“Can’t you see that our nation will be completely secure the moment Basel’s nation will be completely free?,” Abraham wondered out loud. “Can’t you see that we are intertwined? That my people can be truly safe only if Basel’s people are truly free and safe?”
Instead of continuing to repress reality, to curse those who dare to show it and incite against them, as Zohar did after the film’s victory, Israelis would do better to watch this important film and understand that establishing a Palestinian state would give members of both peoples equal rights.
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