lists four directors: Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal are Palestinians who live in the West Bank area of Masafer Yatta. Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor are Israelis. Adra began filming scenes of the destruction of Palestinian homes and villages when he was 15, and the four of them have built a film largely from those beginnings.
It is, of course, not a happy documentary. It’s filled with moments in which Israeli military vehicles and bulldozers line up near one of the villages, and then slowly roll down a hill to begin knocking down homes. In the chaos, soldiers are abrupt and impersonal; they knock people down and in one instance caught on camera, shoot a young man and leave him paralyzed. Villagers scream insults at the soldiers. The soldiers insist the land must be used for military training exercises, but Israeli documents reveal that’s a ploy to get the Palestinians off that land. The sight of people yelling that destroying their village harms them, brings home a terrible absurdity – these soldiers could care less. They know they’re causing harm to other human beings; humane arguments are useless.
The footage is intimate and frightening, but it’s nothing new. These scenes have been shown many times. But what is new are other intimacies.
Each time the army demolishes the village, the villagers build it up again, often at night. And many of the people move into nearby caves, where they make new homes, with electricity, rugs and beds on the cave floor, makeshift kitchens. In the midst of the displacement and uprooting of their lives, villagers still show care and tenderness. A mother caresses her little daughter’s hair; people share meals together; they laugh and talk. The kids want to go to school, and with stunning resilience they play clapping games together. People decorate their cave homes with balloons and colorful pictures. They sing and dance.
And there are fascinating, frank yet respectful conversations especially between filmmaker/journalist Yuval Abraham and men in the village. One man asks him, “How can you come here? It could be your brother or friend who destroyed my home.” But before Yuval responds, the man is called away, and he says to Yuval, “Come, we’ll keep talking.” The ability to have coherent, almost loving interactions is stunning, and contradicts most of what we hear about unremitting conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Basel Adra has studied law, but he tells Yuval softly that he’s lost faith in it.
These two young men look like cousins. Both are fairly dark-skinned, with black hair and short beards, and both wear T-shirts. If the movie didn’t identify who is who, my American eyes could not discern which of them is Palestinian and which Israeli. So, No Other Land is full of ironies and absurdities, which give the picture richness and depth, ambiguity, and exceptional humanity.
Several times, at the end of a day, Yuval leaves for his home. These are quiet moments, but telling. Yuval is free to go back and forth between his home and the West Bank. He also has a home to go to, and he has no fear that anyone is going to show up and destroy it. It’s one more moment in the film that brings home the dreadful disparities. Yuval says in a television interview that Israelis can’t have security until the Palestinians have freedom.
No Other Land may displease some, but people should certainly see it before they reject it. It’s an important document.
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