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PORTSIDE CULTURE

A LYD WITHOUT THE NAKBA  
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Dikla Taylor-Sheinman
October 25, 2024
+972 Magazine [[link removed]]

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_ Merging documentary with sci-fi, this new film narrates the ethnic
cleansing of the Palestinian city in 1948, and imagines what it would
look like if the war never happened. So the Israeli government banned
it from being screened. _

Israeli police escort right-wing settlers as they attack and clash
with Palestinians in the city of Lod/Lyd, May 12, 2021. , Oren
Ziv/Activestills

 

Two hours before I was due to attend the debut screening in Israel of
Rami Younis and Sarah Ema Friedland’s film “Lyd” earlier this
month, I received a message from the organizers informing me that it
was canceled. Police, under instruction from Culture Minister Miki
Zohar, had forced Jaffa’s Palestinian-run Al-Saraya Theater to call
off the event. Their pretext was a century-old British Mandate
ordinance obliging theaters to obtain prior approval for every film
they screen — but for Zohar, it seemed there was another factor at
play.

“The film presents a delusional, lying picture in which IDF soldiers
allegedly committed a brutal massacre,” the minister said
[[link removed]] before its
cancellation. His statement followed pressure from the right-wing
group B’tsalmo, which had already planned to protest the screening
at Al-Saraya, smearing Younis as an “inciter” and warning
[[link removed]] that
the film “could cause terror attacks by Israeli Arabs.”

Narrated in Arabic with English subtitles, “Lyd” premiered at the
Amman International Film Festival in August 2023, where it won the
Jury Award for Arab Feature Documentary Film and the International
Film Critics’ Award. In attendance at that first screening were
hundreds of refugees from the city of Lyd, or Lydda, which is now
known officially as Lod. 

Located in the center of what is today Israel, the city was occupied
by Israeli forces in early July 1948, about three months after
Israel’s declaration of independence. Soldiers massacred over 400
[[link removed]] Palestinian
residents by firing indiscriminately in the city center, before
rounding up dozens of men and executing them in the city’s main
mosque. The vast majority of Lyd’s residents and scores of
Palestinians who were taking refuge among them — some 70,000 in
total — were forced out beyond the borders of the new Israeli
state. 

Dozens died on their way, while most ended up in the West Bank or
Amman where they or their descendants live today, still forbidden from
returning. David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister,
would boast
[[link removed]] to
his cabinet that in Lyd and nearby Ramle, “not one Arab has
remained.” As it happened, a few hundred locals did manage to stay
and return to their hometown.

“Lyd,” which I had fortunately already seen before the recent
canceled screening, leads the viewer through these historical events,
drawing on archival footage and never-before-seen interviews with
Israeli soldiers who took part in the operation to cleanse the city of
its Palestinians. It also features new interviews with Palestinians
who were expelled, descendants of Lydian refugees who now live in the
occupied West Bank, and current Palestinian residents of Lo

But the film is not just a documentary; it is also an exercise in
political imagination. Archival footage and interviews are
interspersed with animated scenes depicting an alternative reality in
which the European imperial powers never meddled in the Middle East,
the Nakba never happened, Lyd never became Lod, and Palestine never
became Israel. Instead, Palestinians and Jews live together in a
multicultural, egalitarian society. 

Younis, who is a Palestinian citizen of Israel from Lyd (and
a longtime contributor [[link removed]] to
+972), and Friedland, who is an American Jew, had planned to follow
the Amman premiere with screenings around the world, but decided to
put these on hold after October 7. They resumed the tour in February,
taking the film everywhere from the United States to Italy, Algeria,
Australia, and now, so far in vain, to Israel. 

Ahead of the cancellation, Zohar described it
[[link removed]] as a “disgrace that
the inciting and false film ‘Lod,’ written and produced by
anti-Israel boycott activists Rami Younis and Roger Waters, will be
screened in the state’s territory.” His statement emphasized the
role of Waters, a musician formerly of the band Pink Floyd and
prominent pro-Palestine activist, as executive director, while
changing the name of the film to the city’s current Israelized name,
and omitting Friedland’s role as co-writer and co-director.

“The State of Israel does not even want to face the fact that this
city has a Palestinian name, Lyd, and that a Jewish person would
dedicate nine years of her life to sharing the Palestinian narrative
of this city,” Friedland said
[[link removed]] in
response. Younis sarcastically thanked
[[link removed]] Zohar
and the Israeli police for canceling the film, a move which will
doubtless raise its public profile. “If there’s one thing I
learned as a Palestinian journalist and artist,” he said, “it’s
that if they go this viciously after your work, it means it’s vital
to the moment.”

