In 2009, Tony Blair visited Masafer Yatta, a collection of hamlets in the Palestinian West Bank. He had come to see a school that had gained attention for having been rebuilt in defiance of Israeli attempts to tear down the village. After he returned home, Israel cancelled the demolition order for the school. “This,” Basel Adra says, “is a story about power.”
Adra is one of the directors of No Other Land, a documentary about the experience of living through, and attempting to defy, Israel’s attempts to erase Masafer Yatta to create an IDF “firing zone”. Last week, it won an Oscar. In the 1980s, Israeli authorities designated part of the area as “Firing Zone 918”, a closed military area. In 1999, the government issued eviction orders against Palestinians in the area for “illegally living in a firing zone”. Two decades of court battles ended in 2022 when Israel’s supreme court ruled the villagers could be expelled.
