00;00;15;06 - 00;00;46;06

Jonathan Hafetz

Hi, I'm Jonathan Hafetz, and welcome to Law on Film, a podcast that looks at law through film and film through law. This episode, we look at no other Land, the 2024 Oscar winning documentary that shows the brutal destruction of a Palestinian community in the occupied West Bank. The film, which was recorded between 2019 and 2023, is told through the story of Bassel Adra, a young Palestinian activist who's been protesting the Israeli army's destruction of homes and eviction of villagers.

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Jonathan Hafetz

Basil Adra is assisted by Yuval Abraham, a Jewish Israeli journalist. Basel and Yuval are also two of the film's four directors to Basel and other Palestinians. The Israeli army is destroying their homeland. The Israeli army, however, counters that the inhabitants are on the land the military needs for live fire, military training, and that the evictions have been duly authorized by Israeli courts.

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Jonathan Hafetz

The situation turns violent. We see, for example, our cousin being shot by Israeli soldiers in the days after the October 7th, 2023 attacks. And Basil Adra himself is endangered by efforts to record the evictions and protests. The film not only provides a penetrating look at a Palestinian community in the West Bank, but also shows how the plight of those being forced off their land there, with literally nowhere else to go, contains a larger message about the continued frustration of Palestinian desires for a homeland.

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Jonathan Hafetz

I'm joined for this episode by Omer Bartos. Professor Bartos is the Dean's professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University. Born in Israel and educated at Tel Aviv University and Saint Anthony's College, Oxford, Professor Bartok's early research concerned the Nazi indoctrination of the Wehrmacht and the crimes committed in World War Two, which he analyzed in his books The Eastern Front 1941 to 1945 and Hitler's Army.

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Jonathan Hafetz

Professor bathtub has also written about the links between Total war and genocide, including in Murder in Our Midst, Mirrors of Destruction, and Germany's War in the Holocaust. His more recent work has focused on the inter-ethnic relations in the borderlands of Eastern Europe, such as erased vanishing traces of Jewish Galicia in present day Ukraine, and Anatomy of a genocide the life and death of a town called Jews Ask.

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Jonathan Hafetz

Professor Bartos most recent book is Genocide The Holocaust and Israel Palestine First Person in History in Times of Crisis, and is at work on other books, including Israel What Went Wrong? And The Broken Promise a personal Political History of Israel and Palestine. I'm also joined by Professor Lisa Hajar, and Lisa Hajar is professor and chair of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

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Jonathan Hafetz

Her research focus on law and conflict, including war crimes and other gross violations of international law, military occupations, and court and legal activism in pursuit of justice. She's the author of numerous publications, including Courting Conflict The Israeli Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza, International Law and 50 Years of Occupation and Law and Order. Human rights organizations, and the Palestinian Authority.

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Jonathan Hafetz

Her most recent book, The War in Court Inside the Long Fight Against Torture, was published by University of California Press in 2022. In her work, Professor Hajar often compares Israel and U.S. violations of international law and the forms of legal reasoning. Government lawyers can court to legalize illegal policies and practices. Omar. Welcome, Lisa. Welcome back to Law and Film.

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Jonathan Hafetz

Great to have you both on.

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Lisa Hajjar

Thank you.

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Omer Bartov

Thanks.

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Jonathan Hafetz

So the film takes place in massive regard to an area in the occupied West Bank near Hebron. So for some context for the film, what's the history and legal status of this territory?

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Lisa Hajjar

I mean, this is a very agricultural area in the Hebron Hills. And so people have been living in this area for, you know, a well over a century, if not longer. But the area itself, since the Oslo Accords, it's part of the occupied West Bank that Israel occupied in 1967. But as part of the Oslo Accords, I negotiated in 1993, which one of the outcomes was to divide the occupied territories into different forms of jurisdiction, and essentially the largest portion is called area C, in which Israel claims complete and total control.

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Lisa Hajjar

There's area A, which is Palestinian towns, and then area B, which is some villages, but in area C, which is under complete Israeli control, that's where these 13 communities are based. And so, you know, Israel has basically claimed area C, if not permanently. And I mean, it's it's likely that area C could be permanently annexed, but it's de facto annexed.

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Lisa Hajjar

And so what's been happening since 1999 when Israel began sort of the process of trying to evict people from these communities, declaring the whole area a closed military zone. And so that's been since 1999. That was sort of the beginning of what really gets depicted in No Other Land, but it really escalates, you know, over the years, increasing efforts to just forcibly remove these people on the claim that it's needed for military purposes.

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Jonathan Hafetz

And so Israel and the Israeli soldiers cite the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court ruling from 2022. So how does that play in and in terms of what Israel or the IDF's position is.

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Lisa Hajjar

Since 2000, the year 2000, that was, you know, when the order to sort of start evicting people the previous year, a judge allowed them to return in 2000, and then for the next 22 years, you know, there were efforts by the military to force them out, you know, and there were then injunctions, you know, against that. But it was this May 2022, High Court decision that basically said that, in fact, the residents of these areas are not permanent.

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Lisa Hajjar

So their status and rights in the land was unrecognized. And so that then, you know, sort of triggered moves by the military to sort of fast track the permanent demolition and destruction and eviction of all the populations. And I just would mention what's been happening recently. I mean, this is sort of like a postscript to the film in June 2025, the Army, you know, was sort of targeting one of the 13 communities and demolishing everything.

