The documentary No Other Land, co-created by a team of Palestinians and Israelis, has gained international attention, winning numerous awards, including the Oscar for Best Documentary. However, it has sparked controversy within the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, with The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) calling for the film to be boycotted.
The film documents the Israel Defense Force’s (IDF) forced expulsions and demolitions in the West Bank hamlets of Masafer Yatta, through the eyes of its residents. Israeli forces have continually encroached into Masafer Yatta, seizing land, evicting residents and destroying homes over more than 20 years, nominally to use the area for ‘tank training’. The absurdity of this lie is self-evident. The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the annexation of their West Bank territories is another front of the territorial expansion of Israel – old Palestinian homes bulldozed and replaced by new Israeli homes for settlers.
Early home footage, made by Palestinian co-director Basel Adra as a teenage, charts his family’s protests and his father’s numerous arrests. But the film proper begins in 2019, when Adra is joined by (among others) Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham. It proved to be a landmark year in the struggle – after a 22 year legal case, the Israeli Supreme Court approved the evictions of more than 1,000 Palestinians from 20 villages. This judgment set in motion destruction on a larger scale than ever. As Adra puts it: ‘I began started filming when we started to end.’
The documentary proceeds by chronicling the IDF’s brutal conquest of villages in Masafer Yatta. With a ‘just following orders’ coldness, Israeli forces destroy generational family homes, pour cement into wells, down electricity lines, flatten sheep pens and tear apart the children’s parks. An older woman, upon seeing her home destroyed, comments: “we have no other land, that’s why we suffer.” Her son is later shot and paralysed by the IDF.
While there is nothing that will be new to those in the Palestine solidarity movement, who are aware of Israel’s crimes, for people new to the movement or unaware, the film serves as a good introduction, alongside other useful films such as Israelism.
Intercut between the chronicling of Masafer Yatta’s ethnic cleansing are the conversations between Adra and Abraham. Their unequal footing is subtly explored – Israeli Abraham is free to leave Masafer Yatta for safety each night, but Adra is a Palestinian, confined under military law. However, their mutual suspicion gives way to friendship and their dialogue provides the heart of the film as well as their hopes of reconciliation.
No Other Land concludes in October 2023 – ending on the image of settlers, rifles in hand, entering the villages. Today these extremist settlers, finding political expression in the Netanyahu government and supported by the IDF, evict Palestinians and steal their homes. Settlers have destroyed 16 West Bank villages since October 2023. As inspiring as the resilience of the evicted villagers is, the future for Masafer Yatta is very bleak.
Therefore it is deeply counterproductive for the BDS movement to denounce the film. No other land has already been the subject of suppression and vitriolic criticism from Zionists, as well as death threats against the filmmakers. When the film won an award at the Berlinale film festival, the Mayor of Berlin described the directors as ‘anti-semitic’. A German Green politician clarified on X that, when she applauded the film’s win, she was ‘only clapping for the Israeli side’!
However, PACBI argues that the film is a case of ‘normalization’: ‘a joint activity between the oppressed and the oppressor that is not based on the recognition of the rights of the oppressed and does not aim at the elimination of oppression…[it is] an attempt by the oppressor to colonize the mind of the oppressed with the notion that oppression is a fact of life that must be coped with, not resisted.’ This reads more like an excerpt from Franz Fanon than a clear guideline on what to boycott.
At least one Palestinian activist, the leader of the Khirbet Susya village council, responded that he ‘didn’t know what the BDS people are talking about’, and praised Abraham as “far more Palestinian than most of these online commentators attacking him.”
Of course, a critical approach should be taken to any film that would actually attempt to normalise Palestinian oppression or fail to address the imbalance between the Palestinians and Israelis involved in production. But this imbalance is the product of the apartheid system from which the filmmakers cannot extirpate themselves, but only highlight and investigate, as No Other Land does in its illustrative sections featuring the parallel lives of Adra and Abraham.
Arguing against PACBI’s decision to boycott No Other Land, the head of the Masafer Yatta village council believes, ‘the pros outweigh the cons, and the film should not be boycotted. It tells our story, the Palestinian story — there is no Israeli story in it. Yuval is a true partner, and so are all the international and Jewish activists, who sleep in Masafer Yatta and defend us from settler and army attacks.’
PACBI is on stronger ground when they refer to ‘extremely harmful, immoral statements drawing a false equivalence between the colonizer and the colonized’, presumably in reference to Abraham’s remarks during his Oscars acceptance speech to the ‘crimes of 7 October’, uttered in the same breath as more general references to Palestinian ethnic cleansing. Any attempt at placing a moral or historical equivalence between Hamas’ attacks to the ongoing genocide in Gaza is totally bogus.
Nonetheless, apart from this unfortunate remark, the position statement made by the filmmakers is on the whole very good – making clear reference to the Nakba, describing the ongoing assault on Gaza as a genocide, even describing Israel as an apartheid state on a major platform like the Oscars.
So, while some of PACBI’s criticisms of Abraham’s words, have they built a case to boycott No Other Land? I would argue that they have not. The case against the film as an instance of ‘normalisation’ is confused, especially since it fails to take into account the views of the residents of Masafer Yatta, who want their story to be heard. Making this decision over the heads of the Palestinians involved in producing and contributing to this film is condescending and self-defeating.
The struggle recounted in No Other Land remains as live as ever, as settlers, under IDF protection, encroach further into the West Bank. On 26 March 2025 one of the Palestinian filmmakers of No Other Land, Hamdan Ballal, was evicted, assaulted and detained overnight during a settler and IDF assault on his village. His assessment was stark: ‘It was revenge for our movie.’
No Other Land is on Channel 4
