THE LONG DEFEAT

The 2025 Academy Award for Best Documentary feature was given to No Other Land, a film which follows Basel Adra, a young Palestinian activist, as he documents and resists the forced displacement of his people from Masafer Yatta, a collection of villages in the occupied West Bank.

During the film, Basel befriends Yuval Abraham, an Israeli journalist about his age. They form an unlikely friendship despite the enormous differences in their lived experience. Halfway through the film, the two are sitting in Basel’s car. Yuval is excited because an article he has written about the violent displacements in Masafer Yatta has been viewed thousands of times.

Basel warns Yuval that he needs to understand that to practice solidarity with his people, he must accept that he is a ‘loser’. His article won’t change anything. Basel tells Yuval not to expect things to change quickly, and advises him to be patient.

This conversation is one of the best examples I have ever encountered of The Long Defeat, something that has haunted me for years and which I claim my work is in service of, but which always seems to get further out of reach the more I try to put it into words.

Basel recognises from experience and from the line of intergenerational activists whose work he has inherited that there is an importance to fighting this fight without the assurance or belief or even the hope that it will end in victory.

And so Basel urges Yuval to recognise that there is something essential in recognising that their efforts will end in failure. In doing so, they realise that the purpose of their resistance isn’t the certainty of victory anyway.

No Other Land is itself a wonderful image of this; a remarkable, miraculous film that against all odds exists in a world in which it really shouldn’t have been allowed to. It hasn’t tipped the scales of the struggle in favour of Basel or his people. They made the film anyway.

The Long Defeat is taken from The Fellowship of the Ring, the first part of The Lord of the Rings. When a depleted and tired Fellowship arrive in the elven kingdom of Lothlorien, they meet the Lady Galadriel, one of the elves who saw the light from the Two Trees before the sun or moon were made. This is an incredibly important distinction among the elves, and also makes Galadriel one of the oldest people left in Middle-earth.

Introducing her husband, Galadriel says that “together, through ages of the world, we have fought the long defeat.”

The Long Defeat encompasses the struggle of the elves in Middle-earth. Although readers tend to regard that land as enchanted, elves of Galadriel’s age have watched it fade through many generations. They know that the struggle against decay and death is not one that it is ultimately possible for them to win.

They struggle anyway, and Galadriel’s home of Lothlorien represents one of the last enclaves of beauty that calls to mind the memory of the unspoilt beauty of the Blessed Realm itself. The Long Defeat of the elves gives them a distinctly melancholic perspective on the world that Lord Elrond communicates, when he claims to ‘have seen three ages in the West of the world, and many defeats, and many fruitless victories.’

It is this perspective that ultimately animates the heart of The Lord of the Rings. Knowing that using the Ring to defeat Sauron will result in themselves becoming corrupted reflections of the Dark Lord, the forces of good set out on an inverted quest; not to find something, but to lose it. Michael N. Stanton writes that LOTR is a story in which 'Evil struggles to gain power; Good to relinquish it'.

In the BBC’s ‘Big Read’ poll in 2003, the UK voted The Lord of the Rings its ‘best-loved book’. I wish we acted like it. Endurance, long-suffering and the relinquishing of power are not popular contemporary virtues.

In sharp contrast to Basel’s witness, the metric for participation in anything tends to be success. Most activism today encourages participation with the assurance that you as an individual can make a difference.

I am a Christian, and Christianity for the most part is not much better in this respect, marketing an extremely positivist brand of religion that encourages you to sign up and claim the victory of Christ in every aspect of your own life, from your conscience to your physical health to your search for meaningful work. Many of the Church’s more powerful and vocal limbs eagerly anticipate the assured revival of Christianity as an accepted and dominant force in national life before the imminent return of Christ.

There are similarities here to what the cornered philosopher Walter Benjamin recognised in the historical materialism of his own time. He lamented a philosophy fixated on winning a game of chess, convinced that the eventual triumph of the masses was almost scientifically assured.

By way of contrast, the greatest and most orthodox expression of Christianity, both historically and amongst the global majority today is martyrdom.

In it we witness the image of our God, who we believe took human form and became obedient to death; ‘even death on a cross’ (Philippians 2). Martyrdom is the concrete expression of the belief that there are some things worse than dying, and the denial that death itself represents a total or final defeat. In this sense part of the Christian call is to fight a Long Defeat.

One of the finest artistic meditations on martyrdom is found in Terrence Malick’s 2019 film A Hidden Life, which depicts the life and witness of St Franz Jagerstatter and his wife Franziska in Austria during the Second World War.