Poetic justice is just the start

In one brief scene towards the end of Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, the narrative recedes and we find ourselves in some inexplicable wonderland buried under thick blankets of snow. There is the sound of children running around and playing. A gazelle makes herself visible. And soon enough, a full moon. The wonderland is the occupied West Bank one particular morning last winter, when everyone woke up and the entire landscape had been transformed. 

It is a phenomenally-timed moment of light relief in an otherwise overwhelmingly bleak film. The beauty of the scene was for me completed by the fact that I was lucky enough to be watching it on location – in Susiya, a small village in Masafer Yatta, a region almost but not quite desert, located on the West Bank’s southernmost tip. Susiya is home to Hamdan Ballal, who directed and featured in the film as part of a four-person Palestinian-Israeli collective that also included Basel Adara, Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor. Susiya is also where I lived for three months in 2023 as an international activist with the Center for Jewish Non-Violence, and where I still seem to frequently find myself.

No Other Land had already won acclaim in Berlin, New York, and London by the time it made its way back to Susiya that night in the middle of January. A temporary ceasefire in Gaza had been announced half an hour before, and as everyone gathered inside the community centre around the shaky projector, trying to get it to work, it seemed that the whole room was ready to sit and be silenced by the blank wall alone.

But in the end there was no need, as the film began to play. Over 90 minutes we are inducted into everyday life in Masafer Yatta, primarily through the eyes of Basel, who lives in Tuwani, a village just down the road from Susiya. Since before he can remember, Basel has been capturing on camera the ethnic cleansing of his community by Israel – so that it is there for the world, the police, the international community, for anyone willing to look, to see. 

Now, with an Oscar in tow, the world might indeed just see. In a community where small wins against a relentlessly brutal state apparatus take on the aspect of miracles, where a mountain or two are easily stolen within the space of an afternoon, a village burnt to a crisp in the evening – where once in a blue moon it is the perpetrator who is arrested and not the victim, in brief, in a context where, as Basel puts it, “you’re a loser” – a standing ovation from Hollywood is quite something. 

International recognition is also the bare minimum, and painfully overdue (as British-Palestinian author Isabella Hammad observes in her newest book). Palestinians in Masafer Yatta have been enduring an excess of sights for decades, with scene after scene in the film demonstrating just how deeply acts of seeing and witnessing shape life inside the community. It’s not just footage of homes being demolished the audience is presented with – it is homes being demolished before the eyes of the people who lived in them. We see older sisters doing their best to block the vision of their little sisters, to little avail, we see fathers cursing at the rubble, and we hear a mother repeating to television crews how her son, Haroun, was shot “in front” of her. 

The film reckons throughout with the extent of its own power: what bearing witness to violence, whether in person or on the big screen, actually leads to. It does not normalise but continuously reckons with the ethics of Israeli involvement in the Palestinian fight for liberation – especially when that involvement means that more people might pay attention. One moment, people paying attention appears to be fully synonymous with material change: archive footage shows Tony Blair walking around Tuwani “for seven minutes”, as Basel explains on voiceover that Israel agreed to cancel a slew of demolition orders in the village shortly thereafter. The next moment, we return to Haroun’s mother, who only very reluctantly allows a group of journalists near enough to catch a glimpse of her paralysed, homeless son; no matter how many photographs you take of him, she confronts them, “There he is, still in a dirty cave”. 

Accordingly, Basel wavers back and forth between hope and cynicism about what he can do with his camera. In the morning, he frantically searches the house for it, just in time to record some demolition; in the scenes set in the evening, we tend to find him staring endlessly at the ceiling, his phone, or a plate of food. I had imagined for a while that the film’s poster depicted Basel lying low atop a mountain, carefully positioning a camera, but with a closer look, it became clear that all he is doing is idly placing stones on top of one another, Israeli tanks driving up ominously behind, camera resting untouched beside him.

It is hard not to see the Oscar as an unambiguous victory for Basel's camera, just as it is tempting to discern something like poetic justice in what he screams over and over at the settlers who invade his village: “I’m filming you.” There is without doubt a radical poetry to the film, in the sense that every detail is perfectly dedicated to conveying the message, and truth, of what is happening in Masafer Yatta, until it becomes simply impossible not to be entirely enveloped by it. (Indeed, we hear Yuval apologising over the phone to his boss for neglecting his writing, and being too much on the ground.) Watching the film the second time round, I noticed that even the silent and invisible cinematographer of the team, Rachel, is unable to suppress a curse word while recording one particularly violent settler attack. The film knows that it is right, and true, and undeniable, and that it will break you. So we hear Basel’s father telling a young Basel in an inserted 90s home movie not to fear the soldiers in the distance – for “we have a special power”.

The film does everything and more that it is earthly possible for a film to do. It is left decidedly up to audiences, far and wide, to translate its special power, its poetic justice into real political change. The soldiers and their occupation certainly haven’t gone anywhere. The past week alone has seen Israeli forces launch raids night and day across several villages, arresting young and old without charge – as they continue to coordinate with violent settlers to cleanse the region of its entire Palestinian population. The future of Masafer Yatta has never hung more delicately in the balance. No Other Land is nothing but an insistence on doing something, anything – to make what only happens in the movies happen on the ground.▼

Kate Greenberg is an editor at Vashti.