No Other Land – forced displacement captured from inside the West Bank and a friendship that defies stereotypes (Queen’s Film Theatre from Friday 22 November)

No Other Land is a haunting film that stayed with me over the four and a half months since I first watched it as part of Docs Ireland at the end of June. Basel’s family have long been documenting life in their West Bank village. Their precarious situation brought with it constant vigilance and activism to protect their home from demolition notices backed by the Israeli Army. When he was old enough, the camera passed to Basel Adra who hot foots it across the area, day or night, to witness and record the latest actions to force his community out of the area.

“I started to film when we began to end.”

When Tony Blair visited the rudimentary primary school that local children attended in 2009, the international attention – from a seven-minute stop – rescinded the threat. No Other Land picks up the story in 2020, when a court confirmed that the area was a military training ground and the dust from army jeeps, trucks and diggers on the road into the group of around twenty villages in Masafer Yatta would signify that another family was going to lose their house that day. Then a man only known as Ilan takes over control of the demolition. Ilan is very aware of the names of those who document the army’s actions.

More homes are torn down. A young friend of Basel’s is shot at close range. Paralysed from the chest down, Harun sleeps with his family in a cave, and is lifted out in an ad hoc stretcher made from a carpet rug to an above-ground tarpaulin tent during the day. The international media give his plight some attention, but nothing changes. His Mum is distraught at his condition and wishes he could be free from pain, even if that meant death.

Nighttime raids are added to daytime ones. Bare-chested men from nearby West Bank settlements come into the area with their faces disguised, carrying guns and clubs. They smash windows threaten the villagers with impunity while the army looks on. At a later date, armed settlers reappear, without any disguises, and shoot dead a young man. We watch Basel’s footage of the moment his cousin is killed. That’s the point that most villagers around Masafer Yatta give up what remains of their homes and land. After decades they leave.

Professional camerawork (Hamdan Balla and Rachel Szor) enhances older family archive and contemporary camcorder footage that Basel collects. A sympathetic Israeli journalist from outside the West Bank visits regularly. Yuval Abraham can travel through the checkpoints – his number plate is the right colour (yellow, not green) – and he becomes a close confidant of Basel. His impressions and the pair’s friendship and friction form one of the most important threads through the film. Yuval is mostly accepted into the community, albeit with moments of intolerance and tension. He is frustrated that his online storytelling about the destruction doesn’t get more traction. Basel cautions his “[enthusiasm] like you want to end occupation in 10 days” and says “you have to be patient” … Basel’s family have been living through this for decades. (Yuval is the fourth producer of the film alongside Basel, Hamdan and Rachel.)

The sight of families carrying bedding and white goods out of their homes in the moments before watching diggers knock over the walls is distressing. While there’s no version of these events that is going to be calm and peaceful, the terror is exacerbated by the animosity and foul language of the soldiers. The scenes bring back memories of people forced out of their homes in Northern Ireland: except the local form of a demolition notice would be graffiti on your wall or a knock on the door with a threat, and someone else would usually move into your home. But has the state stood by at times and cast a blind eye to intimidation?

The sight of children calmly gathering together their classroom resources and carrying them outside when the bulldozers arrive has no local parallels. Watching concrete being poured from a cement mixer into a local well to cut off the fresh water supply is a robust measure and totally inhumane. Seeing Ilan gleefully taking a chainsaw to the water pipework to put it beyond re-use emphasises the hatred behind the operation.

Having reached 2023, the film finishes with a pensive Yuval dreaming of a world where Basel will be free to come to visit him. Basel is not convinced. Harun dies. Official papers reveal that the heightened campaign of forced displacement was “to stop Arab villages expanding”. Soon after the documentary is edited and begins touring around festivals, the conflict in Gaza escalates: tensions and attacks rise in the West Bank.

No Other Land returns to the Queen’s Film Theatre from Friday 22 November. It’s an excellent companion piece to the fictionalised The Teacher, and is all the more potent because it is real.

 

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