This review was originally published at Give Me Some Light on Substack last week.
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March 15th’s breaking news: One of the Palestinian co-directors of the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, Hamdan Ballal, was attacked and beaten by Israeli settlers. Israeli soldiers then seized him, and his whereabout are, at this writing unknown.
This is not the typical homecoming for filmmakers who have won Oscars.
Basel Adra, another co-director, witnessed the detention and said around two dozen settlers — some masked, some carrying guns, some in Israeli uniform — attacked the village. Soldiers who arrived pointed their guns at the Palestinians, while settlers continued throwing stones.
“We came back from the Oscars and every day since there is an attack on us,” Adra told The Associated Press. “This might be their revenge on us for making the movie. It feels like a punishment.”
[UPDATE: Hallal has since been released. Here are details from NPR and The New York Times.]
It seems high time that I post about No Other Land, a documentary I saw a few weeks ago, and one that has weighed heavily on my heart every day since.
I’m writing this review somewhat hastily, as the demands at school have been heavy lately. But I don’t think it’s wise to wait until I have the luxury of a full day to compose this — I’m not sure when that opportunity will come. And this is too urgent an issue for me to wait around.
I’ll start with the obvious — the conflict between Israel and Palestine is so fierce and so complicated that no movie review is going to address it sufficiently. (If you want to quickly educate yourself, here’s a January 2025 BBC News summary.)
And I am not here to claim any deep historical wisdom or to “pick a side” between Israel or Palestine. That would be a show of ignorance. Hamas, the political organization that has controlled the Gaza Strip since 2007, has committed acts of terrorism against Israel and has made statements in the past about aiming to destroying Israel. They have greatly exacerbated the conflict, even though it seems that many Palestinians do not support Hamas or its violence. Meanwhile, the Israelis, whose claims of “self-defense” do not align with their tactics, are following a playbook of genocidal violence against all Palestinians regardless of whether or not they oppose the cruelty of Hamas. And the international community continues to grant them unconscionable freedom to do so.
This doesn’t get fixed by choosing sides. While the dream of a two-state solution seems honorable and the only possible alternative to the ongoing slaughter, it has proven unachievable so far, in part because the leadership on either side seems unwilling to seriously entertain the notion of giving up their grudges over blood already shed.
I make no claim to have a winning strategy to propose. But I am certain that the way forward requires truth-telling.
And No Other Land is a bold investment in truth-telling. We have before us a remarkable document, a personal testimony full of front-lines footage that gives us a detailed counternarrative to the version of the conflict being presented in so much Western media coverage. I suspect I will still be thinking about it decades from now.
It’s powerful for many reasons, none more affecting than the fact that the filmmakers—a partnership of Palestinians and Israelis—have risked their lives to make it. Palestinians Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal are crying out for the world to see what is actually happening to Masafer Yatta, the cluster of villages at the southern end of the occupied West Bank. And Israelis Yuval Abraham (a journalist) and Rachel Szor (a cinematographer) see through their own nation’s duplicitous strategies, and they have committed themselves to documenting the violence playing out in front of them over this span between 2019 and 2023.
I brace myself every day for breaking news that these truth-tellers are paying a cruel price for their service.
As one who loves the teachings of Jesus, I feel compelled to recommend this film to you. Jesus teaches us to dedicate ourselves to the work of truth-telling, reconciliation, and peacemaking, and here is a conflict as deep and difficult as any on the planet right now. I think we’re supposed to be involved. But this isn’t just about loving our neighbors. It’s also about accountability. I hope my fellow Americans will see the movie and bear its burdens with me because we are complicit in the crimes unfolding onscreen.
And the violence is undeniable. Anyone with a conscience will feel sick watching bulldozers and tanks move into this struggling neighborhood and start smashing homes, shelters for farm animals, and even active schools which are full of children until moments before the destruction. Mothers and children weep while Israeli soldiers throw all of their belongings out into the dust and then crush their homes. Large families flee into caves where they must survive in cramped spaces. Incredibly courageous villagers host non-violent protests even as the Israeli forces flaunt automatic weapons. We witness baseless arrests and abductions. We witness Israeli soldiers shooting protestors, leaving paralyzed one individual we’ve come to know as part of Basel’s family, and eventually killing another. We watch as Israeli forces take away their cars and their generators, and then cut off their resources for food and even water. (I had to keep reminding myself that I would feel similar rage if I were watching footage of Hamas carrying out terrorist attacks against Israelis — but then I would remember, again, that the Palestinians onscreen are not responsible for that, nor do they have sway with their cruel government.) The Israelis’ claim that they are seizing these Gaza territories “for military training” seems dubious at best (and it is negated by details revealed later in the film). Meanwhile, these villagers are told to leave their homes with “no other land” available to sustain their lives.
The psychological and emotional torture being inflicted on these families in front of these cameras is clearly about more than territory — it’s about hatred and a resolve to erase these people from the earth.
Our heartache will linger with us long after the credits roll, as we watch how this very violence, and worse, continues to play out without any tangible intervention from nations that claim to prioritize peace. You can read testimonies in this IndieWire story of what has been happening since the film started winning awards.
