“Get used to failing. You’re a loser.” Basel to Yuval in 2019.
Basel Adra speaks at least three languages. He has a law degree. He will never practice law. He will work in construction in Hebron if he is lucky. If he survives displacement. If he survives. He is a green man - a Palestinian - not allowed to leave the West Bank. If he tried, where would he go? Those are questions No Other Land asks before October 2023. After October 2023 Masafer Yatta is a forgotten story as Israel crushes Palestinian people and the extended and deliberate death of one area cannot compete with the urgency of the other.
Yet, they are the same story. They are a story which began on one clock but moved in different rhythms. The goal is erasure.
Yuval Abraham is asked by an IDF soldier why he cares. His answer is simple. “Because you’re doing this in my name.” When asked by one of the villagers what does he think of what his people are doing to theirs he says, “It’s a crime.”
The difference between Yuval Abraham (and Rachel Szor) is they can leave. Not that they choose to - they are committed activists - but they CAN leave. Any Palestinian who leaves Masafer Yatta forfeits their land. A woman cries out during one of the demolitions, “We have no other land.” They are not citizens. They do not make laws.
Basel waited every day for the moment he would be arrested. Instead, they arrested his father, Nasser. Emotional torture is one of the instruments of the regime.
A man, Harun, is shot trying to stop his construction tools from being confiscated. He survives (he has died now) but as a quadriplegic. He lives in a cave with his mother whose car has been confiscated (it becomes illegal for the villagers to drive). There is no access to the hospital or medication, and she says the best outcome she can hope for now is if God takes him.
The school Nasser and his wife built through their ingenuity and will - a school Tony Blair visited - is razed. Israel correctly judges that no one in the wider world will pay but a few seconds of attention.
Watching the No Other Land in December 2024 and knowing all that the future holds for Palestine from the 2019 beginning would be an act of fatalism if not for a conversation Yuval and Basel have near the conclusion of the documentary. They’re musing on the future - Basel wonders if he will get married and thinks he probably won’t because the world is too unstable and every day it feels for him like it’s ending. Yuval says, “Maybe there is the one thing we make or post that makes people feel something”
“They need to remember they were weak once. They suffered.” Basel muses.
Resilience. Peace. Disobedience. Non-compliance. Humanity. Shared humanity. Neither Basel nor Yuval have answers, but they have hope – and it is that hope which makes No Other Land a galvanising and imperative piece of documentary filmmaking.
Directors: Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Rachel Szor
Featuring: Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal
Writers: Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Rachel Szor
Producers: Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Fabien Greenberg, Rachel Szor, Bård Kjøge Rønning
Music: Julius Pollux Rothlaender
Cinematography: Rachel Szor
Editors: Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Rachel Szor
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