Masafer Yatta’s Struggle

In 1981, Israel designated nearly 7,500 acres of Masafer Yatta, a constellation of Israeli-occupied Palestinian villages in the South Hebron Hills of the West Bank, as a firing zone for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), a common legal tactic to expel Palestinians. The minister of agriculture at the time, Ariel Sharon, issued this particular order.

After Israel displaced hundreds of families in Masafer Yatta in the late ’90s, a group of Palestinian residents appealed to Israel’s High Court to stop the expulsion. The High Court issued a temporary injunction that allowed families to return but strictly curtailed what they could do. In this span of time, building demolitions, confiscations, intimidation, and settler violence did not stop but did slow down, becoming sporadic, gradual, and piecemeal.

Ultimately, more than two decades later, the High Court upheld the military’s designation in 2022, issuing an eviction order for all Palestinians living in the zone. Since October 2023, settler violence has increased all across the occupied Palestinian territories, including in Masafer Yatta. As settler violence has increased there, more villagers have moved out.

No Other Land documents the decades-long struggle to save Masafer Yatta. It was filmed and directed by a collective of two Israelis, Abraham and Rachel Szor, and two Palestinians, Adra and Hamdan Ballal, over the course of four years, from 2019 to October of 2023.

“Language Is Helpless”

The Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha recently gave an interview in which he described the situation in north Gaza as “catastrophic.” This prompted him to speak about the inadequacy of language to do justice to what is happening: “How many times did I use the same word? . . . Sometimes I want to stop writing because I’m repeating the same word even though the situation is worse. So, I mean, language is helpless.”

It is because I had these comments in mind that I was so struck by the opening of No Other Land. We hear a young child babbling something that sounded like “Da.” As we observe the child toddling around, repeating “Da,” a voiceover explains, “He says so much with that one word.” This arguably is the power of film — to say more than words ever could on their own. Abraham has put it differently: “When you look at a person’s face watching their own house being demolished, you understand a lot.”

The filming of the documentary didn’t begin as a film. It began, for Adra, who was born in Masafer Yatta, as a method of survival and political resistance. He says in No Other Land, “I started filming when we started to end.” For Adra, filming has not only been a way to record the injustices committed against his community but also to preemptively defend himself against any false allegations that could be made against him (as is common when Palestinian activists are arrested). For Abraham, who is an Israeli journalist, the filming began as a method of journalism, for documenting and communicating the effects of Israeli policy to the larger world (even most Israeli citizens know very little about what happens a few miles away from where they live).

The film became a film when the directors decided that a wider lens and bigger platform were needed in order to tell the story of Masafer Yatta. Only then could the world no longer claim plausible deniability about not knowing what was happening there, or in the West Bank more broadly. A prerequisite to action is knowledge, and widespread Western ignorance about Israel-Palestine in the West was made painfully clear after October 7, 2023.

No Other Land is a documentary, but it doesn’t attempt to hide its activist goals. This is, of course, true of many documentaries. There are dozens of highly acclaimed documentaries about climate change. The Academy Award winner for Best Documentary in 2023, 20 Days in Mariupol, was about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. None of these documentaries, with the exception of No Other Land, would conceivably be accused of being “one-sided” or “biased” by liberal audiences.

Multiple Perspectives

The collective behind No Other Land had access to hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of footage filmed across four years — more if you include archival footage from the community and from newsreels — so the final arrangement of images in the film reflects a set of careful, intentional decisions. For instance, there are many scenes of Abraham leaving Masafer Yatta in his car to drive home to Be’er Sheva. On the other hand, we never see Adra leaving. That’s because he can’t.

Like all Palestinians living in the West Bank, he finds his movement severely restricted by the Israeli authorities. Because of his involvement in political activism, he has been blacklisted from receiving a work permit in Israel, further regulating his movement and life opportunities. Abraham, however, as an Israeli citizen, with his yellow license plate and blue ID card, can move freely within Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. 

No Other Land inhabits multiple perspectives. It is, after all, filmed by many different people, with different angles, different cameras, and different filming styles (also with different motivations for filming). There are first-, second-, and third-person points of view. The effect is kaleidoscopic without becoming dizzying. The film achieves this through its firm grounding in narrative: the personal narrative of Adra’s life, his friendship with Abraham, and the story of the Masafer Yatta community itself.

The documentary features many conversations between Abraham and Adra, both personal and political. In a Q&A with Adra and Abraham in November, Abraham observed, with a mixture of curiosity and disappointment, that some interviewers have fixated on this friendship as the focal point of the film, seemingly as a way to avoid talking about its politics. However, for the filmmakers, centering the friendship was a political choice, chosen because of what it reveals about the structural inequalities between them. (The film, admirably, shows much more than it tells.)

