By Joel Margolis, JNS
The Oscar-nominated documentary film “No Other Land” is a polemic of Palestinian grievance against Israel. Expect to be agitated, not educated.
The Oscar-nominated documentary “No Other Land” portrays the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the microcosm of a collection of Palestinian Arab settlements called Masafer Yatta. In that cluster of makeshift villages, the film gives the impression that impoverished Palestinians confront the oppression of Israeli military demolition crews in an existential struggle to prevent the destruction of Palestinian homes, the displacement of their people and the theft of their land. But ultimately, we are told, the righteous Palestinian resistance survives.
The reality of Masafer Yatta is altogether different. The history of that area exemplifies how Palestinians illegally seize plots of land in Judea and Samaria, and how Israel lawfully defends against these incursions.
The 1920 San Remo Treaty and 1922 Palestine Mandate, under the supervision of the League of Nations, created the state that became Israel. The West Bank, known historically as Judea and Samaria, was part of that allocated territory. These instruments of international law were justified by widespread recognition that the designated land was the ancestral homeland of the Jews.
The State of Israel emerged in 1948 and acceded to membership in the United Nations a year later. By that point, Jordan had illegally invaded and occupied the eastern portion of Jerusalem and land on the west bank of the Jordan River. However, in the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel liberated those territories from Jordanian occupation. Israel then validly applied its sovereign governance to eastern Jerusalem but decided to forego implementing its sovereign right to the so-called West Bank area pending negotiation of peace deals with its Arab rivals.
The Palestinians never had a state that could be occupied. They never even had a treaty or comparable agreement granting them legal ties to eastern Jerusalem, the West Bank or the Gaza Strip. On the contrary, the original 1964 Palestine National Charter of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) expressly disclaimed Palestinian rights to those three domains because they were occupied by PLO ally countries: Jordan and Egypt.
Israel and the Palestinians began an effort to make peace in 1993 when they signed the first of six agreements known as the Oslo Accords. In the area called the West Bank, the accords awarded Israel interim control over a territory labeled “Area C,” and granted the Palestinians interim control of Area A. Area B was marked as shared.
Masafer Yatta lies in Area C, which places it under Israeli civilian and security control.
About 200,000 Palestinians reside in Area C. Some of them live in Masafer Yatta. But in 1999, when Palestinians erected an additional batch of shacks in Masafer Yatta, they violated the Oslo Accords by failing to obtain building permits from Israel’s Civil Administration.
Palestinian Arabs have orchestrated many such unlicensed land grabs in Area C. Using slapdash combinations of cement blocks, mud bricks, corrugated metal sheets, plastic tarps and portable electric generators, they create chess pawns strategically positioned to block the buildout of Israeli communities and enlarge the pretense of “Palestinian land.” The decision to add Palestinian settlements in Masafer Yatta was especially provocative because that barren expanse had been classified in the 1980s as an Israeli military training zone.
The Masafer Yatta builders ignored the Israeli Civil Administration’s stop-work orders. Then came 22 years of litigation that hamstrung the process of demolishing the structures. Finally, in 2022, Israel’s High Court of Justice ruled that the disputed Masafer Yatta outposts must be removed. None of the affected villagers were expelled. Instead, when the demolition order was enforced, they relocated to nearby cave homes, where Muslims, Christians and Jews had lived for centuries.
A truthful and less one-sided documentary about Masafer Yatta would reveal how patiently Israel legally defends its sovereign rights and the Oslo Accords, despite Palestinian schemes to circumvent those agreements. Better yet, an honest filmmaker would compare Area C with Area A, which remains under complete Palestinian rule. Israel prohibits its citizens from entering Area A due to the threat of murder by the local Arab population. If any Israelis were caught trying to build a home in Area A, they would probably not live long enough to enjoy the courtesy of a trial.
