No Other Land: powerful documentary about Israel’s occupation of the West Bank asks questions of us all

It’s a tale as old as the hills, the kind that international law says should have long been buried in them: ordinary people menaced on their land by raiding parties, invaders and occupiers waving weapons and new rules or expulsion orders. For the residents of Masafer Yatta, a collection of 19 Palestinian hamlets in the southern Hebron Hills whose existence predates the state of Israel’s by more than 60 years, the latter’s occupation of the West Bank has brought decades of attritional oppression aimed at their displacement. 

Designated Military Firing Zone 918 in the early 1980s, under an Israeli policy deliberately formulated to create land reserves for Jewish settlement, the area has since been subject to waves of harassment and destruction by the allied forces of the military and emboldened settlers. In 2022, after slow-walking an appeal by the villagers for two decades, Israel’s High Court of Justice concurred with the army that the villagers were essentially squatters without rights or history in their land, guilty of persistently building such illicit structures as “cisterns, latrines, homes, schools”.

No Other Land, which won the documentary and audience awards at the Berlinale in February – co-director Yuval Abraham’s acceptance speech drew antisemitism accusations from German politicians and death threats in Israel – shows this slow ethnic cleansing on the ground, among Masafer Yatta’s residents from 2019 to late 2023, as IDF demolition raids tear down their homes and drive them into caves. The film’s rhythm is marked by staccato eruptions of violence as shock troops, armoured vehicles, bulldozers descend on a given village and smash classrooms, bathrooms, pigeon coops. One man is shot and paralysed as he tries to save his portable generator. This is difficult enough to watch. Imagine living it.

Two of the film’s four directors put themselves in the frame as main characters. The directors are activists, defenders of Palestinian land rights – two Palestinians, two left-wing Israelis – and their film, besides bearing witness, finds a dramatic through line in their struggle to find an effective activism, a slingshot against the Israeli state. Basel Adra, a young Masafer Yatta native, a trained lawyer with no chance of practising, provides the film’s voiceover – and another visual motif, of breathless, phone-filmed chases across the hills to film another Israeli incursion, and show the world. Later, as the soldiers identify him as a thorn in their side, he has to go into hiding: the sense of siege is amplified by stakeouts and night raids.

Basel’s parents were local activists before him; his earliest memories are of their protests and arrests (and they too filmed their fights, on the handicams of the time). Now – as they try to tend their business, a petrol station under their home – he stands in his father’s shoes, measuring their people’s long, fraught struggle.

Another mirror figure, Basel’s fellow defender and co-director Yuval Abraham, opens the film up across borders and cultures. Peers and lookalikes, Basel and Yuval represent the possibility of solidarity and alliance: they make a buddy partnership, Yuval keeping Basel company in the long waits in the gloaming, trying to pep up his friend over a hookah pipe. But their different statuses remain: other villagers wryly designate Yuval a ‘human rights Israeli’, and wonder if he is a spy; Yuval can escape to safety and comfort any time, his yellow licence plates admitting him on Israeli roads barred to Basel. (A third co-director, Hamdan Ballal, appears among the villagers; the fourth, Yuval’s fellow Israeli journalist Rachel Szor, goes unseen as the main director of photography.)

Basel teases Yuval about his impatience with social media returns: “You want to end the occupation in ten days – it requires patience,” he counsels. As we watch Basel’s own faith and energy draining, and the occupation ratcheting up its assaults – a late montage includes irrigation pipes severed, concrete poured down wells and a close-range shooting by a rampaging settler – it’s not clear whose optimism might be more misplaced. But their reporting and resistance also encompasses this film, which at the least provides eloquent testimony to inequality, colonialism, erasure and impunity. Its title, like the climate slogan ‘No planet B’, asserts bare levels of existential justice. And its portrait of activist outreach – and our corresponding capacity for solidarity and alliance – asks questions of us all.

► No Other Land arrives in UK cinemas 8 November.