Three weeks ago, the Palestinian Basel Adra and the Israeli Yuval Abraham were in the spotlight at the Berlinale, receiving the award for best documentary. A contrast with the schoolyard that received them in half-light on Thursday, for the first screening of their 'No Other Land' in the place where it was conceived.
Five years of filming about the struggle and suffering of the Palestinians of Masafer Yatta, reflected in this same community in the extreme south of the occupied West Bank, where more than 1,000 people live with a constant threat of expulsion by Israel, which in 2021 – after a 22-year judicial process – ratified it as a military zone.
As a result, and as the film portrays, the villages of Masafer Yatta have suffered for decades from harassment and destruction of their homes, schools, farms and even electricity and water lines; confiscations of agricultural machinery and all types of materials; and violent raids by Israeli settlers.
Therefore, this viewing in Al Tuwani, the main village of the community, and in the school where Adra studied, is very particular. Among the Palestinian public (who could not arrive en masse for fear of moving at night and being attacked by settlers) are the protagonists, directly or indirectly, of this story.
“I lived most of the scenes in the documentary, I see them every day, it is what I have experienced since I was born,” says Tariq Hathaleen, a Palestinian activist and English teacher from the village of Umm al-Khair. But seeing all this together in a two-hour film is very hard.”
Sitting in this makeshift movie theater is Farisa, mother of Harun Abu Aram, who died in 2023 after being quadriplegic for two years after being shot in the neck by an Israeli soldier while trying to prevent his electric generator from being taken. Also running around in the lines is one of the little girls who on the screen combines playtime with the fear of observing, at her young age, how the Israeli bulldozers destroy everything; and next to Adra is his father Nasser, who instilled activism in him since he was a child and whose arrest is one of the few moments that shake the filmmaker's strength.
Among the rest of the audience, more than 200 present, there are friends and Israeli citizens from the left and anti-occupation – the ideological core from which director Abraham comes –, arriving in shared cars and two buses from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
“I feel sad, terrible, but also hopeful,” admits a young Israeli-American after watching the film and sharing coffee with cardamom and sweets among the Palestinian-Israeli audience. This attempt to collaborate is another aspect that 'No Other Land' addresses, with the evolution of the friendship between Adra and Abraham, built between deep conversations, jokes and many silences.
The Israeli journalist linked up with the Palestinian activist five years ago and entered the community despite the distrust of the residents. “This guy is a spy, I'm telling you,” he says when Hamdan Ballal, one of the four co-directors of the film, meets him, even though Abraham helps them rebuild and confronts his compatriots.
“Here is a Jew who helps them. They're going to have to pay you a visit,” an Israeli worker scares him in one of the scenes. A threat that, in the end, became a reality after he denounced in his speech at the Berlinale the “apartheid” that Israel imposes on the Palestinians. After these statements – which became a matter of state in Germany and a public lynching in the Israeli media – a mob surrounded his family home, forcing his parents to leave the house for a few days and forcing him to delay his return to Israel for death threats.
Still, Yuval Abraham remembers before the screening at Al Tuwani, “there is no possibility that soldiers will enter my house in Jerusalem in the middle of the night or that I will have to sleep with my shoes on” as happens to his colleague Adra .
The situation has worsened in Masafer Yatta since October 7. As Adra explains at the end of the film, the last video was recorded a few days after the Hamas attacks in southern Israel and shows how a settler shoots his cousin in the abdomen. “The reality is very miserable and people cannot carry out their daily activities,” due to the increase in blockades, which prevent them from tilling the land or grazing their sheep, and the deployment of settlers who, now in uniform, attack with stones , sticks and weapons.
“Five communities have been forced to leave, about 335 families in total, because of how everything has changed since October,” Adra says. People had to destroy their houses with their hands, take their things and escape because the soldiers and settlers come at night, attack them, harass them and threaten them that if they don't leave, they will kill them.” A cruel crossroads for the inhabitants of Masafer Yatta, who are torn between resisting or leaving the only land they have inhabited for generations.
