‘No Other Land’: The war on a West Bank village

“You want the occupation to end in 10 days," chides Adra with a chuckle that belies the bone-deep exhaustion etched into his face. “You have to have patience." The word he uses is sabr, an Arabic and Urdu word that means something a bit deeper, more spiritual — it connotes endurance and perseverance; a belief in the righteousness of the long battle you’re fighting. 

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It’s moments like these that make No Other Land so powerful. The film, which screened this week at TIFF after premiering at Berlinale, where it won the Best Documentary award, uses Adra and his family as the anchor in its exploration of the decades-long Israeli assault on Masafer Yatta, a mountainous rural village in the West Bank. The film begins with some of his earliest memories, immortalized in grainy video footage, of his parents and grandparents engaged in stand-offs with Israeli soldiers destroying parts of their village. The film cuts from archival footage to present-day, where nothing has changed. By court-approved order, one of the largest expulsions in the West Bank is underway, with the goal of razing the village to set up a training ground for the military. Nothing is spared, not even portable toilets or pigeon coops. Houses are bulldozed in the blink of an eye, with entire families forced to take refuge in nearby caves, with nowhere else to go. 

“We have no other land," says a Palestinian woman whose son, Harun, was shot by an IOF soldier in a horrifying moment caught on video. Paralyzed from the shoulders down, he has no access to medical care or even a proper place to recover. His bed is a pile of blankets on a damp cave floor and he catches frequent infections that weaken his already compromised body. 

While some Israeli soldiers are particularly vicious and aggressive, emboldened by the support (both tacit and explicit) of the world’s superpowers, it’s the impassivity of the rest as they inflict and observe pain that truly gets the skin crawling. In one devastating scene, Israeli forces surround a school filled with children, locking them within the building as they prepare it for demolition. The frantic children escape through a window, aided by their teachers, and moments later the building comes down. 

Adra was once a student at this school, which his parents helped build with their own hands. Another video flashback, with Adra narrating: the IOF is preventing construction from taking place so Adra’s mother has the idea for the school to be built by women and children (whom soldiers are less likely to brutalize) during the day, with the men taking over the work by stealth during the night. This is how that modest one-storey school, now in ruins, came to be.

Abraham, who refused mandatory Israeli military service, watches all this unfold in shock and anger. Adra has vouched for him so he is welcomed into the village, where a resident asks if he’s one of the rare “human rights Israelis" that is against the occupation of Palestine. Yes, it’s a crime, he says. He’s outraged at what is being done in his name but at the end of the day, he gets to leave. His Israeli passport and yellow license plates mean he can enter and leave the West Bank as he wishes, a basic right not afforded to the Palestinians who live there. During one of their late-night conversations over hookah, he asks Adra why he never worked as a lawyer, having been trained in the field. Because there are no opportunities here, responds Adra plainly. There’s nowhere for Palestinians to work except Israel, where the only jobs available are in construction. So he became an activist and a documentarian instead. What else is there for him to do but pick up his phone and relentlessly document (as his forefathers did before him) the million injustices, big and small, his community has to live with? In a world where the Israeli military gets away with murder, a camera has long been the Palestinians’ only weapon.

The stark disparities between Abraham and Adra are apparent in these quiet moments as they reflect on their different realities, and also in their interactions with Israeli soldiers. Abraham quickly switches to Hebrew, which offers him a degree of protection. Adra, meanwhile, is frequently threatened and attacked. Yet he remains resolute, despite moments of despair and a mounting, near-overwhelming emotional toll.

No Other Land has much to recommend it on grounds of subject matter alone, but it delivers on the filmmaking front as well. Camera phone recordings of the incessant demolitions and violence create a sense of urgency while archival footage reinforces the repetitive nature of these land grabs, establishing an agonizing and infuriating throughline (and providing an oft-necessary reminder that this conflict did not begin on October 7). Meanwhile, Szor’s cinematography captures the landscape in all its beauty and brutality, at times giving the film the air of a pastoral fable. In the most harrowing moments caught on camera, the filmmakers let the footage speak for itself — no commentary or narration is needed when extreme acts of cruelty, including cold-blooded murder, take place in broad daylight.

Condensing four years of footage into 95 minutes was surely a daunting task, but the result is a tightly and masterfully edited film. For Palestinians, the political and the personal are indistinguishable, and the film gets that across with various tableaus of daily life in the occupied region —from the quiet dignity of villagers trying to make the best of their makeshift homes to the protests organized by locals on rural roads, from lighthearted dinners with Adra’s family, even as the threat of arrest looms large, to conversations about an uncertain future between Abraham and Adra (who are often filmed in profile or side by side in a single frame, perhaps to underscore the growing intimacy yet stark divide between these two young men of similar ages).

As Israeli intrusions ramp up in the aftermath of October 7, particularly by armed settlers, the Palestinian spirit of sabr is tested. To endure or to leave becomes the impossible choice faced by the residents of Masafer Yatta but if the video message Adra recorded for the TIFF audience—standing next to Abraham in the near-darkness of his village—is an indication, they shall endure. 

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