No Other Land begins with the people of Masafer Yatta moving into caves after their houses have been demolished by the Israeli military. The turmoil that follows them over the next few years are documented in part by two of No Other Lands’ subjects — the Palestinian Basel Adra and the Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham. Throughout No Other Land, also directed by Rachel Szor, we see the people of Masafer Yatta, including Adra, who was raised in the village, lose schools and playgrounds, water sources, and the lives of family members to vague demolition orders from the Israeli military. To be forced to be without a home, to make do in a literal cave, is simply the beginning of the Israeli violence on this quiet village.
Or, the beginning of what is explicitly shown in No Other Land, rather. Israel’s violent destruction of Palestinian land is a decades long endeavor, something Basel Adra knows well; he comes from a familial line of activists fighting for a free Palestine, for the right to live where they have always lived.
Yuval Abraham is an Israeli journalist spending time with Basel and his family, frequently writing about the injustices they are facing at the hands of Israel in an attempt to raise awareness. He is frequently frustrated by how little traction his work seems to get. At one point in No Other Land, Yuval complains about his story documenting a civilian being shot by Israeli military in Masafer Yatta not getting any traction. Basel presses back against Yuval’s dissatisfaction. “I feel you’re enthusiastic,” Basel gently critiques. “Enthusiastic like you want to end the occupation in ten days.” Yuval’s enthusiasm is naive to Basel, irrelevant to the cause at large. “It requires patience,” Basel expands. “Get used to failing, you’re a loser.”
The use of the word “loser” here is light; Basel is smiling and laughing as he says it. The loss that the people of Masafer Yatta—and the people of Palestine at large—experience is massive, certainly. But their resilience cannot make them true losers. No Other Land documents not just Israel’s violent oppression, but the Palestinian people’s unbelievable capacity to prevail, to remain on their land at any cost.
In his critique of Yuval’s impatience, Basel is instead speaking to the fact that the revolution and the true freeing of Palestine is a long game. Basel knows this to be true. He comes from a family line of Palestinian activists, singularly determined to protect their land through regular protest and documentation of the abuse of Israeli settlers and military. They are willing to be in the line of fire, to be arrested, to be targeted for this, time and time again, over generations.
I’m reminded of Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun’s work on defining the characteristics of white supremacy culture, specifically their noting of a constant sense of urgency being a key feature of white supremacy. Jones and Okun argue that if we are lost to urgency in our attempts to organize, radicalize, and change the material systems at work in our violent and oppressive systems, we risk not letting the correct voices be heard, and we risk making decisions that are based on the personal feelings of the default norm (i.e. white people) instead of the goals of the true collective. We so often see — and I’m ashamed to admit I often personally embody — this trend of urgency. We also see how quickly this urgency can create only a flash in the pan; one loud scream that fades within just a few short days, weeks, or months into nothing.
More than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed during Israeli attacks in the last year. I, among many, feel more radicalized and despondent, and more desperate to call for a free Palestine than ever before. In fact, I feel shame about what I did not know, what I subconsciously chose not to know in the years before this. If we didn’t know of the mass oppression of Palestinians in 2019, when Basel and his family risked so much to retain their homeland, or know of it in the many decades before, we should know this now.
Instead of a consistent push, we fell into urgency at the most severe time. This is not to say the current genocide in Palestine isn’t urgent. It certainly is. But the work must be done at a steady and consistent speed; sustained, engrained, clung to. It will take time. But it also takes determination, upkeep, and focus.
At one moment in No Other Land, a villager of Masafer Yatta explains the cycle that his life has become: “I’ll keep watching how my home is destroyed, I rebuild, it’s destroyed, I rebuild. I can’t live. My whole life’s purpose became to have a home.” It’s a devastating sentiment — a life where there is no time but creating shelter that will seemingly inevitably be destroyed for no reason other than to reinforce your subjugation. And yet these same people choose to rebuild again and again.
“Masafer Yatta exists for one reason,” the voiceover reads near the end of No Other Land. “People who hold onto life.” The people of Masafer Yatta insist on continuing to live where they came from. Existing for as long as possible under a regime insistent upon taking away all it can from you is unbelievable, consistent work. What can those of us holding onto vast privileges — starting with the fact I am able to live in a home securely without a thought — learn from this work and sacrifice? And what, in turn, can we build to help free Palestine and those colonized and oppressed everywhere? What can we begin to do now, not to be completed in ten days, but to be woven into the very fabric of our lives?
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