raxzberry

i want to stop and pick up milk for another friend because i know their spouse hates the grocery store

i want to buy fruit that i dont like because it’s on special and i know people who do

i want to pass lemons over the fence and to take my neighbours bins out when the forget

i want group chats instead of rideshare apps, calls in the middle of the night because someone’s at the hospital, lonely or hungry or both

i want to do the dishes in other people’s houses, extra servings wrapped in tinfoil and tea towels so it’s still warm when you drop it off, a basket of other people’s mending by my couch

The film’s title begs the question, no other land for whom? We hear it in the Palestinians pleading with the Israeli soldier aiming a bulldozer at their homes. But its echoes are also the film’s subtext, the possibility of a future shared between settler and native. A settler has come to help the natives, hoping to redeem himself and, implicitly, the horizons of the settler-state. Where are we supposed to go?, we can imagine an Israeli asking a Palestinian, having been made a guest in their home, once political reality enters their conversation. 

Much of the film, which is ostensibly about the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian villages, is spent tracing the friendship of Adra and Abraham. Several scenes find Adra and Abraham driving in a car, smoking hookah in a restaurant, sitting simply in conversation about the present and the future (the past, beyond that of Masafer Yatta, is generally left alone). Toward the film’s end, during one of these heart-to-hearts, Abraham offers a vision of Israel that no longer denies Adra his rights. He asks Adra to dream with him of a future in which Palestinians and Israelis live side by side. “Inshallah,” Adra half-humors his friend. Over the course of the documentary, by talking to Palestinians and witnessing the actions of fellow Israelis, we see the settler growing, learning from the native. We see the settler recognizing, in his limited way, the nature of Zionism at a pace the Palestinian, here exceedingly patient, can’t afford.

While No Other Land tells the story of one Palestinian community’s depopulation, it also stands in for the liberal’s long-sought-after Roadmap for Peace. Abraham introduces himself to the Palestinians with whom he works as yahudi, Jewish. He offers them his time and energy, and risks his safety, to tell their story. “I need to write something about the protest today,” Abraham tells Adra from the passenger seat, while the latter, driving, focuses his eyes on the road. “I have to write more. The article I wrote on Harun’s mom didn’t get many views.” “I feel you’re a little enthusiastic…” Adra says, and Abraham asks him to clarify. “You want everything to happen quickly … as if you’ve come to solve everything in ten days, then go home.” Adra snaps his fingers before returning his hand to the wheel. Abraham remains committed to ending the program of ethnic cleansing committed in his name, but in the film and elsewhere, he attributes those horrors to the “occupation” rather than to Zionism. His condemnation of the former serves to preserve the latter. This distinction is artificial: from the standpoint of its victims, Israel is its occupation, the Zionist project necessarily one of ethnic cleansing and genocide, of total erasure.

Abraham attempts a rehabilitation of an iteration of Zionism that doesn’t exist but could, a familiar settler hope (think, imagine what America could be). In one clip, Abraham appears on Democracy Now! to say, “As an Israeli, it’s very, very important for me to stress that I don’t think we can have security if Palestinians do not have freedom.” The possibility of this future depends on the actions of individuals like Abraham, although the film itself reveals the futility of this vision. After the Democracy Now! clip, the film cuts to Abraham on Israeli TV. Here, Palestinians are the other: “They have no voting rights under military occupation,” Abraham says. “Basel, a guy my age who lives there, can’t even leave the West Bank, and we destroy their homes every week—” Here, he is cut off by another Israeli on the panel, calling in remotely: “You’re against Jewish people, in everything you do.” Abraham sighs, then pushes back, calling the man a liar, only to be interrupted by him again: “They’re invaders in a military training ground.” This thinking, not Abraham’s, is at the heart of Zionism. Israeli soldiers and settlers taunt Adra and Abraham repeatedly, goading them to upload the videos they record to see if this might change anything on the ground. In the final footage recorded for the film, we hear Adra on the phone with Israeli authorities, asking for protection. We see armed settlers descend on Masafer Yatta, then Adra’s cousin shot point-blank in his abdomen by a man in a T-shirt. Words flash across the screen, informing us that, since October 2023, many such attacks have continued to take place, prompting Palestinians to flee their homes.

…

The film doesn’t engage with other ways this suffering might end. The only resistance we see is nonviolent demonstration. Adra is an activist, a term whose configurations are vague except vis-à-vis violence. The film matter-of-factly captures plenty of violent Israelis, settlers and soldiers, armed and sustained by the state, their bulldozers and their unmoved expressions, or their twisted smiles as lives are destroyed, but no Palestinian fighters, no direct Palestinian response. Instead, Palestinians and their supporters are “armed” with their cameras, committed to capturing an aftermath to which a sympathetic Western audience might choose to respond on their behalf. At the film’s start, Adra’s father, who has been imprisoned and abused by the Israelis multiple times, describes a desire to throw rocks at Israeli soldiers, then apologizes to his Israeli guest, explaining that sometimes he finds himself so angry. The woman’s son was shot at a peaceful protest. 

Before the footage capturing the settler attack on Masafer Yatta, during which Adra’s cousin was shot, the producers inform the viewer through an intertitle, “We finished this film in October 2023.” The implications here are obvious, a Pandora’s box that the film, committed to the possibility of a future that accommodates both settler and native, must bend over backward not to touch.

also:

From Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal by Mohammed El-Kurd: