No Other Land review – an Israeli and Palestinian’s remarkable relationship

When Palestinian villages were bulldozed to make way for the Israeli military, it brought together a film-maker and a journalist from across the divide

This rage- and pain-filled documentary from a quartet of Palestinian and Israeli film-makers was the subject of a somewhat surreal statement from the German culture minister Claudia Roth at this year’s Berlin film festival. She had been in the closing gala audience applauding when it won a prize, and later said she was clapping Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, not his Palestinian co-director Basel Adra, when they collected the award. It was an unhappy demonstration of enduring division.

No Other Land is about Masafer Yatta, a collection of Palestinian villages in the West Bank whose thousand-plus occupants were, in 2022, ordered to leave because the Israeli military needed the area as a training zone – and so began the long, bitter process of bulldozers being sent in, accompanied by soldiers who were grimly unmoved by residents’ desperate protests. Local Palestinian resident Basel Adra had been for years recording his community’s harassment on video, but this film also records his remarkable relationship with Israeli photojournalist Yuval Abraham, with whom he collaborated on this film along with Hamdan Balla and Rachel Szor.