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Lisa Hajjar

And this has been ongoing. But, you know, homes, tents, caves, water facilities, etc.. And then on June 17th of this year, you know, it was actually during the war in Iran, Israel's war on Iran. The Israeli government submitted a letter to the High Court asking for the destruction of at least 12 of the villages and the expulsion of those inhabitants.

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Lisa Hajjar

And then on the following day, the Civil Planning Bureau, which is in Israeli military body that sort of controls land use, basically decided to reject all Palestinian building permits in what is called, you know, the whole area is called firing zone. 918 and so now demolition orders are being fast tracked and Palestinian building permits are being rejected, including ones that were already authorized.

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Lisa Hajjar

So we are really seeing in just recent days what may be the last chance for Palestinians to stay on this land. I mean, it is a full on, you know, expulsion operation to destroy and expel everybody from the area.

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Omer Bartov

I just want to add something to the sort of larger context of this, which is, you know, there's a book that just came out in Israel by my father was, well known civil rights lawyer, very impressive guy. And in the book he describes, among other things, the Supreme Court, of Israel, the same Supreme Court that Israeli citizens, demonstrated, to protect from the judicial coup between January and October 2023, which is actually ongoing.

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Omer Bartov

Of course, this so-called overhaul, that Supreme Court is the court that while saying that it could not rule on the case of the occupied territories because that was a political issue, that was yet to be determined, actually created the legal apparatus that facilitated the settlement project, including creating a kind of status, a legal status for extraterritorial Jewish citizens who live in the West Bank.

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Omer Bartov

And so much of what you see from the Supreme Court going all the way down to the local courts and then, of course, to the military judges there is a legal apparatus that was created to make kosher what has been declared now by the International Court of Justice in a recent ruling, completely illegal occupation. And that's just to underline the fact that all this legalese that is going on, including the declaration of areas of training that are needed for military use, is simply verbiage that is used by both military and legal authorities to sanction the expulsion of people from their land, and then taking that over that land, over by the state and handing it

00;09;40;29 - 00;10;13;17

Omer Bartov

over to settlers. That's not something that was invented after 1967. There are, of course, major precedents of that from 1948 onward. And the entire military regime that was imposed on Palestinians in Israel and Palestinian citizens in Israel between 1948 to 1966, was based on the same idea of taking land away from them, declaring military training areas and then handing those areas to civilians.

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Omer Bartov

But since 1967, this has been done in what is considered in international law as occupied territory. And so all of this, this sort of legal discourse of that within Israel, in an area that in international law, everything that happens, by settlers is actually illegal.

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Lisa Hajjar

Absolutely. And one thing I would sort of stress for listeners to appreciate is the sort of, you know, as Omar just mentioned, like there is a legal distinction between the occupied West Bank and Gaza and inside of Israel, although the practices are in a sense identical. But it was a guy named Mirjam Gar who ultimately ended up as the chief justice in the High Court of Justice.

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Lisa Hajjar

But when he was the military advocate general before 1967, he basically came up with this idea. He and there were some other thinkers, but it's a way of reinterpreting the law. And so the argument was that the argument that basically all of Israeli legalistic discourse has been built on is that the West Bank and Gaza are not occupied because they were not sovereign territory of any state in 1967.

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Lisa Hajjar

So the original claim was that they're administered territories and therefore, you know, Jewish claims or Jewish Israeli claims to those areas are not in violation of international law. But that's been absolutely crucial because, you know, Israel has, you know, while Israel was very much in this, one could say this for decades, Israel was very mindful of its reputation, its rule of law reputation.

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Lisa Hajjar

So it was projecting these contrary or contrary legal interpretations, but using the law itself to argue the justification, for those kind of policies. And so that sense of saying that, you know, we love the Geneva Conventions, they just don't apply to the West Bank and Gaza. We respect international law and human rights. But Palestinians, as stateless peoples living under Israeli administration, don't have any claim to legal rights that we are obligated to respect, except for those that we choose to.

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Lisa Hajjar

And so that's really set the ground for the legalistic framework. And I completely concur with Omar. And I think, you know, anybody who knows anything about, you know, the way in which the High Court of Justice has, treated Palestine over the decades. It's that it it's very much a facilitator of Israeli policy, and it facilitates the, you know, sort of and it gives, you know, Israelis, even Israeli liberals, the idea that the government should abide by the law with the High Court says something is legal, even though it's based on these completely contrary legal interpretations.

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Lisa Hajjar

It just varnishes what is essentially like a deep, you know, implacably erroneous understanding of what international law is and what the states rights in those territories are.

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Jonathan Hafetz

Yeah, we see that in the film where the, you know, the Israeli soldiers, I guess to some extent, settlers are kind of saying, you know, we're just what is enforcing the law, but it's this distorted right to describe the film zooms in on this. I must have forgotten this community's there. And so how accurate is this or how reflective is this?

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Jonathan Hafetz

What? But what about what's happening and what's happened elsewhere within the West Bank in terms of, you know, kind of the daily occurrences, that go on? I mean, how, you know, how much can you sort of extract from this generally.

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Lisa Hajjar

I think that, you know, there's been a tension within Israel that in some ways now, you know, sort of gone, you know, the tension that existed was, you know, settlers, you know, when the settler movement started, it's both religious and nationalistic types of people motivated to claim all of the historic land of Judea and Samaria as the rightful possession of the Jews exclusively.

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Lisa Hajjar

But there was a sense, you know, the kind of security, liberal or security types that basically always made a kind of militaristic argument about, you know, the existential threat Palestinians pose. But in some ways, you know, like after the Oslo Accords, I think in Omagh, maybe you might have a completely different perspective. But from my perspective or what I could understand, it's that a lot of Israelis were like, okay, we're just going to like, let the Palestinians have their areas.

