NO OTHER LAND won the Best Documentary Prize at the Berlinale and the Panorama Audience Award in the documentary category. The award ceremony turned into a scandal, because, among other things, the Israeli co-director Yuval Abraham spoke of “apartheid“ during the gala. Yuval did not mean the Palestinians living in Israel, but the conditions in the occupied territories. Since 2010, Israel’s government has forced the construction of new settlements in the West Bank with official military support for the settlers. NO OTHER LAND, directed by Arab activist Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, is about one of these military operations.

The Israeli government declared the villages in the Palestinian region Masafer Yatta as a military restricted zone. All of the petitions of the roughly thousand residents in the region were rejected. Allegedly, a tank training area is to be built, but right next to the Palestinian villages you can see the brand new Israeli settlements. Basel Adra’s father runs a gas station in one of the villages, Yuval Abraham wants to report on the expulsion of the residents. He doesn’t have a lot of hope that his article will find resonance, and Basel has little hope that the villager’s resistance will succeed.

The Israeli army moves into the villages with armored vehicles and unloaded machine guns, throwing each family's belongings onto the street and demolishing the houses with excavators. Usually, the Palestinian families build new houses quickly, but then the army starts to confiscate/steal the building materials as well - depending on your perspective. Residents’ cars are also confiscated/stolen. When a man, Harun Abu Amar, resists the theft/confiscation of a power generator, an Israeli soldier shoots him in the back. He is paralyzed from the neck down. His family has to move to a cave after the expulsion and forcible demolition of their house. There, Harun lies apathetically on the sandy ground, slowly dying.

When the village school is also destroyed by the Israeli army, the resistance starts to crumble, but it only breaks down when Basel Yadra’s cousin is shot down by an Israeli settler. The families begin to leave the area. A secret document, according to the end credits, proves that the declaration of the area as a “military restricted zone“ was just a pretext. The aim was to prevent the “expansion of Arab villages.“

Tom Dorow (INDIEKINO MAGAZIN)

Translation: Elinor Lewy