The Israeli and the Palestinian who teamed up to film one of the best documentaries of the year: ‘The camera is our only weapon’

The first memory Basel Adra says he has of his childhood is of his father’s arrest by the Israel Defense Forces. Two years later, when Adra was seven years old, he was already taking part in his first demonstration against the expulsion, authorized by the Israeli Supreme Court, of more than 1,000 villagers from Masafer Yatta, in the southern West Bank, which has been occupied by Israel since 1967. A 25-minute drive away, in the Jewish town of Be’er Sheva, Yuval Abraham, the same age, was growing up. His Jewish-Arab grandfather spoke to his grandmother in the language of the Quran when he didn’t want his grandson to understand what they were talking about. That territorial proximity, but a huge chasm in terms of citizens’ rights, has led them 20 years later to be the stars and co-directors of No Other Land, winner of the Silver Bear for best documentary at the 2024 Berlinale and other awards at prestigious festivals such as the International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam, Visions du Réel, and the Sheffield DocFest.

“We come from two different societies but we share the same values and fight for the same goals. We want justice and an end to apartheid, for everyone to be free and equal. Those are the values that have united us,” Adra, now 27, tells EL PAÍS at a hotel in Mallorca, where he traveled last week to attend the Spanish premiere of the film at the 14th Atlántida Mallorca Film Fest. He makes it clear that he prefers to be asked about the eviction and forced mobilization of Palestinians in the West Bank that the film documents, and not so much about himself or his relationship with Abraham. “It’s very hard for us to be screening the film in Spain or Berlin, places where people live in peace and have a joyful life, while the nightmare and attacks continue in Gaza. People are being killed and schools are being tapped by the Israeli occupation.”

Adra gave a similar empathetic speech when he picked up the Berlinale statuette for No Other Land, a journalistic film in terms of its first-person account of over nearly five years of the ongoing demolition of homes and the territorial, legislative, and social mobility segregation of Palestinians. But it was his Jewish friend Abraham’s anti-occupation and anti-apartheid narrative at the ceremony that provoked extremists to call him a traitor, issuing death threats and harassing his family’s home in Be’er Sheva. “We are very proud of the speeches we made. I would be a traitor if I didn’t act according to my values and what I believe in. To me, that is much worse than being attacked by populists. We are fighting for a world where not only Israelis are free, but where Palestinians can also decide their future and not be in the hands of a foreign army,” he says.

Abraham learned Arabic at age 20 guided by his grandfather, born in Jerusalem but of Arabic descent, and with whom, before his death, he came to have conversations in the language. “It was a way to connect with my family’s roots in the past. It’s hard to imagine living in a place where a language is spoken all around you and you’ll never understand what they’re saying. I think learning a language is much more than just the language, it’s also understanding its speakers emotionally.” His interest in learning about the Arab perspective led him to found projects like Across the Wall, a platform he created in 2019 with Ahmed Alnaouq, which translates Palestinians’ testimonies and opinions about the government into Hebrew.

Shortly thereafter, Abraham would contact Adra via Facebook. The Palestinian was already posting images on his networks of the arrival of bulldozers in the village, escorted by the army, to dismantle schools and water wells. In fact, almost all of Adra’s life is visually documented because when he was born, in the late 1990s, the long dispute between the villagers and Israel — which had designated the area as a military training zone — began. His father, whose activist vocation he inherited, would mix home movies of Adra growing up with the first violent evictions by the Israeli army. His parents struggled to obtain basic services such as school, electricity, or access to clean water. “The camera is the only tool we have in the face of the oppression we face; we don’t have much else to fight the occupation machine,” he says. “Growing up in this family and community of activists made me feel a responsibility to continue down that path.”

Abraham and Adra claim to be journalists before filmmakers, but none of the articles they wrote for the independent +972 Magazine had the media impact and popular response of No Other Land. They acknowledge the momentum of being honored at the Berlinale, which led them, they say, to receive hundreds of requests and messages from people and organizations who wanted to see the film. And they will take it as far and wide as possible: “We have a long, long journey ahead of us, which is to bring this film to as many audiences as we can,” says Adra.

Neither Adra nor Abraham, nor the other two directors and camera operators behind the documentary — Israeli Rachel Szor and Palestinian Hamdan Ballal — were prepared to include the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israeli territory in the film, which left 1,200 Israelis dead and sparked the war that has resulted in the deaths of over 39,000 Palestinians. They included an epilogue on how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s offensives in the Gaza Strip are having repercussions in the occupied West Bank, where armed settlers knowingly shot Adra’s cousin. The tense situation has caused many of the farmers to flee the area, but some are holding out, like Adra’s family: “I don’t know how much longer they can hold on. The settlers, backed by the government, are building more and more settlements and demolishing Palestinian property.”

Abraham is saddened because he lived with Adra’s family for several years to make the film. They ate together, played with the children and smoked hookah. It is during these scenes, in which they discuss their aspirations, careers, and motivations, that the Israeli realizes the differences between them despite just a few kilometers of territorial separation. A state of consciousness that he used to denounce apartheid in his Berlinale acceptance speech and that he is now raising again: “To get here and talk to you, I flew from the airport that is in my country because I am Israeli. Basel, who is here next to me, had to go to another country because the Palestinians don’t even have an airport. So why if we were born in the same place, under the same rules, in the same country, why do I have an airport and he doesn’t? Why do I have the right to vote and he doesn’t?”

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