A Lyd Without the Nakba
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 in response. Younis sarcastically thanked 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 as an internal frontier 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 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 of 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. 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 by 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 which 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” marked the largest uprising of Palestinians in Israel since the events of October 2000. 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 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, who later died. Rioters also set fire to three synagogues, which Mayor Revivo likened to “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 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 at 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 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 of Netanyahu’s Likud party and Lod’s Garin Torani. When he isn’t storming a mosque to shut off the speakers broadcasting the call to prayer during Eid Al-Adha, he is stoking moral panic about escalating crime, hinting at nationalistic motives of “Arab gangs,” or asking the government to 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 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 from the West Bank, and 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.
“Lyd is serving as a kind of lab, a pilot,” Younis says. “What the Israeli authorities are doing in Hebron, they’re planning on doing in 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 — and all the more so in 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. Hundreds of 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 and faced calls from 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 as 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 that 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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