Psalm 137 On My Mind
On watching "No Other Land" the day the Bibas childrens' bodies were returned
Yesterday, I went to see the film, “No Other Land,” a documentary co-created by Palestinian Arabs Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal and Israeli Jews Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, about demolitions and expulsions happening in Masafer Yatta. Masafer Yatta is a group of villages in the West Bank south of Hebron near the Green Line (the border between Israel and the Jordanian-controlled West Bank before 1967), in Area C, which is the region under the Oslo Accords that remains under full Israeli administration. The area was designated an army live-fire exercise zone in the early 1980s, but locals sued to prevent their expulsion, and the case made its way through the Israeli courts for forty years before finally being resolved in favor of the government. In the wake of that decision, the entire population of the area—over 1,000 people—has been ordered evicted. The film documents the villagers’ refusal to go, their determination to keep building illegally in secret, their confrontations with the Israeli army and with nearby settlers, and the progressive destruction of their community.
The focus of the film is relentlessly local. Most of the footage was shot by Adra and other activists, and the footage that wasn’t shot by them mostly consists of home movies shot when Adra was a child, plus the occasional news clip (including clips of Abraham on Israeli television). There is almost no attempt made to provide any kind of context to this local conflict, either from the Israeli or the Palestinian side. The main people we see have devoted their lives to politics, but we don’t really have any sense of what, in a larger sense, their politics are: whether, for example, they favor an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel or a single bi-national state or an Arab state from the river to the sea, or how they feel about the Palestinian Authority or about Hamas. The film also doesn’t delve into the questions at issue in the legal dispute about the expulsion order: for example, whether these villages really do have a pedigree dating back to the 19th century or whether they were established specifically to frustrate Israeli efforts to seize the land.
This local focus serves the film’s political purposes well; what you see looks manifestly unjust, and if you don’t know anything about the context of the conflict then you have no idea why such an injustice might be happening, and your political sympathies will shift accordingly. But I also think that focus is true to life in the way that a larger understanding is not, because manifest injustice is how these events feel to the people on the ground and on the receiving end. That’s really the value of a documentary, to show you what something looks like and feels like. If you want an analysis of the conflict, you’d do far better to read a book, preferably several books with different perspectives.
I got home from the film, and learned that the bodies of the Bibas children, taken hostage on October 7th, had been returned, along with a body that turned out not to be that of her mother, though that was who Hamas had said they were returning. Moreover, I learned that the children, aged 4 and 8 months when they were abducted, did not die on October 7th, but were murdered in Gaza. The Israeli reaction to this news has been, understandably, a mix of grief and fury. What kind of monsters murder babies in cold blood? How can one ever come to live alongside such people?
My mind, inevitably, went to Psalm 137, particularly the last two lines:
1 By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.
2 Upon the willows in the midst thereof we hanged up our harps.
3 For there they that led us captive asked of us words of song, and our tormentors asked of us mirth: 'Sing us one of the songs of Zion.'
4 How shall we sing the LORD'S song in a foreign land?
5 If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.
6 Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I remember thee not; if I set not Jerusalem above my chiefest joy.
7 Remember, O LORD, against the children of Edom the day of Jerusalem; who said: 'Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof.'
8 O daughter of Babylon, that art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that repayeth thee as thou hast served us.
9 Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the rock.
I don’t know whether Prime Minister Netanyahu quoted from the Psalm, but he might has well have. That is the feeling, still, even after all the destruction that has been unleashed since the war began.
It’s not actually correct to say that “No Other Land” doesn’t express any kind of concrete politics beyond “stop committing this injustice.” “I’m not going anywhere” is also a politics. Someone else might simply have left—as increasing numbers of the villagers of Masafer Yatta have done since October 7th, as the tempo of Israel’s demolitions and expulsions has accelerated dramatically since then. The entire premise of Hamas’s terrorism is that Israel’s Jews will ultimately pack up and leave when they see what staying will be like. But they won’t. They’re going to stay and, as Patton said, make the other guy die for his country. That’s also a politics.
And it’s the normal politics of people who are engaged in what feels like an existential conflict, a war of peoples. The completely normal thing, when you are emotionally engaged in such a conflict, is to see things only your way. And without that emotional engagement, keeping up the fight is practically impossible. Perspective, understanding—these are luxuries, because they cut against the emotional necessity of patient, determined strength, of standing with your side through the worst, both the worst of what is done and the worst of what you believe must be done. It’s there in the faces of every member of the IDF we see in the film, though both the Palestinians whose homes they destroy and the film itself decline to gaze too closely into those faces, just as those faces decline to see the faces of those screaming at them in pain and fury. How could they do their jobs if they did?
Early in the film, Adra laughs at Yuval for wanting to solve the conflict in ten days and go home. This has been going on for decades, he says; it will go on for decades more. We have to be patient. Yet at another point, after the Israeli army has demolished the community’s school, Ballal (I think that’s who it was) is talking to Yuval and asks him how long they can even keep talking to him. Those could have been your friends, your brothers who came and destroyed the school. So you thinks it’s terrible, you’ve come to lend your assistance—good for you, but so what? How long can that go on, keeping one foot in each camp? So much for the patience of decades. And all of that, of course, was before October 7th, the massacre and the war in response that made keeping one foot in each camp, keeping some broader measure of understanding, almost completely inconceivable for anyone actually engaged in the conflict.
As I argued previously, though, wars like this one can’t really end without it. That’s why leaders who, in the midst of existential conflict, are able to demonstrate that broad perspective, people like Abraham Lincoln or Nelson Mandela, are so valuable. It’s also why they are so rare. Today, they seem almost nonexistent.