An ominous bulldozer rolls in the distance as Basel Adra’s body lies in a fetal position on the rocky valley below, his right hand gently caressing a few blades of grass. This riveting scene doubles as the official poster and main message of No Other Land – the colonizer destroys, the colonized nurtures.
Set in the Masafer Yatta region on the southern West Bank of Palestine’s Hebron Governorate or Area C, No Other Land tells the story of a people’s struggle against erasure. A four-person Palestinian-Israeli collective determined to unmask the military occupation’s vicious destruction filmed the documentary from 2019 to 2023, although the history began decades earlier. In 1981, the then Minister of Defense, Ariel Sharon, ordered Israeli Forces to establish training zones. Known as “Firing Zone 918,” the measure meant civilians need special permission to be there or construct anything. Claiming the land for military training gave Israeli officials an excuse for demolitions, evictions, and forced transfers – or in a term, ethnic cleansing.
Via childhood archival family footage, co-director Adra weaves video clips and images of confrontations with Israeli soldiers. Memories of his father’s arrest and Adra’s first protest at the tender age of 7 are interspersed with happier times, his nephew as a little boy running after sheep, his mother lying in bed beside her daughter, whispering love into her ear before bedtime.
Those lighter moments are fleeting – a peaceful life for Adra, co-director Hamdan Ballal, their families, and their communities is impossible under the oppressor’s stranglehold. In disbelief, we watch as Israelis demolish homes, a school, a playground. Enraged, we see soldiers pour cement down a water well, take hedge clippers to a water pipe, and conduct terrifying night raids, all with impunity.
We watch in despair as a young man, Harun Abu Aram, while attempting to wrestle an electric generator from a soldier, is shot in the neck at point-blank range. Abu Aram ends up paralyzed from his wounds, and since the Israeli government refuses his family a building permit, his mother is forced to care for him in a cave – yes, a cave!! – without running water, for the next two years, as his health worsens. Harun took his last breath on February 14, 2023, at age 26.
No Other Land captures all of this brazen brutality on film, documenting it for the world to witness. This got me wondering, “How much military savagery is enough for the West to take notice?” In one scene [from 2009], former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair is seen taking an escorted walking tour of a Masafer Yatta primary school. Surrounded by security staff and photographers, the then Middle East Special Envoy smiles for the cameras, shakes someone’s hand, and nods at something a person (off-camera) says. In light of this high-profile seven-minute trip – where Blair passes by Adra’s family home – the Israeli military pauses the scheduled demolition of that school. In 2022, they went ahead and razed it to the ground. In May of the same year, under the guise of “military training,” the Israeli High Court of Justice authorized the eviction of approximately 1,000 Palestinians from Masafer Yatta.
Reflecting on the movie, I keep circling back to the same questions: How much is too much? What will it take for the atrocities to end? Both bring me to the film’s numerous accolades. From Lisbon to London, Berlin to Belfast, Amsterdam to Athens, the documentary garnered international acclaim, including winning the 2025 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
So, with all the buzz – and the coveted Oscar – No Other Land captivated audiences from Los Angeles to New York, showing in at least 100 cinemas across the United States. But it hasn’t gotten a U.S. distributor. No streaming platforms have picked it up. And the Miami Beach mayor even threatened a local arts theatre with eviction (and defunding) if it screened the film.
Why? One word: fear.
Doctor, freelance journalist, and filmmaker, Ahmed Twaij explored the topic in his March Al Jazeera opinion piece, “Why Is America Afraid of No Other Land?” According to Twaij, distributors are “afraid of showing Israel’s ongoing crimes.” He added that their fear illustrates “just how massive the campaign is to erase Palestine in the US, affecting every aspect of public life – from education to the media, and to arts and cinema.”
Whatever their reasons, I see it as both a silencing of Palestinian voices and a desire to continue to dehumanize and delegitimize anyone or anything that characterizes the Israeli military/government as criminals, monsters committing horrible crimes.
As a journalist and formerly diaspora-displaced Boricua, I can’t help but resonate with No Other Land. The unfathomable pain of the Palestinians breaks my heart over and over again. They are Brown people, just like me. They are Indigenous to their land, as am I and my people. We share an intense emotional and spiritual connection to our Indigenous ancestral motherland, which makes this film hit particularly hard.
I’m taken back to Adra’s opening line: “I started filming when we started ending.” I am still left wondering, will the Palestinian people survive this nightmare? Or will the Israeli government complete the ethnic cleansing of what is left of Palestine?