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Lisa Hajjar

And like the main thing we want is separation. We just don't want to see Palestinians anymore. But that contradicted, in a sense, the settlers, you know, who wanted to completely encroach. And so even separation was insufficient. So but in recent, years, I mean, probably throughout this, you know, the decades of this century, the kind of violence and destruction, the unbridled, you know, permissibility of, settlers and others and the military to just seize Palestinian areas and disregard any claims that they have there as people or as, you know, the sort of inhabitants of the land.

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Lisa Hajjar

It's I mean, we saw it in so one we see it in Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem, you know, just the kind of aggressive appropriation disregard for any sense of humanitarian considerations like Palestinians. And I think the movie does a good job really capturing how the military and settlers that are, you know, depicted in the film, which I think are typical of what one might see in the West Bank, are really just see Palestinians and treat Palestinians as extraneous and expendable and removable in a sense.

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Lisa Hajjar

And so that kind of dehumanization, I think that's what's so powerful about film.

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Omer Bartov

I would agree with all of that. I would only add that while things were really bad until late 2022, and all of this was happening, and indeed behind this fiction of separation, two things happened since then. One is that a government was created, that is a government of the settlers, and a minister is being put into place. But other small who is not only Minister of finance, but is minister within the Ministry of Defense and as minister in the Ministry of Defense.

00;16;12;14 - 00;16;44;07

Omer Bartov

He's basically the boss of the West Bank, which is supposed to be again ruled by the military. But in fact, it's under a civilian minister. And that has meant that there has been a tremendous shift in terms of resources going to the settlers, to the settlements, and to the creation of more and more settlements, and has been more and more encroachment by the civilian authority on the military, even those members of the military who somehow want to keep some kind of law and order.

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Omer Bartov

And now basically under the thumb of the government. So that is one thing that we saw. And of course, we saw more and more violence as a result of that. But then after October 7th, this is going on steroids, you know, so what you have now is, first of all, what we see, of course, is first of all, almost weekly pogroms that are going on.

00;17;07;03 - 00;17;35;23

Omer Bartov

And those pogroms are carried out by the so-called, hilltop youth. But it's not only them, of course. It's far more of the settlers who are participating in the army is supposed to be in between the Palestinians and these hooligans, but in fact, they, facilitating this violence. They hardly ever arrest anyone. If they arrest people, they arrest Palestinians and most of the killings.

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Omer Bartov

And there's been a vast number of killings. If I understand right now, about 800 people have been killed in the West Bank since October 7th, most of them shot by Israeli soldiers, not by the settlers. So you have that. So there's much more violence now. And finally, you can see a pattern on the West Bank in general. Now that's not reflected in the movie, of course, because the movie was made before.

00;18;02;20 - 00;18;32;28

Omer Bartov

And the pattern is a creeping ethnic cleansing, which is beginning in the margins. So it's happening either in these rural communities in the South Hebron hills that are being pushed out and pushed into the towns, because where can they go? They go to the cities. They become slum dwellers and at the same time, attacks in the northern part, the West Bank on, refugee camps and their tactics are being imported from Gaza into the West Bank.

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Omer Bartov

So the West Bank is beginning to look, in part, the way Gaza started looking when the IDF moved in, moving in with tanks, with bulldozers, clearing up homes, and by now having evicted about 40,000 people from their homes. And many of these homes have been destroyed in the name of allowing heavy military equipment to go through those towns, through those refugee camps.

00;18;58;08 - 00;19;03;17

Omer Bartov

So things have way worse than what you see in the movie.

00;19;03;20 - 00;19;26;02

Lisa Hajjar

Agree? And like even, you know, thinking about what's happening in Janine and that area, Janine and Tukaram, you know, very much is the gasification of and Gaza was the Lebanon ification of Alice. I mean, so we've seen this kind of the docu doctrine where total destruction is sort of sanctified by the government on the grounds that, you know, the state can do anything.

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Lisa Hajjar

But it is, you know, that kind of I mean, what's I think, Jonathan, especially for, for a podcaster on the law, what is so, you know, moving and frustrating about this film is the constant invocation of the law. We were just sort of talking about that. But not only is it no other land, but like to have no state like it just really brings home the point, like Hannah Arendt had so famously, you know, disgusting, you know, in the to kind of a nation state, the end of the rights of man, you know, that it's a stateless people are uniquely vulnerable because there's no state to protect them from the state that controls and harms

00;20;01;06 - 00;20;23;27

Lisa Hajjar

them. And this is something that we can really see. You know, I think that that is a connecting thick fiber between Gaza and the West Bank and Jerusalem. You know, with that, the statelessness of Palestinians condition and the fact that the international community is not, you know, I mean, doing anything to let this, you know, a genocide in Gaza go on for over two years.

00;20;24;00 - 00;20;46;07

Lisa Hajjar

You know, it's just or 18 months. I'm bad at math, you know, it's just unbelievable. I think everybody us and probably hundreds and thousands of other people are saying like, what is going to become of international law in the wake of all of this, you know, and the Palestinians are really sort of, the canary in the coal mine of international laws, deep erosion, destruction.

00;20;46;10 - 00;21;15;02

Omer Bartov

You know, the name of the movie. I'm not sure that many people outside of Israel are really aware of. What is the implication of the movie, the name of a movie? No other land to hear it. What does it mean? No other land. Its its own. Its slogan elevates it. They don't have any other land. What the movie does, it shows that in the name of an old town, this slogan, this is my Holy Land.

