No Other Land
Directors: Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Rachel Szor.
2024
5 June 2025
See
Basel is a third generation Palestinian activist, whose home Masafer Yatta, a mountain village in the West Bank, is constantly demolished and attacked by Israel, which ruled it was an army training ground, trying to evict Palestinian residents to make way for Jewish settlers.
Think
Can’t they coexist? Yuval Abraham, an Israeli journalist who speaks Arabic goes there to report on what’s happening. He becomes colleagues and friends with Basel. That’s what gives me hope for the future. One Jewish man seeing the Palestinian perspective. And showing us.
Feel
The village has to constantly return to caves, because their homes are bulldozed. They built a school, women and children labouring during the day and men at night. Tony Blair, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, visited for several minutes, which prevented Israel from destroying it. For a time. There are poignant moments between Basel and Yuval. The Palestinian studied law, but what’s the point if you can’t practice it and are too preoccupied struggling to survive, when an Israeli cement mixer pours concrete on the irrigation system of crops, demolishes children’s playgrounds. Basel is busy filming it, posting it, running from the IDF and Israeli settlers, he’s fast, and his spirit seems indomitable, but there’s a scene where some distance away in relative safety, he’s body begins to give up, and he lies down in the bucolic poster image. Still stacking one stone on another. He tells Yuval friend that Israeli is strong, and has technology. But it didn’t always. Once they were oppressed. How can a people that experienced it do it to others? How quickly they forget empathy, an eye for an eye and everyone’s blind, and October 7, 2023 happens where Hamas attacks Isralis, abducting them as hostages. And Israeli declares war and bombs the people with no where else to go out of existence. A systemic destruction of a people. It’s ethnic cleansing. What is Shoah in Arabic? Almihraqa.