The Israeli government’s brazen censorship of “Lyd” shows that
it is still insistent on suppressing the realities of the Nakba and
its ongoing reverberations. By presenting the massacres and ethnic
cleansing of 1948 as part of a continuing structure of Jewish
domination over Palestinians, the film takes on a whole new resonance
in the wake of Israel’s year-long onslaught on the Gaza Strip —
seen by many as a catastrophe of even greater proportions. And by
offering the viewer an alternative reality in which Jews and
Palestinians live in the city as equals, the filmmakers affirm that
things could have been, and could still be, different. 

Lod, Israel. Cut. Lyd, Palestine. Repeat

In common Israeli parlance, Lod is a “mixed city” — one of only
a handful of places in the country where Jews and Palestinians share
an urban space. Situated right in the middle of Israel, it has a
relatively low socioeconomic profile and high crime rate. A visitor
strolling its not-so-shiny streets might not be inclined to believe
that it used to be a prosperous place. But Younis and Friedland’s
film reminds us that it was. 

Screengrab from “Lyd” showing the square where over 400
Palestinians were massacred during Israel’s occupation of the city
in 1948. It is now called “Palmach Square,” after the commando
unit that committed the massacre. (Courtesy of the directors)

A little over a hundred years ago, residents would celebrate Eid Lyd,
a holiday commemorating Saint George of Lydda (who also happens to be
the patron saint of England, Moscow, and Georgia). People and goods
from cities all across the Levant would travel through the city by
camel and train. During the British Mandate period, it even had its
own international airport, which would later become Israel’s main
airport. 

It wasn’t always “mixed.” For hundreds of years, Lyd was an Arab
city — much like Jaffa, Acre, Haifa, and Ramle, the other cities in
Israel that are given the same label. After most of their Palestinian
inhabitants fled or were expelled during the Nakba, Israeli Jews now
comprise the majority in each of these cities, though significant
Palestinian minorities remain. For the Israeli right, these binational
cities are increasingly seen
[[link removed]] as an internal
frontier [[link removed]] to
Judaize. 

In today’s Lod, Palestinians account for around 30 percent of the
population, although the two communities are not commingled, living
instead in segregated
[[link removed]] Jewish
and Arab neighborhoods. Yet in Younis and Friedland’s imaginary Lyd,
Muslims, Christians, and a sizable minority of Jews live together
without any one community dominating over the others. 

Explaining how this came to be, the viewer is asked to imagine that
British and French diplomats never conspired to carve up the
post-Ottoman Middle East; instead, the communities of the region
established a multi-state federation called “the Greater Levant”
in defiance of Western imperialism. But the cinematographic fiction
doesn’t always deviate from historical reality: European Jews still
immigrate en masse to Palestine to escape antisemitic persecution,
joining their Eastern coreligionists who had lived there for
centuries.

Friedland told me that the film’s imagined history was inspired by
sociologist Salim Tamari’s descriptions
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pre-mandatory Palestine, which paint a picture of coexistence without
domination, before nationalism dictated communal affiliations.
Friedland was moved to discover that members of the Abrahamic
religions shared in each others’ festivals: just as Muslims in Lyd
celebrated Saint George (as we see in the film), those in Jerusalem
partook in Purim celebrations. 

“I was not taught that this region had ever been a safe place for
Jews since the exiles of the past [by the Babylonians and Romans],”
she explained. “The alternative history is a reclamation of the
shared society that existed before the State of Israel was founded.”

A sympathetic viewer can still find the film’s speculative
imagination futile, an exercise in wildly wishful thinking. When I put
it to Friedland that Lod is only becoming less like the Lyd of her
film, she shrugged. “I understand that this can sound completely
utopian or naïve. But isn’t that the point of imagination? You have
to imagine the world you want to see in order to build it.”

From Balata refugee camp to G. Habash University

To bring this imaginary world to life, the film takes each real Lydian
character and gives them a fictional doppelganger. In the real world,
Jehad Baba and Anan Tarteer live in the Balata refugee camp in the
West Bank. Baba is a young metal worker who once dreamed of being a
lawyer. Tarteer is Baba’s gregarious friend, who owns the modest Lyd
Restaurant. 

The two have lived their whole lives under a military occupation
that severely limits their professional horizons
[[link removed]].
But in Younis and Friedland’s imagined city, they are university
students — and not just at any university, but “G. Habash
University.” 

No such university could exist in the Israeli city of Lod. George
Habash, who died in 2008, was born to a Greek Orthodox family in Lyd
and went on to found the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
(PFLP). To Israel, Habash is a terrorist. But for Palestinians, he
will always be Al-Hakim (“the doctor” or “the wise one”), an
activist physician and national leader. 