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Omer Bartov

You know, Jews cannot live anywhere else after the Holocaust. We have to live here. This is my only land. And this was a literary trope as well. The many texts that were written along this thing, of course, means that it cannot be the land of anybody else. And those people who say, this is my plot of land, this is where my village is.

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Omer Bartov

This is where I, I heard my sheep becomes irrelevant because it's under, again, a much larger assertion that this is the land of the Jews. The Jews have no other land. And when you think about it, within the larger discourse of the legal issues, that's the fundamental claim in Israel. This is our land. We have no other land.

00;21;58;29 - 00;22;18;01

Omer Bartov

We may or may not. We will try to recognize the rights of some other people who live there. But generally speaking, this is ours, and it's ours because we have nothing else. And you see that entering into all the various legal, philosophical, intellectual discussions, this is what always pipes up.

00;22;18;04 - 00;22;55;05

Lisa Hajjar

Absolutely. And I think, you know, we see in the movie, for example, like it visualized, it makes visually apparent the apartheid nature of, you know, Israeli control. And in that sense, I think this is why, you know, charges that, you know, Israel is an apartheid state or that, I mean, some people say all of it and some would say, you know, just the occupied territories, but that hits at this no other land argument from a Zionist point of view, because when you know, the whole invoking apartheid and then the boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which is modeled on South Africa, if that were to come to fruition, it's like the people can stay.

00;22;55;05 - 00;23;18;09

Lisa Hajjar

The government must change, you know? And so that's the nature of, you know, it's not so much even that it's inconceivable that people could live on the land, you know, Palestinians and Jewish Israelis, but that what is the nature of rule? And if that rule is entirely an exclusively, you know, Jewish and favoring, you know, Jews over and against everyone else, then that's, I think, the real sort of paradox.

00;23;18;09 - 00;23;21;06

Lisa Hajjar

I can't see a reconciliation between those principles.

00;23;21;09 - 00;23;44;11

Jonathan Hafetz

You know, you mentioned before the international community lack of action. There's an interesting segment in the movie. And again, most of this is before October 7th, but where they show Faisal calling a visit many years earlier by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. And Basil notes that Blair spent seven minutes in his village and that as a result, Israel canceled demolition orders for the places that Blair visited.

00;23;44;14 - 00;23;55;13

Jonathan Hafetz

And he says, this is a story about power. That's what Basil says. So it didn't seem to be a lasting thing, but I just to take what Basil says. I mean, how does this tell us as a story about power and its absence?

00;23;55;15 - 00;24;28;02

Omer Bartov

It tells you everything. This, and especially the presence of British Prime minister, because everything that happens in Palestine after World War One has to do with external powers. The settlement of Palestine and the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine is based on the Balfour Declaration that is then rolled into the mandatory documents that allow Britain to be the mandatory ruler of Palestine, and one of its goals is to create a national home for the Jews in Palestine.

00;24;28;05 - 00;24;56;28

Omer Bartov

And so Zionism always knew since that, so that it needed some empire, some larger power to enable it to create the Jewish state. It couldn't do it on its own. Initially. They thought maybe the Ottoman Empire and then the British came and the British actually made their promise. They had their own reasons to do it at the time, although it's very hard for many Israelis to, accept that today, because this is the story that we fought against the British for independence.

00;24;57;00 - 00;25;31;09

Omer Bartov

But this state, in being that was created in the 20s and 30s, is a result of the British allowing it, facilitating it, working with the Jews to create this proto state in Palestine. So that's the first part. But the second part, of course, is that, as we said, what Israel has been doing since 1948 and since 1967, again in the occupied territories, is done openly with a variety of legal arguments, but with impunity vis a vis the international community.

00;25;31;09 - 00;26;12;17

Omer Bartov

When you think that it took until 2024 for the International Court of Justice to rule on apartheid in the West Bank, and to call for the end of the occupation immediately, that it should end as soon as possible. According to what they wrote, it means that it took almost six decades to reach that conclusion. So everything that Israel has been doing and it has been helped is, you know, it's been integrated better and better until October 7th, better and better integrated into the EU and economic policies and military and strategic policies, let alone in the US.

00;26;12;17 - 00;26;35;22

Omer Bartov

All of this was done in defiance of what Israel was actually doing in those occupied territories. So yes, these powers make a difference. And the difference they make is in that they have allowed Israel to get away with that until October 7th. And of course, as we were saying after October 7th, Israel has been acting with complete impunity in Gaza.

00;26;36;00 - 00;26;42;13

Omer Bartov

And in some ways, it's not surprising. It's a continuation of a situation that is existed for decades.

00;26;42;16 - 00;27;12;09

Lisa Hajjar

I totally agree, and I think that's one of the reasons that Israel, since 1948, but particularly since the occupation, has expended so much sort of intellectual energy creating legal rationales for what it does, like through the reinterpretation of law was because of the the need to appear to be acting legally, even if the international lawyers would disagree with what was happening, the fact that it was framed as legal, unlike, for example, authoritarian regimes that can just disregard the law completely.

00;27;12;16 - 00;27;41;06

Lisa Hajjar

And that was important because of the importance of, you know, sort of maintaining a reputation internationally. But I think since the turn of this, millennium, you know, and with the start of the U.S. war on terror, you know, the kind of Israel and the United States have been mutually emulating each other and benefiting from each other. And the idea that international law cannot constrain security pursuits, and we can put security and scare courts because everything becomes securitized.

