NO OTHER LAND (BASEL ADRA, HAMDAN BALLAL, YUVAL ABRAHAM, AND RACHEL SZOR)
An explication of forced expulsion on the occupied West Bank made mostly on amateur digital video by a collective of Palestinian and Israeli activists, No Other Land is more than a film—it’s a film whose right to exist is contested throughout by Israeli authority. The subject is injustice. A two-decade legal battle over the fate of an agrarian area with some twenty Palestinian villages, ostensibly appropriated to create a “closed” military training zone (but actually to provide settler lebensraum), was lost when Israel’s supreme court allowed the army to proceed, bulldozing homes, demolishing schools, filling wells with concrete, confiscating generators, and wreaking violence on protesting villagers. International participants joined the Palestinian demonstrations and often displayed signs in English. Did it matter? Early in the film, an activist expresses the quixotic hope that a particular protest strategy will “force the United States to pressure Israel.” Impossible. Yet by its very existence, No Other Land demonstrates at least a possibility of Palestinian-Israeli cooperation.