The film’s tragic heroine, who sounds like she is fighting a losing
battle, is Manar El-Memeh. In real life, she is an elementary school
teacher. In her informal after-school program, we see her desperately
trying to instill a sense of Palestinian identity in her students —
an identity that is deliberately suppressed
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the Israeli education system. 

She asks her students to point to Palestine on an official state map,
which shows no such place. The students are perplexed: one boy points
to Egypt, another says “Saudi Arabia.” After the children leave,
El-Memeh bursts into tears and a colleague tries to console her. 

But no sooner has the viewer watched this distressing episode than an
alternative present appears on screen, in which El-Memeh is still a
teacher but at a very different institution. Here, she works at the
“K. Sakakini School,” named after the Jerusalemite educator,
public intellectual, and Arab nationalist Khalil Sakakini, whose life
spanned the periods of Ottoman, British, and Israeli rule. Instead of
trying to help her students find Palestine on a map, she is now
teaching them about the history of Eid Lyd on the eve of the festival,
while posing a question for her Palestinian students: “How might you
share your Palestinian privilege with your Jewish classmates?”

An eruption of intercommunal violence

Then reality interrupts. In a brutal transition, the exercise of
imagining an equal, multicultural Lyd is cut short and the viewer is
teleported to the intercommunal riots of May 2021
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engulfed several binational cities in Israel — with Lod at the
epicenter.

The events of that month shocked Jewish-Israeli society and cast a
shadow over Jewish-Arab relations in Israel. What Palestinians
describe as the “Unity Intifada
[[link removed]]”
marked the largest uprising of Palestinians in Israel since
the events of October 2000
[[link removed]].
This time, they rose up in solidarity with those in occupied East
Jerusalem being forced out of their homes by state-backed Jewish
settlers and subjected to police brutality on the Al-Aqsa compound
during Ramadan. 

In Lod, peaceful demonstrations
[[link removed]] on May 10
turned violent after Palestinian youth raised their national flag from
Al-Omari Mosque, prompting Israeli police to fire stun grenades.
Protestors responded by burning tires and cars, and a group of armed
Israeli Jews shot and killed 32-year old Musa Hassuna. 

The next day, police fired tear gas on mourners at Hassuna’s
funeral, further escalating tensions. Palestinian youths then attacked
Jewish-owned cars and homes, injuring Yigal Yehoshua
[[link removed]],
who later died. Rioters also set fire to three synagogues, which Mayor
Revivo likened
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“Kristallnacht in Lod.” In response, the government declared a
state of emergency and sent in the Border Police, while Israel’s
president urged Arab mayors to condemn the violence.

But these events didn’t happen in a vacuum, and the film makes it
abundantly clear that the expulsion and massacre in 1948 were only the
start of a continuing injustice against Palestinians in Lod. Since
then they have faced ghettoization, discrimination, and neglect by the
authorities. Crime
[[link removed]] and
poverty have been allowed to flourish in the Palestinian
neighborhoods. Frustration, alienation, and a sense of grievance have
been brewing for decades.

This reality flies in the face of the city’s official narrative,
according to which the ungrateful Palestinian rioters have, all of a
sudden, destroyed the peaceful coexistence that the municipality spent
decades building. Mayor Revivo epitomized this worldview when he told
the media
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the time: “All the work we have done here for years has gone down
the drain.” 

A pilot for Judaization

Another absence from the official Israeli narrative on the events of
May 2021 is the process of creeping Judaization in Lod: the ongoing
effort to bolster the city’s Jewish character and demographic makeup
and to further shrink the Palestinian minority. “Lyd” calls our
attention to a major engine behind this process. 

The Garin Torani (Torah Nucleus) movement is a
nation-wide religious-Zionist organization
[[link removed]] that
takes the logic of the West Bank settler movement and applies it to
Israel’s binational cities. For over two decades, it has been
bringing thousands of Orthodox Jewish families to Lod, buying out Arab
residents and aggressively settling the city’s mixed neighborhoods,
especially Ramat Eshkol in the Old City.

No one encapsulates Lod’s Judaization and the growing influence of
religious Zionism in the city more than Mayor Revivo, a proud member
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Netanyahu’s Likud party and Lod’s Garin Torani. When he
isn’t storming a mosque
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shut off the speakers broadcasting the call to prayer during Eid
Al-Adha, he is stoking moral panic about escalating crime
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hinting at nationalistic motives
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gangs,” or asking
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send the Shin Bet (Israel’s internal security agency) to restore law
and order. 