00;27;41;06 - 00;28;05;28

Lisa Hajjar

But I think that that's become really like a critical issue. And we're seeing now, I mean, not that that, you know, every U.S. administration, you know, has been sort of never stood up for Palestine except with maybe the smallest, you know, exceptions of Jimmy Carter, but mostly after he was out of power. But you're really seeing the kind of carte blanche that Israel can have has always been, you know, important.

00;28;05;28 - 00;28;26;23

Lisa Hajjar

But now that carte blanche is a carte blanche for openly disregarding and violating explicitly genocide, convention against genocide, etc., and the United States government now has no leg to stand on because it too has completely shredded the understandings of international law that are customary in the world.

00;28;26;25 - 00;28;51;14

Omer Bartov

Yeah, I should say, you know, that I think potentially I mean, we don't know. Of course, what will happen in the future, but potentially this Israeli argument that was so important for its international standing, especially in Western Europe and in the United States, that it was the villa in the jungle, right? That it was the outpost of civilization in the sea of barbarism, that it had the most small army in the world.

00;28;51;17 - 00;29;18;28

Omer Bartov

It was just a wonderful place, a real democracy, that although Israel has enjoyed impunity over these, I think it's 21 months maybe, although it's enjoyed impunity, I think it's by now completely eroded that I think it will no longer be able to make that claim. It has shredded the law. That has been done with the American complicity in European complicity.

00;29;19;04 - 00;30;01;24

Omer Bartov

Germany, Britain, France have all been complicit in that. But I think that the violence has been so out of bounds, has been so different, so extreme. And, the indifference to any rules, to any laws, to anything at all, the sheer power, I think, may make going back to that situation, which was much more convenient for Israel, this sort of slow takeover that always appears legal may not be possible anymore, not least also because while Israel already had clearly an apartheid regime in the West Bank, Gaza was a somewhat different animal.

00;30;01;24 - 00;30;31;08

Omer Bartov

Of course, the most likely scenario right now is that Israel will become a full blown apartheid state and will become an increasingly authoritarian state where democracy will be the way it is. Let's say in Hungary at best, or in Russia. And that will mean that it will no longer be able to sell itself to Western powers and even to the United States, as it had done so successfully in the past.

00;30;31;10 - 00;30;43;14

Omer Bartov

Now, that may take a long time, but I think that facade of legality, if we're talking about law, the facade of legality may have been irretrievably eroded.

00;30;43;17 - 00;31;08;20

Lisa Hajjar

I mean, I think that Netanyahu and Trump, in their own different ways, are disregarding it. Palestinians are expendable. That's not new for Israel, but the United States at least tried to play lip service with previous administrations to the idea that you can't just, you know, evict Palestinians wholesale or kill them, you know, indiscriminately that there wouldn't be anything to stop it, but there would be a sense that it wasn't okay unto itself.

00;31;08;20 - 00;31;34;29

Lisa Hajjar

And then you get the Gaza a Largo plan. If the idea that Palestinians can just be moved, that they are just, you know, movable. This is something I think that really resonates with no other land. The idea that these Palestine doesn't matter where they go, they just have to go to go away from here. I think we're seeing, you know, this particular moment is a very perilous, confluence of two fully blown authoritarian and contra legal, rulers.

00;31;35;02 - 00;31;56;27

Jonathan Hafetz

You know, one effect, I think, is we've seen this across a number of different areas under the Trump administration. But the crackdown on free speech in the United States protests, other things around protest around Israel's actions. And just to look at the film itself, the film is not available in the United States. It was shown like in film form in New York City, where I saw how it was drawn.

00;31;56;27 - 00;32;03;08

Jonathan Hafetz

I know in Los Angeles, but outside of those handles, you cannot watch this film in the United States. I mean, I kind.

00;32;03;09 - 00;32;09;15

Omer Bartov

Of watch it in a university, environment, because universities are afraid of showing it.

00;32;09;18 - 00;32;28;28

Lisa Hajjar

But you can't even get it. I mean, absolutely, I saw it in the theater, you know, but when I was trying to rewatch it before this podcast, just so people who are listening can understand, the only copy I could find after Hunting Everywhere was a bad version on YouTube because, you know, for people in the United States, you can't even buy the film.

00;32;28;28 - 00;32;40;13

Lisa Hajjar

It's on sale through Amazon and other things, but only in Europe, or at least in the UK. I don't even know where else, but it's absolutely impossible for an American to access a copy of No Other Land.

00;32;40;16 - 00;33;01;23

Omer Bartov

Yeah, I mean, the joke is that the easiest way to watch it, which is how I watched it, is to watch it through local Cor, which is an Israeli news outlet known as plus 972 in the English version. And get an Israeli server so you could watch it in Israel easily, but you can't watch it in the United States.

00;33;01;23 - 00;33;34;20

Omer Bartov

That's the that's the madness of it. But more to the point, I would say, you know, again, when you speak about the law, the legal apparatus that was created to facilitate also shutting down any criticism of what is happening in Israel. When you saw what happened last spring with the use of arguments of anti-Semitism, allegations of anti-Semitism to stop any protest against genocide in Gaza, and you think the law was directly invoked?

00;33;34;20 - 00;34;15;24

Omer Bartov

I mean, law enforcement was on the ground in full force. Universities said that the students were breaking the law. They were using public property. Students were not allowed to return to campus to receive their degrees. There was a huge punitive policy from one campus to another to shut down speech. When you think that the extent to which this sort of facade of legality that allowed violence and expansion and oppression of people in Israel was imported to the United States, not only to start a protest against Israel, but once you discover that you can do it, why do it only about Israel?

