Israeli Apartheid on the Big Screen
'No Other Land' Is Affecting and Maddening, and Worth Seeing
The Oscar-winning documentary, No Other Land, tells a tale of violence, both physical and emotional. It is a story about occupation and apartheid, about the constrained lives most Palestinians are forced to live under Israeli military rule in the West Bank.
It is a story many Americans do not want to hear, and it is why it continues to lack widespread distribution and is playing in independent theaters like Montgomery Cinemas, which also is showing October 8, a documentary that purports to unmask the antisemites on American campuses. It is billed as an expose, but — based on the trailer that closed the previews and led into No Other Land — is more of a polemic, a diatribe. That the theater featured both films side by side is not a surprise; many theaters are creating “balance” by booking them in tandem.
Seeing the trailer for October 8 — and teaching on a campus that has come under investigation and unwarranted criticism — was quite the juxtaposition. The trailer’s tone was hyperbolic, extreme. Its argument — made by actors Debra Messing and Michael Rappaport — was turned up to 10, the sound meter spiking in the red. It was impossible to miss — and left me wondering whether the filmmakers saw or would accept nuance.
The trailer shattered expectations for what was to follow, and the quiet, the silence as No Other Land opens, the titles, the images, all played out against the hysterical assault of the trailer. The juxtaposition ultimately strengthened the argument made in No Other Land, because the tone of the Oscar-winning documentary was thoughtful, mournful, and occasionally angry.
The images on the screen are well outside my personal experience. The bulldozers wrecking bedrooms and bathrooms. Whole houses reduced to piles of debris. By order of the army. The demolitions approved by the court. Land in the West Bank inhabited for decades by Palestinian families usurped. Stolen. The army taking possession. To go from native to alien by the stroke of a pen, at the whim of power, of an occupying force is not something I know, though it probably still exists in my cultural memory, in my DNA.
No Other Land tells in miniature the gruesome story of Israel’s colonization and continued efforts at the dispossession of Palestinians from their lands. The focus is on Masafer Yatta, a collection of small villages that has been designated as a military zone. Adra has been filming much of the resistance and the violence of the Israeli military and the settler movement for much of his life, and the film is structured around his footage and supplemented by the work of the documentary team.
The ostensible focus, the McGuffin in Hitchcockian parlance, is the court order ruling that the military’s needs meant it could displace — forcibly if needed — the residents of Masafer Yatta. But its narrow focus opens to a deeper truth about the history of Israel’s occupation and dehumanization of Palestine and Palestinians, a history that has to be scene across decades into the early 1900s. It is a history that can be summed up by a very brief comment from Basel Adra’s grandmother: “They've made us strangers in our own home.”
This is the film’s theme, its focus. Her words are present throughout in every action by the mostly anonymous Israeli soldiers and bureaucrats who impose their overwhelming power over the villagers.
There are moments of protest. Some of hope. But mostly, it is constant victimization and oppression. Brutality imposed for the sake of brutality, that is meant to beat down and batter not just the bodies but the souls of their Palestinian “prisoners.”
I found the film moving, but I came in sympathetic to its pro-Palestine point of view. The film has been criticized by Israelis (including its government) and by pro-Israel Americans. This was to be expected, given its unsparing — and accurate — portrayal of Israeli abuses. The film ends shortly before the Oct. 7 Hamas attack that killed about 1,200 Israelis dead and and took about 240 hostage, and the onset of what is now an 18-month genocidal war on Palestinians in Gaza.
There has been criticism from the Palestinian side, some warranted by the filmmakers’ choices and some having little do with the film itself.
The film presents the horrors in a way that should shock the complacent, and it implicates Israel’s military — but, as Maysa Mustafa writes at Middle East Eye, the complicity of broader Israeli society in the occupation is absent.
Yes, Israelis play their parts — Yusuf Abraham, an Israeli journalist who is hoping to shed light on his country’s atrocities, befriends Basel. He is both of the film, but above it, always existing within the knowledge that his movements are not constrained, that he has a freedom of movement that Basel does not enjoy.
Abraham assumes “that his Israeli-Jewish identity alone could override the obstacles that Palestinians face — obstacles that many times mean death — when it comes to covering the horrors of the Israeli occupation.” He is ineffectual, and in some ways a less cynical version of Homer Atkins from The Ugly American. “Abraham has good intentions,” Mustafa writes, but he also “serves as a stark reminder” of Abraham and Adra’s difference. Abraham “could never fully grasp the amount of tenacity required to push back against the Israeli occupation of Palestine.” He can always walk away.
Worse, Mustafa writes, “Adra may represent the lives of most Palestinians in the West Bank, but Abraham is a complete anomaly in Israel.” The film, he adds, “overlooks how Israeli society at large sees the oppression of Palestinians not just as an "unfortunate reality" but rather as justified treatment.” It shows the military, but “it is not brave enough to puncture through the surface to face the root of the problem: a society that by and large supports the actions of the occupation and its end goal of ethnically cleansing Palestinians from the land.”
Mustafa’s critique focuses as much on what is not there as what is, imagining a different film, perhaps a better one. But the fact that this story is told by Palestinians with little interference from Israelis is important, as is the way the film constantly undermines Abraham, whose authority would be expected to be centered in most films.
There is no “white savior” here. Only evidence of violence and apartheid. “(E)ven solidarity is spoiled by occupation,” writes Ahmed Moor. It is a film of “asymmetries,” in which “Apartheid means that Yuval can leave.” Basel Adra cannot, and that ultimately is the point of the film. Unity may theoretically be possible, but not now and not while a brutal occupation grinds on or while an autocratic American government is using Jewish fears of antisemitism to excuse the occupation.