General
Nearly 10 years have passed since I visited a Jewish settlement outside of Hebron, the largest city in the West Bank, and was confronted by a settler at the gravesite of Baruch Goldstein.
Goldstein became a hero to hard-right settlers in 1994, a year after the Oslo accords were signed, when he walked into an ancient mosque in Hebron with an automatic rifle and began shooting, killing 29 Palestinian worshippers and wounding 125 before the survivors beat him to death.
On the day I visited, his tombstone was adorned with freshly placed rocks along its perimeter, a gesture that honors the deceased and marks recent visits. An engraved tribute offered this praise: “He gave his life for the people of Israel, its Torah, and land.”
I thought of that visit on Sunday night when the Oscar for best documentary was awarded to “No Other Land,” a film made by a crew of Palestinians and Israelis that shows the relentless efforts to destroy a tiny Arab village in the West Bank to make way for a new military training ground. You see bulldozers crushing homes, forcing the survivors to live in caves nearby. You see Jewish settlers harassing them and scaring their children, and in one instance, an Israeli soldier shooting an unarmed Palestinian man in the neck as he tries to stop them from taking his family’s generator.
The movie documents the friendship that grows between its two main figures, the Palestinian activist, Basel Adra, and the Israeli journalist, Yuval Abraham, both co-directors of the film. But every night, Abraham goes home to safety and security, generating resentment among some villagers, while Adra stays behind, wondering if another midnight raid awaits.
“When I look at Basel, I see my brother,” Abraham said at the Oscar ceremony. “But we are unequal. We live in a regime where I am free under civilian law, and Basel is under military laws that destroy his life.”
The film carries a moral urgency, one that Adra underscored at the awards ceremony by describing Israel’s actions as “ethnic cleansing.” It’s a claim that has grown harder to dispute as Jewish settlements relentlessly expand in all corners of the West Bank, and the death toll of Palestinians killed in the West Bank during confrontations with Israeli soldiers and settlers since the Oct. 7 attacks is just over 890, according to the United Nations. At least two members of the Netanyahu cabinet have called for outright annexation, as have leaders of the settlement movement.
“The year 2025 will be the year of sovereignty in the West Bank,” Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said in November.
Conservatives in Israel have dismissed the film as propaganda. Miki Zohar, the Minister of Culture, called it “sabotage” that “chose to amplify a narrative that distorts Israel’s image” around the world.
It is true that the film shows only one side of a tangled and fraught story, like most movies and books on the conflict. There are no suicide bombers in the film, no rockets fired on Jewish homes, and no discussion of Hamas’ mass murders and kidnappings on October 7, which took place shortly after filming was done. (For a gripping account of that attack, try “The Gates of Gaza” by Amir Tibon, an Israeli journalist who lived in a kibbutz near the Gaza border and spent hours hiding in the safe room of his house, huddled with his wife and two daughters, while the massacre took place outside his door.)
But “No Other Land” deserves this award. Many great documentaries champion one side in a dispute, as does my own favorite, Eyes on the Prize, the 1987 series on the civil rights movement in America.
“No Other Land” brings to life an ugly aspect of this conflict that Americans too often ignore. This is not about Israel hunting down Hamas fighters holding hostages in tunnels beneath schools and hospitals in Gaza. In the West Bank, we are witnessing a land grab, fueled by religious extremism and ethnic hatred. A two-state solution is almost impossible to imagine now that there are 144 Jewish settlements in the West Bank with a population that has grown to 490,000 — not counting the 220,000 Jewish residents of East Jerusalem.
That’s by design, and the Jewish settlers I talked to in their settlement near Hebron, Kiryat Arba, made no secret of it.
“This is the land of the Jewish, that’s all,” said one middle-aged settler, a woman who worked as an ambulance driver. “It’s right in the Torah. The idea of Palestinians is a myth. There is no nation of Palestine.”
At the Goldstein gravesite, the burly settler who approached us, Ofer Ohana, took it a step farther: “If the Arabs make trouble, we kill them,” he said. “This is our country. We must keep them afraid.”
Fear is not something you see much of in “No Other Land.” The Palestinians in this village, Masafer Yatta, were outgunned and outmanned, but they refused to leave, even when the bulldozers came, even when forced to live in caves. What, in the end, will Israel do about that?
Moran is a national political columnist for Advance Local and the former editorial page editor/columnist for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. He can be emailed at [email protected].
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