00;34;15;24 - 00;34;41;13

Omer Bartov

You can do it about anything, any protest against anything that you find unjust in your own society. That's a really scary scenario, that the US is not only facilitating what Israel is doing, but is importing Israeli concepts, ideas of how you create a sort of legal facade for silencing people and not allowing them to protest against oppression.

00;34;41;16 - 00;35;02;16

Jonathan Hafetz

The film in addition to these sort of larger issues, it's also a story about friendship between the Palestinian activists Feisal Adra and Yuval Abraham. These Jewish Israeli journalists who helps him. What we see is that while the two bond tensions arise as a result of the very different ways the conflict, and I think the law itself impacts their lives.

00;35;02;16 - 00;35;24;16

Jonathan Hafetz

Right. Yuval can travel freely as an Israeli cities in Basel, cannot you? I was also surprised that his journalistic reports are not generating more discussion and more controversy. Art Basel is not surprised really at all by the lack of attention. So what is their relationship and the depiction of it? Tell us about the Israeli-Palestinian divide, divergent perspectives and even the legal background.

00;35;24;19 - 00;35;53;24

Lisa Hajjar

You know, it's an issue. I mean, in my own work, I've dealt with this a lot, where Israelis, you know, who have been deep and active critics like critics of the Israeli government, you know, lay it out. I mean, there's a fabulous documentary advocate about her. But, you know, sort of over the decades that I've been working on Palestine, Israel, there is this sense, this tension that really the film captures, which is Jewish Israelis, no matter where their hearts live, no matter what politics they do, they are structurally privileged.

00;35;54;01 - 00;36;18;21

Lisa Hajjar

And so that lends itself to, you know, sort of charged, almost like the, you know, a kind of white variation of the white savior complex. But I don't think that's actually accurate. But, you know, in a context where separatism and ethno religious hatreds are so much a part of the, and particularly, you know, from sort of the repressive version of the way of Zionism is repressive.

00;36;18;24 - 00;36;58;17

Lisa Hajjar

It makes those kind of friendships fragile, but also, I think, really valuable. I really think that the film capturing the tensions and the, you know, solidarity, there is something that's really worth noting because even as you know, Michael's father, who Omar had mentioned before, like there's the Israeli left who have really put their backs to the stone over the decades to fight against this stuff and, you know, sort of siding with the Palestinian struggles alongside Palestinian lawyers and activists, etc. it's really a thankless, challenging concept, but it is something that exists.

00;36;58;17 - 00;37;03;10

Lisa Hajjar

I mean, it's a real thing. And, it's great that the film could capture that.

00;37;03;13 - 00;37;31;14

Omer Bartov

Yeah. That's true. Just add as far as I know, Yuval Fahmy doesn't live in Israel anymore because he's been, under threat. And so, Bassel was, or one of the other filmmakers was that was attacked in his village. And of course, that's the real sort of showing who is the boss. For people like, me and others, if they keep speaking out, they may not be able to stay in Israel.

00;37;31;16 - 00;38;09;10

Omer Bartov

I know that if I may not be able to continue his work because, they need money from they basically need support from elsewhere, from outside of the country, financial support. And the government, just like in Russia, is trying to, stop any funds from supporting NGOs. And so it's obviously different than you can make analogy, say, with the South Africa apartheid, where those whites who were fighting against apartheid, often had to leave, but they were obviously privileged, visa free black Africans in Israel.

00;38;09;10 - 00;38;23;29

Omer Bartov

Being now an activist, a Jewish Israeli activist, is your field, your area of operations. It's getting narrower and narrower, and there's no reason to think that it will stop. The things will improve.

00;38;24;01 - 00;38;28;08

Jonathan Hafetz

And that seems that's really been all I ask you. Is that been like real escalation?

00;38;28;11 - 00;38;55;21

Omer Bartov

Absolutely. And, and and there's a lot of violent rhetoric. But now you also have look, I mean, the police has become increasingly a sort of instrument of Benfield acting like a militia and speaking about the law. Not only the enforcement of the law, but the law itself. All indications are that the judicial system in Israel is bending increasingly under the pressures of the government.

00;38;55;23 - 00;39;24;15

Omer Bartov

And we have to remind ourselves that while the Supreme Court and the attorney general, beleaguered, they have said nothing about what's going on in Gaza at they have said nothing about the conduct of the Israeli military, and they've said nothing about what's happening in the West Bank. And they, seen as the last bulwark. And, they're not a bubble at all in those terms.

00;39;24;15 - 00;39;53;14

Omer Bartov

So I would say that the erosion has been faster than anybody could have predicted. The Supreme Court, by the way, has been taken over increasingly by conservatives and settlers. And you see that in rulings in recent rulings, there was a ruling on hunger. I mean, I'm sure Lisa knows about it. That was a ruling by one of the justices on an injunction regarding hunger in Gaza.

00;39;53;14 - 00;40;12;12

Omer Bartov

I mean, what these people are saying now, when Barack, who has certainly, has not been great about the West Bank, would never have been able to express himself in the way that these new justices are speaking. It's, it's a different universe around.

00;40;12;17 - 00;40;39;26

Lisa Hajjar

Barack could really pave the way for this, though. You know, he did. He did put the liberal face on all kinds of repression. But I mean, for example, just sort of in this same vein, like, you know, when Israel declared, I think it was 6 or 7 Palestinian human rights organizations, terrorist organizations, including UN, Amir and al-Haq and others, you know, this is I mean, it kind of is like the film No Other Land, like, these are people who are the only like the eyes on what's happened.

