'No Other Land'
A quick review of the Oscar-winning documentary
This week the mayor of Miami Beach threatened the lease of a theater that showed “No Other Land” — the Oscar-winning documentary that shows a small, horrifying slice of life in the Israeli-occupied West Bank — accusing the theater of "disseminating antisemitism" by letting audiences choose to see it.
So I went into my local theater today to view the documentary, trying to be alert to displays of antisemitism.
That’s not really what I found.
Let’s get the synopsis out of the way:
No Other Land won this year's Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. It was made by Palestinian activist Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham and their team. From 2019 to 2023, they chronicled ongoing bulldozing of homes and buildings in the Masafer Yatta community on the West Bank. Their film focuses on Adra and his family and neighbors, whose ancestral homeland was taken over by Israeli forces to become a closed military training zone. Some of the Palestinian families resisted displacement, living in caves and continually trying to rebuild.
About the anti-semitism accusations: There is one brief moment — in the epilogue — when you hear in the voiceover a news report that discusses the Gaza war taking a toll in which "thousands of Palestinians were killed" and "hundreds of Israelis were taken hostage." That caught me up short, seeming to downplay or elide the toll of October 7.
But.
That moment aside, this movie doesn't strike me antisemitic, nor even overtly anti-Zionist. What it does is show a Palestinian story from a Palestinian point of view, and that’s still something we in the United States don’t see all that often. There's beauty in that story, but also horror.
And also frustration: As “No Other Land” proceeds, it is clear that Basel is frustrated with Yuval. Whatever level of sympathy Yuval has, the Israeli can leave the disaster hitting Basel’s community at any time. Basel cannot. And Basel’s family and neighbors clearly despise putting their lives on display for journalists to document, but also see it as a necessary evil to enable the moment to be documented and shared with the world.
The only power they have is to show their powerlessness to the world. Which deepens their tragedy.
“No Other Land” is, I think, human and humane. That, as best I can tell, is the danger here. What Miami Beach’s mayor calls “anti-semitism” is, for the most part, the act of seeing Palestinians as human1.
I’m glad my local theater, Liberty Hall in Lawrence KS, showed the film. I’m glad I got to see it and make up my own mind.
Anti-semitism is real, and its horrors are part of how we got to the horrors in Gaza. Evil begets evil all too often.
Thanks for the review. I can only process so much per unit time, and mostly neglect video oriented media. I was curious, given some comments about the documentary I'd seen in passing, just what sins the mayor believes were committed by providing a means for folks to see the documentary. I was wondering if the mayor was engaging in political theater that he perceived to be good for his ambitions. If the principal offense of the film was presenting Palestinians as humans, that tells me all I need to know.