“You can go wherever you want. Not me”: the documentary about the impossible life of Palestinians who traveled from Berlin to a school in the West Bank

In a sequence from

No Other Land

, the documentary awarded last month at the Berlinale, its co-directors, protagonists and already friends - the Israeli Yuval Abraham and the Palestinian Basel Adra - joke about fleeing together to the Maldives to escape the exhausting and frustrating struggle to defend Masafer Yata, the area in the southern West Bank from which more than a thousand residents can be legally expelled at any time (the Israeli Supreme Court confirmed it in 2021 as a shooting zone), the army floods wells and demolishes schools, houses and electric poles, and hundreds of its inhabitants have given up and dismantled the village to settle elsewhere.

The public laughs at the occurrence of the Maldives.

Adra – the Palestinian who defends his land and cannot leave the West Bank – then reminds Abraham – who, as an Israeli, can return to his home in Jerusalem at any time – that their shared dream is impossible: “You can go wherever you want.

“Not me,” he tells her.

The audience's smile freezes and remains silent.

There are more than 200 Israeli and international activists, Palestinian locals and friends, so everyone – from one side or the other of the equation – knows it's true.

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They watch the documentary wherever it takes place, sitting on plastic chairs and despite the cold in the schoolyard (which appears in the film) that Adra attended as a child, in the town of Al Tuwani.

Neighbors distribute coffee with cardamom, sweets and soft drinks (they have already broken their fast for Ramadan), while children run between the rows.

This is the way in which they wanted to release it three weeks after their acceptance speeches for the award for best documentary at the last Berlinale went around the world, became almost a matter of state in Germany and earned them so much criticism and threats of death because of his criticism of Israel that Abraham postponed returning to his country.

This past Thursday, in Al Tuwani, he looked downcast.

The paradox is that the premiere itself proves Abraham's words.

Israeli activists – some of whom know the area because they come in shifts to prevent settler attacks with their presence – have been able to come to Al Tuwani because it is in zone C. It is 60% of the occupied West Bank territory that the Israeli army fully controls and where half a million Jewish settlers live, in settlements built since it was conquered in the Six-Day War of 1967, according to the division established in the Oslo Accords of 1993. They have arrived in buses, vans and cars from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, willing to help with transportation.

And, as an activist reminds them on the road, they will call the police if their compatriots come down from a nearby settlement to attack them.

Palestinians in the West Bank are, however, subject to military legislation and have movement limited by military checkpoints, fences, sand mounds, permits and segregated roads.

An image from the documentary 'No Other Land', about the destruction of a West Bank community.

This reality – for which the screening is not celebrated in Al Tuwani only for the symbolism, but also because both can come together – is what Abraham pointed out in his controversial speech at the Berlinale: “I live in a civil regime and Basel in a military one.

We live 30 minutes from each other, but I have the right to vote and Basel does not.

I can move freely around the country, but Basel, like millions of Palestinians, is trapped in the West Bank.

“This apartheid

situation

between the two, this inequality, has to end.”

Abraham, a 29-year-old journalist, received so many threats that his parents had to leave home.

He decided to stay a few days in Cyprus, for fear of being attacked when landing in his country.

A tweet in which he regretted the criticism in Germany of his speech (“If this is what you are doing with your guilt for the Holocaust... I don't want your guilt,” he concluded) has 60,000 likes.

Basel Adra (left) and Yuval Abraham, collecting the award for best documentary at the Berlinale on February 24. Anadolu (Anadolu via Getty Images)

Now back and in a brief meeting with the press before the screening, he tells an anecdote that reflects this situation.

“When I returned to Jerusalem, I had a

flashback

to the days when I slept here, when Basel told me that when he was five years old [after his father's first arrest] he would go to sleep with his slippers on in case he had to run away.

I remembered that, but at the same time I knew that I was in Jerusalem, an Israeli soldier was not going to enter my house in the middle of the night and I did not have to sleep with my shoes on," he points out alongside Adra, in the classroom. in which he studied.

Today both are activists, journalists and new co-directors.

“It is difficult to lead a normal life”

The documentary not only narrates the situation of Masafer Yata.

Also how they both forge their friendship between silences, laughter and conversations in Arabic while smoking water pipes.

Since Abraham arrives as a journalist for the first time and a distant Adra asks him to be “sensitive” when asking people until October 2023, shortly after the Hamas attack that triggered the Gaza war and multiplied the number of dead and displaced people in the West Bank forced.

“It is difficult to live a normal life when so many people are dying and starving.

We will continue talking about Gaza [as he did in his speech at the Berlinale] and Masafer Yata,” Adra pointed out before the screening, to which the audience reacted with standing applause for almost a minute.

“This moment gives me strength, but it is difficult for me to be optimistic seeing the facts on the ground,” he admitted later.

One of the attendees, Palestinian activist Hisham Sharabati, exemplified the facts on the ground to which Adra alluded.

He says he used to visit twice a week from the nearby city of Hebron, but this is only the second since the war began.

Next to him, a friend urges him out of fear: “Come to the car, come, it's already night and I don't want it to be later, because of the settlers.”

The Palestinian and co-director Basel Adra (above), during the screening of the documentary.Patricia Martínez (EFE)

The documentary also clearly shows how a settler shoots an unarmed Palestinian while a soldier watches.

Years before, also in Masafer Yata, one soldier left another quadriplegic when they struggled over the confiscation of an electrical generator.

Power is, in fact, a frequent element in

No Other Land.

It is the one that the then representative of the Middle East Quartet, Tony Blair, had in 2006, when he immediately achieved the legalization of the school, which the Israeli authorities were going to demolish, when visiting Al Tuwani.

The one about the settler who tells Adra “Go write an article” while he helplessly watches an attack on the town by hooded youths.

Or the one exhibited by Ilan, the border policeman who decides which structures to demolish each week, by indolently responding to Abraham's reproaches in the language they share, Hebrew.

- You know you destroy their lives, right?

- Don't bother me in the mornings.

For this reason, the current Palestinian filmmaker, who already attended his first demonstration at the age of seven, says at one point in the film to the more enthusiastic Abraham: “You intend to end the occupation in 10 days.

"It takes patience, getting used to defeats."

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