00;40;39;26 - 00;41;15;17

Lisa Hajjar

The eyes, and they convey, information. And then to be declaring them, you know, when the government declares them terrorist organizations, other governments sort of say, well, you know, we have to respect, you know, the security assessments of other governments. And so they'll go along with, you know, cutting off, funding and stuff. So, you know, this is why I think, you know, where we can see how no other land links to other elements like to to be able to show people what's happening, to tell people to convey information is itself so dangerous in the state, you know, to the kind of narratives that the state, you know, is going to seek to shut it

00;41;15;17 - 00;41;17;18

Lisa Hajjar

down in any way possible.

00;41;17;20 - 00;41;33;21

Jonathan Hafetz

I think the idea of narrative is important. Right. And it's interesting. I think Basil. Right. He's a it's actually a law school graduate. Right. Because in law school he's not a filmmaker. But as he describes it, studied law. He lost hope in it, in his words. Right. So instead he goes to film, he keeps a camera with them.

00;41;33;21 - 00;41;58;26

Jonathan Hafetz

He starts documenting what's happening in the hope that the images and then the film will spark change. And what he says is at one point now, if we're active and we document what's happening on the ground, it'll force the United States to pressure Israel to stop the expulsion. So what impact do you think the film has had and what impact are things like and images of what's happening in the West Bank and Gaza more broadly?

00;41;58;28 - 00;42;23;12

Lisa Hajjar

One of the things I study is lawyers, and it's always interesting because lawyers often like Basil, I feel that the law doesn't do what it should be doing to help and protect the people, you know. So I think he articulates that idea very clearly. But like legal struggles, documentation and like telling stories, orations, it's sort of the longue durée.

00;42;23;13 - 00;42;48;02

Lisa Hajjar

I mean, we don't know. As Omar had said before, we don't know what's going to happen. I mean, it doesn't look good. But, you know, in a sense, there is a certain value to fighting because without the fight, without the fight, you can imagine how much worse it would be. But it's also, I mean, I oftentimes tease my lawyer friends because they say that I love the law more than they do, which is show me that I always sort of analogize lawyers to like trench warriors.

00;42;48;02 - 00;43;05;08

Lisa Hajjar

And then sociologists are up on the mountaintop, and it's like we can see the value of legal struggles, even if it's not what lawyers would think, like winning, thinking like a lawyer means thinking like, if I'm winning and my work is valuable, if I'm losing, my work isn't valuable. But that's not necessarily the only story.

00;43;05;10 - 00;43;25;23

Jonathan Hafetz

In terms of the narrative. Or let me ask you, in your op ed in The New York Times, recent op ed described what was happening in Gaza as ethnic cleansing, morphing into genocide. I talked a little bit about that before. What insight does the film, which is not you know, again, it was made mostly before Gaza, you know, tell us about that.

00;43;25;25 - 00;43;54;09

Omer Bartov

Well, look, I mean, the first of all, it tells you about the general context, the general context. One thing that, you know, in my last two visits to Israel I found so striking was how Israelis of different opinion and I don't know too many right wing Israelis. So people are center left of center left wing, were completely indifferent to what was going on in Gaza, and part of it had to do with what happened on October 7th.

00;43;54;11 - 00;44;21;09

Omer Bartov

But part of it had to do with what the film shows and what Lisa was saying earlier. There has been a separation which is best indicated by the separation by the barrier. Right? That's the sort of symbol of it whereby most Israelis don't really have much contact with Palestinians and don't think about them. So there was a complete normalization of the occupation.

00;44;21;11 - 00;44;45;28

Omer Bartov

But of course there was constant friction. And where does the friction come? It comes when nice Israeli boys and girls who might be sitting around with you in a cafe and being very cosmopolitan and sophisticated and well traveled, put on their uniforms and go to break into people's homes at four in the morning to show that they're the boss in occupied territories.

00;44;46;00 - 00;45;09;24

Omer Bartov

And so there has been a growing and a creepy over generations, the creeping dehumanization of Palestinians. And that you, of course, see very much in that film. And a kind of what I like about it very much. It shows you one place and that one place is sort of micro history. That's the book that I wrote on this micro history.

00;45;09;28 - 00;45;33;22

Omer Bartov

You can understand from that a lot. You can see and in the film you see it through Uncommon Eyes for Israelis, Israelis who might see it through the eyes of one soldier who maybe a bit troubled, is conscious, maybe. But you see it through the eyes of Palestinians. You see how they experience that. They couldn't care less whether this soldier has some heartburn for what he's doing.

00;45;33;25 - 00;45;56;09

Omer Bartov

That's what he and she are doing to them. And what you see in Gaza is a vast expansion of that. But it begins with that very idea that those people should be on the other side of the fence. They certainly should not come out of it, certainly not bearing guns. And we don't expect them to behave in that way.

00;45;56;09 - 00;46;21;28

Omer Bartov

Part of the shock of October 7th, beyond the fact that there's hundreds of civilians were massacred, is that Hamas managed to do it. The IDF couldn't get control of the territory for a couple of days. People don't talk a lot about it because it's inconvenient. But there were hundreds of soldiers killed, but they took over military bases. The military commander was hiding in his bunker.

