‘No Other Land’ is a documentation of the clogging up of the Israeli psyche– It’s not a movie. It’s a heartache
‘No Other Land’ is a collection of images that allow a glimpse into reality itself. And reality itself is heartbreaking, dementing, drives you mad. You want to break the screen, to shatter it, to shatter us. ■ A piece of reality from which only one simple conclusion emerges: We, the Israelis, have become insensitive, impervious and devoid of empathy, devoid of morality. Bad people, simply bad people.
By Alon Idan • Translated by Sol Salbe
No Other Land is not a “leftist film.” Partly because it is not “leftist”, and also because it is not a “film”. I is not a leftist unless you define “leftist” as human; Unless opposing humanness is “right-wing.” It can also be put this way: If a person who defines themself as “right-wing” watches a film and does not feel pain, guilt, sadness, it is not because they are “right-wing,” but because they have lost touch with the parts of their psyche that are connected to concepts such as empathy, identification, humanness.
It’s not a “film” either, because it’s just the simple reality. Yes, of course it was filmed, and it was certainly defined as a “documentary,” and of course it required money, so it’s a “Norwegian-Palestinian production.” But all these words, these concepts, this language — it’s all intra-cinematic language. No Other Land is none of these. It’s just a collection of images that allow a glimpse into reality itself. And reality itself is heartbreaking, dementing, drives you mad. You want to break the screen, to shatter it, to shatter us. You keep muttering, “The poor person’s Lamb” [Prophet Nathan’s fable delivered to King David] and say to yourself: We lost. We lost. There’s no way we didn’t lose.
I read a film review by Oron Shamir, one of Haaretz’s film critics, about No Other Land. I read it and couldn’t believe it. “The focus is on a little girl, who is in a location that is dangerous to her due to the destruction and she is also experiencing emotional distress. It’s cinematic manipulation, not any old documentation.” A little girl is in her poor, temporary, miserable home, the one that has been demolished over and over again because Israel insists on destroying it to make room for the settlers — and that, well, is “cinematic manipulation, not any old documentation.” In what kind of world is reality as described here is “cinematic manipulation”?
It doesn’t end there. “Just as it is customary to say about war and military films that by nature, never stray too far from officially sanctioned narrative, No Other Land also favours its creators’ agenda over the artistic or journalistic act.” An artistic act? A journalistic act? And what exactly is this “act”? Is there anything more artistic and journalistic than presenting the warped, cruel, insensitive, and callous reality as it is?
“As a film, it is flawed, and if it does win an Oscar next week, it will be the political reasons that will prevail over cinematic values,” he writes. The “political reasons”? Aren’t these the human causes? The moral reasons? The reasons why, and only because of them, there is any point in a “documentary” is that it is supposed to expose the reality? And in general, what are all those “cinematic values”? Do you study them in film school? At the Cinematheques? Isn’t watching life itself as it is — horrible, outrageous, so unfair — enough to be considered a “good movie”? Where is this place where the mind is taught to be enslaved to form, to style, to effects, to “cinematic language”, at the expense of the content itself, reality itself, pain itself, which are reflected in every frame of this wonderful-terrible film?
“Minister of Culture” Miki Zohar objection to the screening of No Other Land as an objection to projecting a 95-minute crack through which one can look at a piece of reality from which only one simple conclusion emerges: We, the Israelis, have become insensitive, impervious and devoid of empathy, devoid of morality. Bad people, simply bad people. And a few hours after No Other Land won the Oscar, we watched those unimaginable scenes, the kind that language has difficulty transcribing, when bereaved families were beaten by members of the Knesset Guard because they wanted to enter a discussion about the establishment of a State Commission of Inquiry about October 7. And once again these words came to mind: insensitive, impenetrable, lacking empathy, lacking morality.
And, the very same words are said over and over again about Benjamin Netanyahu. He, too, is insensitive, impenetrable, and lacks empathy. And suddenly there coalesces some sort of an idea that this is not by happenstance. That Netanyahu is our punishment for exactly that. That this man was our way of hiding from ourselves our insensitivity, our ignorance, our loss of empathy, the disintegration of morality for almost 20 years. That we brought it to hide ourselves. And for that we have been punished.
The punishment looks like this: it makes us feel the same horrible emotions that we sought to hide with it. Everything we say about him, we could be saying about ourselves. Everything that the residents of Masafer Yatta feel about the soldiers who are us, we suddenly feel about our government. We thought we had managed to detach ourselves from the injustice we were doing with the help of the man who promised to “manage the conflict” — he offered a deal that Israelis can have vacations abroad and buy new iPhones, and he would take care of the rest. But like any emotional repression, it comes back to us and begins to gnaw at us. The “reappearance of the supressed” is the reappearance of the concepts: opacity, insensitiveness, lack of empathy, lack of morality.
And maybe that’s the source of the pain, the frustration, the sadness. The reason we feel so unsettled. We still insist on not connecting all the dots. We insist on suppressing our feeling and thoughts. But there is no other way. There isn’t.
Yuval Abraham did us a great favour. He showed the world, but especially us, that it is still possible. That there are still people. He is the part of our heart that is still beating. We shouldn’t persecute him, we need to thank him.
No Other Land is a documentation of the clogging of the Israeli psyche. It’s not a movie, it’s one big heartache.