But their friendship is a heartening testament to how Israelis and Palestinians can come together despite enormous social, linguistic, political, and interpersonal obstacles. It’s also a testament to how threatening such relationships are perceived to be — IDF soldiers and Jewish settlers are clearly unsettled by Abraham’s presence, jeering and harassing him with insults.

Cycle of Repetitions

Politics is as much a contestation over the past as it is the future. In much the same way that Israeli officials have alleged that Palestinians didn’t exist before the creation of Israel, many of them have alleged that Masafer Yatta did not exist before the creation of Firing Zone 918, in spite of extensive archeological evidence to the contrary.

Abraham remarked that it was difficult to “create movement out of a political situation that is stuck in a cycle of repetitions.” Whether or not this was conscious, the film’s loose organization around seasons seems like an attempt to do just this. Seasons recur but are never exactly the same. Time proceeds but seems to repeat, almost.

The first snowfall of winter, just like the utterance “snow,” invokes every other snowfall, every other utterance that preceded it — and is also an irreducibly unique event in time and place. How do we break out of these cycles, how do we unstick ourselves in time, how do we free ourselves from the political terms of the present?

One of the most affecting scenes comes when Israeli soldiers demolish one of Masafer Yatta’s schools — with school children still in it, forced to escape out of collapsing windows. The community, including Adra’s parents, built that school when he was a young boy. In order to evade intervention by the Israeli military, women worked on its construction during the day, while men toiled under the cloak of night.

The finished school was internationally lauded as such a feat of inspiration that Britain’s former prime minister, Tony Blair, paid it a visit in 2009. No Other Land shows archival footage of this moment, as a suited Blair walks down streets in Masafer Yatta. Apparently this seven-minute stroll led to the revocation, or at least temporary pause, of eviction orders for every building that Blair walked by. Adra tells us, in voiceover, “This is a story about power.”

After the school is destroyed, the community makes plans to rebuild it. We see Abraham helping Adra and other members of the Masafer Yatta community make concrete blocks after nightfall. The Israeli military eventually discovers this work and confiscates all of their building materials and tools.

Normal Life

In many ways, the film is simply about normal life in Masafer Yatta. It feels quotidian, lived in. It is not overly dramatized or didactic. There are birthdays and family dinners; children go to school. Residents look out for each other and also keep close track of the movement of bulldozers and military vehicles throughout the villages; houses get randomly demolished. After a protest, people might stay up all night for fear of being arrested.

There are quiet moments of tenderness and contemplation throughout the film, as well as eruptions of joy and anger. We observe the bonds of family, friendship, and solidarity throughout the Masafer Yatta community, where they welcome activists from outside the area, as well as potential fractures: “It could be your brother or friend who destroyed my home,” one of the Palestinian codirectors, Ballal, says to Abraham.

We see footage from when Adra was a child, possibly at his first protest — his father is also an activist and was arrested the day before the film premiered at the New York Film Festival this year. We witness scenes of everyday life under occupation, interactions among settlers, soldiers, residents, and activists in moments of tension and in the quiet lulls between such moments.

We also witness an IDF soldier shoot a Palestinian resident, Harun Abu Aram, for trying to protect a generator from being confiscated. He was paralyzed and ultimately succumbed to his injuries many months after the incident. In the meantime, we see the life slowly drain out of him, as his family members lift his limp body from one room to another.

At one point, a film crew of foreign journalists visits Masafer Yatta to tell Aram’s story. They take photographs, glean quotes, share their condolences, and leave. We hear his mother cry out in desperation about being powerless to help her son. We learn that Aram and his family are no better off than they were before the journalists came.

A Live-Streamed Genocide

In a Q&A, Adra told the audience that he has stopped filming since October of last year because it is “too scary.” This is unnerving to hear from someone who in the film appears so fearless. Many families have left Masafer Yatta under the threat of settler violence over the last thirteen months.

When asked in an interview how and why the collective decided to finish the film, Abraham responded, “We don’t want people to see this film in festivals, drink a cup of wine and talk, and then the communities are [already] gone.” No Other Land is predicated on the belief that film not only has the power to reveal social realities but also to change those realities — that exposing ongoing injustices can create political pressure to end them.

But since October 2023, Western audiences have watched a live-streamed genocide unfold on their phones, and their governments have done nothing to stop it. In fact, the United States has continued to unconditionally supply Israel with an endless flow of weapons.

What does it say about our society that multiple documentaries about an ongoing genocide have been filmed and released while the genocide continues unabetted? What does it say about the power of film? Is art only about bearing witness to history and never about changing it?

The fact that No Other Land hasn’t found a distributor in the United States might be the last hope that the medium of film does still hold some power. If it doesn’t, then what are they afraid of?