No Other Land

Last night I went to see the Academy Award winning documentary No Other Land at the Broadway and, no matter where you stand on the conflict between Israel and Palestine, you cannot help but feel devastated and heartbroken after seeing firsthand the fate of people who have been displaced from land owned by their families for generations and who now have no place to go.  In 1980 the Israeli government declares that Masafer Yatta, a collection of 20 rural villages on the southern edge of the West Bank, will now be used for military training.  After a protracted legal battle fighting against expulsion, the Israeli high court rules against the villagers and the army begins demolishing homes with bulldozers.  Basel Adra, inspired by the activism of his parents against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, decides to to start documenting the destruction in 2019 with the hope that people might be moved by what they see and do something to help.  He gains the attention of an Israeli journalist named Yuval Abraham, who disagrees with what the Israeli government is doing in the West Bank, and together they shoot footage with Hamdan Hallal, a Palestinian filmmaker, and Rachel Szor, an Israeli cinematographer and editor.  The images they capture are visceral and very difficult to watch.  I was in tears when a mother begs the soldiers to stop the bulldozers from tearing down her house because her two daughters are still inside and they tell her that they don't care, when the soldiers shoot a man because he won't give them his generator, when the mother of this man tearfully wishes that he would die because she doesn't have a house in which to care for him now that he is paralyzed, and when a family goes looking for any of their chickens that might still be alive after the soldiers bulldoze their chicken coop but the scene that affected me the most is when a group of crying children watch their school bulldozed to the ground.  I was really struck by the attitude of the Israeli soldiers, which ranges from callous indifference to outright cruelty, towards the villagers in the name of following the law.  However, I was also struck by the growing friendship between Basel and Yuval, contemporaries who have very different lives simply because they were born 30 miles apart, in scenes where they discuss the ongoing conflict because it gives some hope that Israelis and Palestinians might eventually be able to work together for peace despite the events of October 2023 depicted in the epilogue.  This is one of the most powerful and important documentaries I've seen and I am grateful that I had the opportunity to see it (it still does not have a distribution deal in the U.S. so independent theaters like the Broadway are screening it on their own).