No Other Land rightly won Best Documentary Feature at this year’s Oscars. The film has been touted as a Palestine-Israel collaboration, with Palestinian Basel Adra and Israeli Yuval Abraham part of the directorial team alongside Rachel Szor and Hamdan Ballal. Basel and Yuval both appear in the film, which is a meticulously crafted documentary on repeated Israeli demolitions of Basel’s hometown, Masafer Yatta.
In a collective statement, the directors said:
We made this film because we believe that there can be no just future between the river and the sea for all the inhabitants without real justice for the Palestinian people and the Palestinian refugees.
However, Yuval’s comments at the Oscars reveal much about both the political dynamics within the film, and in Hollywood more broadly.
No Other Land
Basel was the first to speak during their acceptance speech at the Oscars, and he said:
Thank you to the Academy for the award. It’s such a big honour for the four of us and everybody who supported us for this documentary. About two months ago, I became a father and my hope to my daughter that she will not have to live the same life I am living now, always fearing settler violence, home demolitions, and forced displacements that my community, Masafer Yatta, is living and facing every day under the Israeli occupation.
No Other Land reflects the harsh reality that we have been enduring for decades and still persist as we call on the world to take serious action to stop the injustice and to stop the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people.
Basel served as the primary figure in No Other Land, and his family and community in Masafer Yatta were the subjects of the film. Through his camera, we meet his mother, father, and siblings.
The documentary is punctuated with frequent and terrifying interventions from the Israeli military.
We see them thrust demolition papers signed by Israeli officials into the faces of the Masafer Yatta community. They repeatedly force Palestinians out of their homes, confiscate building materials, and bodily remove people from their homes.
They demolish an elementary school, they arrest Palestinians, they terrorise children. And, these soldiers increasingly stalk Basel as it becomes clear that he will persist with recording their actions.
Sanitisation
Yuval travels across the border as Basel’s friend. Yuval is there to document the ethnic cleansing of the region as an Israeli journalist. The two go for food, and Yuval serves as a kind of interlocutor once the Israeli military square up to residents in Masafer Yatta.
No Other Land explores Yuval’s tenuous position as a friend of Basel as the reality of Israeli ethnic cleansing understandably makes Basel and his community weary and suspicious of Yuval.
At the Oscars, Yuval said:
We made this film, Palestinians and Israelis, because together our voices are stronger. We see each other, the atrocious destruction of Gaza and its people, which must end. The Israeli hostages, brutally taken in the crime of October 7th, which must be freed.
When I look at Basel, I see my brother, but we are unequal. We live in a regime where I am free under civilian law, and Basel is under military laws that destroy his life and he cannot control. There is a different path, a political solution, without ethnic supremacy, with national rights for both of our people. And I have to say, as I am here, the foreign policy in this country is helping to block this path.
Why? Can’t you see that we are intertwined? That my people can be truly safe, if Basel’s people are truly free and safe. There is another way. It’s not too late for life, for the living. There is no other way.
Yuval’s comments are typical of someone who has had a settler colonial upbringing. The equation of the destruction of Gaza alongside the hostages taken on 7 October is, at best, a partial and ignorant narrative. Israel has been abducting Palestinians for decades, holding them without charge or trial, and brutally torturing people.
Using 7 October as somehow equivalent to the genocide in Gaza is a sickening sanitisation of the horror Israel has unleashed in Gaza.
Yuval’s acceptance speech is underpinned with notions of a two state solution which, considering the ongoing ethnic cleansing and genocide in Palestine that Israeli forces have carried out with horrifying glee, is a fantasy.
American foreign policy is indeed blocking any path to peace. But, Yuval’s remarks gesture towards a vision of peace where coexistence is presumed to be an Israeli desire. The past year or so has demonstrated that Israeli leadership, allies, and civilians desire no such thing.
Zionist tactics
Yuval’s comments stand starkly against his colleagues. Basel is calling for a stop to ethnic cleansing and forced displacement. Yuval, meanwhile, is calling for a ‘both sides’ approach which pretends that Israel and Palestine are on an even playing field.
Israel continues to have the might of the Western world supporting its ethnic cleansing, while the most powerful states could barely even muster a call for ceasefire, never mind a call for a liberated Palestine.
No Other Land does lay these tensions out. For anyone who’s seen the documentary, Yuval’s comments won’t have come as a surprise.
On multiple occasions, Basel’s face is etched with sorrow and yearning as he sees his friend, Yuval, able to travel and live freely. Yuval is so accustomed to his own freedom that he is able to casually declare he is going home, after a day gathering journalistic information about the forced displacement of Basel’s family.
Later in the documentary when Basel and Yuval go out for food, Yuval asks Basel if he’d like to have a family, a wife and kids, of his own. When Basel answers that for him this question is complicated, Yuval asks if it’s a question of money.
Basel doesn’t give a direct answer – often during the film, he stops talking in the middle of a conversation, looking wearied and heartbroken.
What else could he say or do?
No Other Land: showing Israel’s relentless ethnic cleansing
No Other Land demonstrates the relentless nature of Israeli ethnic cleansing. Not only do they force children and injured civilians out of their homes, they leave them having to live in caves. They confiscate construction equipment, lest the local community recover. They shoot at protesters. They arrest people and disappear them. Their arrivals in the middle of the night herald only terror.
Yuval has to know that he is the more acceptable face of No Other Land. His presence is there to make Palestinian suffering palatable to a Western palate. It’s difficult to forget Basel’s expressions as the trauma of his daily life plays out on his face. Yuval is able to imagine any kind of future he likes, full of family, children, travel, joy, and laughter. His future is a certainty, all while his countrymen, and perhaps even friends and family, terrorise Palestinians.
Israeli safety (and the very notion of its future) has been directly tied to the destruction of Palestinian life since the creation of Israel. The least we can do is consider the Palestinian imaginary of freedom and liberation as one that is irrevocably tied to the Israeli genocidal ethos.
No Other Land is a triumph of a documentary – but it is a triumph that belongs to Basel, his family, and his community in Masafer Yatta.
Featured image via the Canary