This is the kind of movie that Israeli leadership would hope to prevent us from seeing, as it impresses upon us that the Palestinians are human beings—multi-generational families trying to survive in desperate conditions, and that, while they pose no threat in their simple routines of survival, they are being cut off by violent mobs of Israeli settlers and by the Israeli military from all of the basic resources they need for survival. It is would be hard for anyone to see the violence playing out onscreen and make an argument that these are not the strategies of genocide.
The merit of this work has, thank God, been recognized in America to the extent that, even as the U.S. government continues to supply Israel with weapons to carry out this violence, No Other Land won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature in February of this year. And that’s only the latest of many accolades from film festival juries and critics around the world. But it has stirred up plenty of controversy, predictably, in America, where some would have us believe that to be moved by the plight of the Palestinians is equivalent to antisemitism. (Just look at the conflict over the film’s exhibition in Florida.) I was fortunate enough to see No Other Land in Seattle during several days of screenings at the Seattle Film Festival’s Uptown Theater. The large auditorium sold out screening after screening. And as the end-credits rolled, we sat in silent amazement, heartbreak, and righteous anger, unable to deny the evils that what we had seen.
I don’t know that I have ever felt so empathetic toward those Jews who wanted Jesus to rise up as a revolutionary messiah and lead them in a violent overthrow of Roman oppressors. Had Jesus walked among these Palestinians, I would have wanted to see him lead a fierce resistance to the Israelis… and, in view of their unceasing material and (im)moral support, America. You won’t hear me singing patriotic songs anymore. There’s no virtue in fighting evil empires only when that serves your bottom line. The curtain has been pulled back on so many of America’s self-aggrandizing lies, exposing the rot in America’s soul. (Evidence of just how our complicity in such horrors is increasing played out in front of us just this weekend.)
But Jesus did answer that call for revolution. Not the way his neighbors wanted him to — but he did. His revolution was to reject outright any engagement in the binary violence, and instead upend the whole game with love. His claim was that suffering and death are not the marks of losing any battle. He did not lash out at the violence. He introduced a grander vision that showed aggression and retaliatory violence are an endlessly destructive and self-destructive cycle, and that there is a grander battle at hand in which love is the ultimate path to redemption and renewal. His way didn’t look like victory. It looked like failure. That is, until some caught a glimpse of the idea that death might not have any real power in God’s grand scheme, that Jesus was being revealed as more powerful than his enemies could have dreamed, and that those who deal in death are in for quite an awakening someday when the folly and futility of their evils are fully exposed. Spoiler: The last shall be first! The poor in spirit will inherit the earth! The lowly will be lifted up!
Still, this tests my faith as much as any film I’ve seen. There is, in the fighting over borders, no sign of any hope for progress, reconciliation, healing or peace. But in truth-telling, in small gestures of kindness, in the love of these world-weary activists, there are glimpses of something that transcends time, something that rings true, something that speaks of a country no military incursion has any part in. It suggests that all of this cruelty is a fever that might someday break when we wake from this half-life and behold the cosmos as they really are.
No Other Land is what film critics like to call “harrowing” — and this time, with all of the bulldozers and diggers, the word is more literal than usual. It’s an ordeal to sit through, but an entirely necessary one, because to turn away is to perpetuate the problem. We are called to love our neighbors, not just with donations to their cause, not just with stickers signaling support, and (God forbid) not just with the politicians’ empty “thoughts & prayers”™, but with such clear-eyed attention that we cannot help but be moved and changed by what we behold.
“And when Jesus comes along saying that the greatest command of all is to love God and to love our neighbor, he too is asking us to pay attention,” says the great Presbyterian minister Frederick Buechner. “If we are to love God, we must first stop, look, and listen for him in what is happening around us and inside us. If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors. With our imagination as well as our eyes, that is to say like artists, we must see not just their faces but the life behind and within their faces. Here it is love that is the frame we see them in.”
I suspect that Buechner would have urged us all to see this film. But it’s one thing to see the film. It’s another thing to know what to do next. How exactly should we bear such heavy witness?
Here I am, typing paragraph after paragraph about what I believe to be true, saying the same essential things over and over again about our interconnectedness, our need for one another, our equality. I’m thinking about how I’ve voted for candidates who might have made better choices in order to make a stronger difference, and how I’ve sent money to various causes. Despite all of these things, it seems like the collapse of hope for these communities just accelerates.
I can turn to the prayers of the distraught prophets and poets, as Jesus did in his own anguish: My God, my God, why have you forsaken them?
I can sing the gospel songs born of persecution. I can lament:
I believe in the kingdom come
When all the colors will bleed into one
But yes I’m still running…You broke the bonds and you loosed the chains
Carried the cross and all my shame, all our shame
You know I believe it…But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.
I can hold in hope to the promises of God within those Scriptures — that, on a grander level than the here and now, the oppressors’ claims will collapse. Those who have suffered injustice will be raised up. And even the most violent and catastrophic deeds of the arrogant and the hateful will be erased, reconciling all of us against their petty and shameful efforts. In the kingdom of God, all such categories that people fight and kill for will be erased and we will be revealed as interconnected, inseparable, equal — a community everlasting.
In the meantime, I can help amplify the testimony of Basel and Yuval. I can make sure their story is seen and heard, and trust that the truth will do its work in hearts that have not yet been hardened.
As another great song goes: “We’re one, but we’re not the same / We’ve got to carry each other.”