No Other Land has won the IDFA NPO Doc Audience Award 2024, the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) public prize for the film receiving the highest ranking from festival audiences. Directed by Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, this debut is an act of co-resistance which documents Israel’s ongoing aggression to evict centuries-old Palestinian villages in the West Bank, a reality about to be witnessed in Gaza.
Basel was born and raised by a family of activists in Masafer Yatta, an area in the West Bank which is home to about 2,800 residents. He started filming the Israeli army’s violent evictions even before he understood the power of the camera. Over time, social media became his two-dimensional channel to expose the bulldozing of Palestinian homes and essential infrastructure across the ten villages that make Masafer Yatta. His images chased the gaze of a global audience who was no longer able to neglect the brutality Palestinians in the West Bank are subjected to under Israel’s military regime in the occupied territories.
A Palestinian-Israeli act of coresistance
The mesmerising effect of evidence inspired an hour-drive from the other side of the Green Line, where home, security and peace take a different meaning. It was in the summer of 2019 when Yuval, an Israeli journalist opposed to the brutality enforced by the army in the West Bank, met Basel in Masafer Yatta. Working together with the cinematographer Rachel Szor, Yuval started reporting on the aggression through established outlets while simultaneously supporting local actions to stop the unjustified presence of the army in Palestinian land.
The film becomes a joint act of resistance blossoming along a friendship that is not blind to the opposite power systems the two activists live under. Basel’s car green plate means oppression and restriction of basic rights on a daily basis; Yuval’s yellow one freedom and shielded rights protection. Both journalists engage in five years of ground protesting, investigative reporting, and social media documentation to expose that all Israeli acts of aggression in the Occupied Palestinian Territories exclusively aim at stealing the land.
Intending to narrate the situation differently, No Other Land is not one but an amalgam of tied stories showing the reality of Masafer Yatta, the West Bank and, in all likelihood, Gaza. The film is a close look into everyday popular resilience in the face of demolition, displacement and lawfare, as well as a visual compression of decades-long systematic denial of a free and independent Palestinian state.
If you are not acquainted with the term, lawfare refers to the use of the law and legal systems to deter the use of legal rights. Or put differently, a way to legally violate individual and collective rights. Since the 1980s, and particularly in the context of Gaza’s genocide, Israel has used military law as a weapon to expel the Palestinian population from Masafer Yatta under the disguise of creating military firing areas that in reality pave the way for new illegal settlements. The film does not fall short in exposing the all-round strategy used by Israel to deprive native Palestinians from their land, including blatant settler violence against local residents and their treatment as foreigners in their own birthplace.
A forewarning for Gaza
The film is a brilliant eye-opening and tear-shedding piece that serves as a reminder that Palestinian land is being stolen as you watch it. Unsurprisingly, illegal settlement expansion is set to grow beyond the West Bank. And if there is one thing that will make Western leaders’ go uneasy, it is the future of Gaza as the next resettlement target.
The Israeli government has recently denied annexation plans for Gaza, and thus the future expansion of settlements in the strip. However, the whole-scale dismantling of the land, the cut-off of humanitarian and essential supplies, the displacement of 80% of its population and lack of return plans might point towards a different future.
“The Arabs of Gaza lost their right to be in Gaza on the 7th of October”, said veteran settler Daniella Weiss, head of the Nachala Settler Movement. In late October, Nachala held a conference in a closed-military zone near the Gaza border where Israeli settlers and far-right members of the Knesset and Netanyahu’s cabinet met to discuss plans for permanent resettlement in the strip.
“Encourage Gazans to leave Gaza”, intervened National Security Minister Itaman Ben-Gvir during the conference. No closed-door talks but an open event which showed that, despite its speculative stage, a wide portion of the Government would support a plan of expulsion, annexation and Israeli settlement in Gaza.
When asked by Haaretz, the same journal targeted by Netanyahu’s economic asphyxia in an attempt to limit freedom of press in regard to the war on Gaza, Weiss expressed her conviction about Gaza becoming a West Bank-style resettlement scenario, where settlers “turned the unrealistic into the realistic”.
Meanwhile the West is holding its breath. In the West Bank, annexation seems to be the next goal of the Israeli Government, a situation particularly feasible with Trump’s administration active across the world. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, the leader of the Religious Zionism group in the Knesset, is not close-lipped about his aim to wreck the Palestinian economy, crack the Palestinian Authority (PA) and eventually transfer to a civilian administration under his mandate the administration of the West Bank.
In Gaza, reaching a ceasefire in Lebanon is no sign of potential end of hostilities. Some see last week’s agreement as Hezbollah’s disassociation from Gaza, opening up a momentum to uphold a war that is to preserve Netanyahu’s governing coalition for the time being and settlement plans in Gaza. While those favouring such plans represent a minority in Israeli society, the growing far-right political support coupled with the ceaseless impunity Israel is receiving from the West signals that annexation is not far from becoming an executable strategy.
An Award to Western Silence
No Other Land has won thirty-nine film festival prizes since its premiere, with a majority of audience awards. IDFA’s public was no exception, showing that despite the anti-Arab and islamophobic sentiment fuelling the Dutch coalition cabinet as well as many far-right led European governments, people are not blind to Israel’s brutality in Gaza and, to a more silent extent, the West Bank.
The message from the West has so far been in the language of impunity, with the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant being apparently insufficient to convince Western leaders that inaction amidst this war not only undermines the integrity of the international legal system but also its power to guarantee domestic peace across those states that preached to protect it.
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