00;46;22;01 - 00;46;46;23

Omer Bartov

So that idea that suddenly those people that you had already, they had a place and you didn't think about them much. You know, all the last election campaigns in Israel, the occupation never came up. It wasn't an issue. And suddenly it exploded. So I think that the film shows you the background of that. Where is that coming from?

00;46;46;25 - 00;47;15;16

Omer Bartov

Unfortunately it also, shows you a likely future that what you see in that one village is going to happen and is happening in more and more sides, and there's nobody to stop it. There's nobody to control it, there's no reporting, there's no interest is the international interest. And, and these people check and they see that they can get away with it, and they do more and more of it.

00;47;15;19 - 00;47;38;10

Lisa Hajjar

I think that the sense of, I mean, you know, all my friends who we've all been active on Gaza, you know, and on Palestine more broadly, I mean, all this, but like, especially in the last two years, the sense is just like, what do you do with your ethics? What do you do with your passion and your humanitarian concerns and your anger?

00;47;38;10 - 00;48;03;20

Lisa Hajjar

You know, because it's just, you know, it really is like shouting into a cave or something like that. There's no resonance, you know, in terms of changing things on the ground. But, you're right. The one thing I wish, you know, I sort of had wished that the film would have been a little bit more explicit about was the kind of legal history they sort of invoke the Supreme Court's case and, you know, at some point or, you know, soldiers saying, well, it's the law.

00;48;03;20 - 00;48;27;00

Lisa Hajjar

But even to just explain a little bit about that, because you know, I don't know what the reception of the film in Israel has been. Oh, my. If you have any thoughts on that, I'd love to hear it. But just the sense of like so people could more. It's it's not just this dehumanize thing, destructive thing, but it's also thoroughly sort of seeded by a kind of legal history of, of control and repression.

00;48;27;02 - 00;48;31;18

Lisa Hajjar

What was the reception after, for example, after the film won the Oscar? Like what was,

00;48;31;21 - 00;48;54;14

Omer Bartov

Well, the film is seen generally in the Israeli media, and I assume by much of the public is an anti-Israeli anti-Zionist. But anti-Semitic film. And that's the fate of, of it was portrayed as such. So, no, I mean, it was seen as completely false and completely anti-Israel. And that's it. Now, of course, on, you know, local.

00;48;54;14 - 00;49;00;03

Omer Bartov

Cool. 972 yeah. But they have an audience of a couple thousand people.

00;49;00;06 - 00;49;05;01

Jonathan Hafetz

Even in the parts of Israel where there are people who are protesting against the Supreme Court who read about the sort of massacre.

00;49;05;01 - 00;49;27;05

Omer Bartov

It's got nothing to do with it. Look, I mean, colleagues of mine and myself, you know, issued a petition in August 2023, two months before, October 7th, on the elephant in the room where we said all these protests were about, you know, protecting the rights of Jewish Israeli citizens, which I think should be protected. But they refused to talk about the occupation.

00;49;27;10 - 00;49;52;03

Omer Bartov

And if you went to the demonstrators, either the carrying flags against or opposing against the occupation, you were told, you know, stand there in the corner in that little street because we don't want you in the mainstream. We wrap ourselves up and everybody sit in Israeli flags. We are patriots. Don't talk about the occupation. We'll talk about it some other time that at the time came on October 7th.

00;49;52;06 - 00;50;24;14

Lisa Hajjar

One thing that Omar was discussing about how, you know, the reception of the film, that it's just anti-Semitic, and this is something that we're hearing constantly, both in Israel. Obviously, and in the United States and in Germany and elsewhere. Is that criticism of Israeli state violations of international law are anti-Semitic, which because Israel is a Jewish state, but that been the logical conclusion of that would be is genocide like a Jewish virtue by that logic is, you know, a gross human rights violations, you know, sort of pro Jewish.

00;50;24;18 - 00;50;38;29

Lisa Hajjar

That in and of itself is anti-Semitic, like the allegations of anti-Semitism in criticizing Israeli violations of international law is actual anti-Semitism because it conflates Jews and Jewishness with crimes of the state.

00;50;39;01 - 00;50;56;26

Jonathan Hafetz

You know, you see, in defense, you sort of see different levels, right? Genocide being that sort of the third rail that people who are defending Israel very, you know, that's, you know, very toxic. Right. But you see, sort of one is. Yes. You know, there are yes, there may be war crimes and the next is, you know, ethnic cleansing, not genocide of ethnic genocide.

00;50;56;26 - 00;51;02;12

Jonathan Hafetz

But the narrative is, yes, Israel is not perfect. It may be making, you know, mistakes, but it's basically rule bound.

00;51;02;14 - 00;51;21;20

Lisa Hajjar

Well, I mean, you know, even when Israel, you know, in the immediate aftermath of 67, said this is not occupied territory. It's administered people who invoke the occupation. That was a third rail. Then, when people in the 1990s started invoking apartheid, like analogized Israeli control over Palestinians to apartheid. That was the third rail. And now genocide is the third rail.

00;51;21;20 - 00;51;38;24

Lisa Hajjar

So you just see the arguments that any sort of law based criticism of Israeli government policy just can be, you know, the kind of rage machine can instantly be triggered, you know, and linked to anti-Semitism, however spurious that connection is.

00;51;38;26 - 00;51;42;19

Jonathan Hafetz

So I want to thank you both for coming on the podcast. It's been great to have you.

00;51;42;21 - 00;51;44;01

Lisa Hajjar

Great to talk with you.

00;51;44;03 - 00;51;45;26

Omer Bartov

Thank you very much. Thanks, Lisa.