No Other Land (2024) (Palestinian-Israeli) (Guests: Omer Bartov & Lisa Hajjar) (episode 47)

No Other Land (2024) is the Oscar-winning documentary that shows the brutal destruction of a Palestinian community in the occupied West Bank. Recorded between 2019 to 2023, the film tells the story of Basel Adra, a young Palestinian activist, who has been protesting the Israeli army’s destruction of homes and eviction of villagers. Adra is assisted by Yuval Abraham, a Jewish Israeli journalist. (They are also two of the film’s four directors). To Adra and other Palestinians, the Israeli army is destroying their homeland. The Israeli army, however, maintains that the inhabitants are on land that the military needs for live-fire military training and that the evictions have been duly authorized by Israeli courts. The situation turns violent—Adra’s cousin is shot by Israeli soldiers in the days after the Oct 7 attacks—and Adra himself is endangered by his efforts to record the evictions and protests. The film provides a penetrating look not only at a Palestinian community in the West Bank but also at the plight of those being forced off their land--with literally nowhere else to go. [Editor's Note: Since the recording of this episode, Odeh Hathalin, a Palestinian activist and contributor to the film, was shot and killed in a village in Masafer Yatta by an Israeli settler.]

Timestamps:

0:00     Introduction

3:42      Masafar Yatta and the Occupied West Bank

7:43      The legal apparatus of illegal occupation

13:14    The “Gazafication” of the West Bank

20:08   The meaning of “No Other Land”

23:21    Israel and the international community

31:24    The crackdown on free speech in the United States and in Israel

34:41    A complex story of an Israeli-Palestinian friendship

41:18     The power of images

43:07    Growing Israeli indifference to Gaza and the West Bank after Oct. 7

48:30    The film’s reception in Israel 

49:53    Law-based criticism of Israel and antisemitism

Further reading:

Bartov, Omer, “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It,” New York Times (July 15, 2025)

Beinart, Peter, Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (2025)

Caplan, Neil, The Israel-Palestine Conflict: Contested Histories (2010)

Hajjar, Lisa, “International Humanitarian Law and ‘Wars on Terror’: A Comparative Analysis of Israeli and American Doctrines and Policies,” 36 Journal of Palestine Studies 36 (Autumn 2006)

Kaufman, Anthony, "No Other Distribution: How Film Industry Economics and Politics Are Suppressing Docs Sympathetic to Palestine and Critical of Israel," Int’l Documentary Ass’n (Jan 15, 2025)

Khalidi, Rashid, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 (2020)

Lukenville, Mackenzie, “The Only Path Forward: ‘No Other Land,’” Int’l Documentary Ass’n (Dec. 5, 2024)

Sfard, Michael, Occupation from Within: A Journey to the Roots of the Constitutional Coup (2025)

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