Upon his election in 2013, Revivo immediately appointed the head of
Lod’s Garin Torani, Aharon Atias, as the city’s CEO. And as he
helps push religious-nationalist Jews into Arab neighborhoods, he
spares no effort in preventing
[[link removed]] Palestinians
from doing the reverse.

During the events of May 2021, when, as Joshua Leifer of Jewish
Currents noted, “Palestinian citizens of Israel were reacting to an
increasingly urgent threat of displacement from neighborhoods
they’ve inhabited for decades,” the Garin Torani poured fuel on
the fire

They called in reinforcements
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within hours, armed settlers were bussed in from extremist
settlements. Far-right lawmakers Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich
showed up night after night in solidarity with the settlers. And while
the police met the Palestinian demonstrators with rubber-coated
bullets and stun grenades, they greeted the armed Jewish brigades with
tacit, and in some cases open, support
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“Lyd is serving as a kind of lab, a pilot,” Younis says. “What
the Israeli authorities are doing in Hebron
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Lyd.” 

The documentary brings out the stark, even absurd contrast between the
footage of the explosive 2021 riots and Revivo’s serene, idyllic
conception of Lod. In his City Hall office, we see him speaking
without a hint of irony about a “mosaic of cultures,” and a city
that “knows how to contain everyone and give everyone space.”
According to him, Jews and Arabs already co-live as equals in a
pluralistic and multicultural city. 

Fear of what’s to come

Lod has yet to erupt again into the kind of violence witnessed in
2021. But among its Palestinian residents, fear of being expelled,
evicted, or simply priced out is as strong as ever
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and all the more so
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the wake of the Hamas attack of October 7 and Israel’s ensuing
onslaught on Gaza. 

Demonstrations against the war are all but forbidden, especially if
you’re Palestinian
[[link removed]]. Hundreds
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Palestinian citizens of Israel have been arrested or fired from their
jobs for as little as a social media post expressing solidarity with
Gazans or criticizing Israel’s bombardment. 

The narrator of “Lyd,” Palestinian actress Maisa Abd Elhadi, was
herself arrested
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calls
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the interior minister to have her Israeli citizenship stripped after
she shared posts online that police claim expressed support for the
October 7 attacks. As of today, 13 months later, she is still on house
arrest without trial, unable to work. 

In February, Revivo was re-elected
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mayor, securing a massive majority for his right-wing coalition in
Lod’s city council. City Hall has been adorned for more than a year
now with banners bearing nationalistic slogans, such as “The Lod
Municipality salutes the security forces” and “The people of
Israel lives.”

A racist mania has engulfed much of the Jewish-Israeli public,
including in Lod. Former councilwoman Fida Shehada told the FT
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when she took her nephew to the shop to buy chocolate late last year,
a Jewish shopkeeper told her that he doesn’t serve Arabs. At
meetings she helped organize between local Jewish and Palestinian
leaders, the former would speak openly about “wiping out Gaza.” 

Toward the end of Younis and Friedland’s film, El-Memeh, the
schoolteacher, says between tears: “I don’t want to go through a
Second Nakba.” As Lod’s Palestinians — many of them descendents
of those who survived the massacre and mass expulsion from Lyd in 1948
— watch Gaza being destroyed by their country of citizenship, they
cannot help but wonder whether they’re next.

We are in an extraordinarily dangerous era in Israel-Palestine. The
bloodshed has reached extreme levels of brutality and threatens to
engulf the entire region. Emboldened settlers in the West Bank, backed
by the army, are seizing the opportunity to intensify their attacks on
Palestinians. The most far-right government in Israel’s history is
ramping up its policing of dissent, using the cover of war to silence
Palestinian citizens and left-wing Jews who object to its policies.

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This escalation has a very clear context, one that +972 has spent the
past 14 years covering: Israeli society’s growing racism and
militarism, entrenched occupation and apartheid, and a normalized
siege on Gaza.

We are well positioned to cover this perilous moment – but we need
your help to do it. This terrible period will challenge the humanity
of all of those working for a better future in this land. Palestinians
and Israelis are already organizing and strategizing to put up the
fight of their lives.

Can we count on your support 
[[link removed]]? +972 Magazine is a leading
media voice of this movement, a desperately needed platform where
Palestinian and Israeli journalists, activists, and thinkers can
report on and analyze what is happening, guided by humanism, equality,
and justice. Join us.

* Film
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* Documentary Film
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* Film Review
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* 'Lyd'
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* Rami Younis
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* Sarah Ema Friedland
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* Palestine
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* ethnic cleansing
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* Judaizationn
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