A tale of two Lyds: What if the Nakba never happened?

There once was an ancient city called Lyd, sometimes known as Lydda. Lyd connected Palestine to the world. It used to have its own airport and even a train station, meaning Palestinians could freely commute. But not many people have heard of it, because it depopulated and forcibly renamed Lod 76 years ago after the Nakba.

As part of the United Nations partition plan that created Israel and carved up the land to create homes for both Jewish and Arab communities, Lyd was to remain part of Palestine.

But as this piece in The New Yorker states: "If Zionism was to exist, Lydda could not exist. If Lydda was to exist, Zionism could not exist."

Lyd was once home to a 50,000-strong Palestinian community and famed for its olive and sesame oil presses. But in 1948, an Israeli militia known as the Palmach massacred hundreds of its local residents and exiled around 35,000 more to the Jordanian border in what would become known as the Lydda Death March.

During the exile, some people were witnessed "chewing grass in the hope of obtaining a bit of moisture," and "pregnant women prematurely delivered babies (by the roadside), their labour brought on by the strain of their ordeal."

Those who remained in Lyd, which is some 15 km east of Tel Aviv, now live in impoverished neighbourhoods, fearful of speaking out against the war in neighbouring Gaza.

But what if the Nakba never happened? What would have become of the city with its 5,000 year rich history as a bustling metropolis?

Part documentary, part fantasy, a new film called Lyd (2023) explores just that. Using never-before-seen archival footage of the Israeli soldiers who carried out the massacre and expulsion in 1948, and interviews with remaining Palestinian residents, the film using animation in parts and imagination, creates a world where there are two Lyds existing in parallel realities - one under occupation and one that is free.

The film premiered at the 2023 Amman International Film Festival where it won the Jury Prize for Best Documentary and is now screening at select cinemas across North America. The film's co-directors, Jewish-American filmmaker Sarah Ema Friedland and Palestinian citizen of Israel Rami Younis (a Lyd native), recently spoke about the film to TRT World.

TRT World: Why did you choose Lyd in particular to tell the story of what life would have looked like if there had been no Nakba?

Sarah Ema Friedland: In 2015, I read an article about the Nakba in Lyd and it blew my mind. I did not know anything about this history. I had never heard of the Nakba, and I was sad and angry that this history had been kept from me. So I decided to use my tools as a filmmaker to share the history further.

However, it was clear that it was not my story to tell, and so a friend put me in touch with Rami (Younis), who is from Lyd, and we hit it off and started working on this together.

There have been many films made about the Nakba, but not many about Palestinian cities and none about Lyd.

Lyd is an important place in ancient and present day Palestine. It was one of the first capitals of Palestine in 636 CE, it was an economic and transit hub, and it was one of the last Palestinian cities to fall during the Nakba, because there was a fierce Palestinian resistance in Lyd.

After British and then Zionist colonialism, Lyd became disinvested by the state of Israel and known for violence and drugs. It is a very tragic story. Because of all of this history and destroyed potential, we thought it important to imagine what could have been if there had never been a Nakba.

TRT World: You've beautifully personified Lyd in the film. Why was that important to do? For people perhaps removed from what's happening to be able to better relate?

Rami Younis: The idea behind personifying Lyd in the film came because of two main needs: We needed a narrative spine to tie all the different forms of storytelling together, and who better to tell the story of the city than the actual city?

And the second need was humanising the space. As Palestinians, we are used to humanising ourselves in the eyes of the world - especially the Western world. By giving Lyd a voice and having her tell her own story, we took it further by humanising the space, not the person.

Cities have souls. It is something you can feel every time you visit one. Can you imagine how much Palestinian cities' souls are tormented? We wanted to shed light on that.

TRT World: Why did you choose science fiction as a genre to depict this utopian land of peaceful co-existence. Can it only ever exist outside the bounds of reality?

Sarah Ema Friedland: We were originally making a much more journalistic film that shared the history of the Nakba in Lyd and its continued impact on the present. However, we took a step back and realised that we were making a film that neither of us would want to watch. It was too tragic and we felt that we were re-victimising - there was nothing liberatory.

We are both big sci-fi fans and sci-fi has a long tradition of telling stories of liberation and imagining new political realities. It seemed like a perfect fit for what was missing!

We do not envision this alternate reality as a perfect utopia. The sci-fi writer Ursula Le Guin uses the term ambiguous utopia, that is what this is. Yes, many things are better, but there are subtle hints in the script that there is still racism and class divides. This is important, because we did not want to essentialise the alternate reality.

That being said, it is a vision of Pan-Arab solidarity, a liberated Palestine, and religious coexistence. Because it existed in the past, we do believe it can exist in the future, even if how we get there feels like a mystery. That is where the fantastical animation style comes in. This is a fantasy and we want people to understand it as such, but it is necessary to imagine it in order to make it real.

TRT World: What does it mean to release this film during a war that has been described as worse than the Nakba for the Palestinian people?

Rami Younis: During the screenings in our US tour (the film premiered in the US on April 17), I was asked the same question. I told people that the first feeling I felt after arriving in the US is that "I can breathe," after being silenced and targeted as a Palestinian citizen of Israel. Palestinians from the river to the sea have been going through not only erasure attempts, but silencing as well.

The war did not start on October 7. The film provides a much-needed background on Israel/Palestine and we see that the average viewer, who doesn't know much about the history of the place, finds the film beneficial in that sense. And it shows that what's been happening in Palestine during the last several months is not a new thing, but has been happening since 1948. Because the Nakba never stopped.

TRT World: In the film, if the Nakba never happened, Israel doesn't exist. How has the film been received by Jewish audiences, and have there been accusations of anti-Semitism?

Sarah Ema Friedland: As a Jewish American, it was very important for me to get this film in front of Jewish audiences, especially in the US. So far their reaction has been very positive.

Many Jewish people simply do not know this history. It is not something we are taught. In fact it is purposefully hidden from us, because if it were not, it would be much harder for Jewish people to continue supporting Zionism.

So far Jewish audiences have been grateful to be shown this history and to be let into another perspective, and we have not had any accusations of anti-Semitism.

I think it will be hard for people to accuse the film of anti-Semitism because it imagines an alternate reality where there is a lot of Jewish presence in a liberated Palestine.

Jewish presence is not erased from the imaginary - in fact, it is welcomed. That being said, the Christian and Jewish Zionist lobbies are very strong in the United States and have worked hard for years to create definitions of anti-Semitism, like the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition that conflates criticising the State of Israel with anti-Semitism, which is ridiculous and anti-democratic.

TRT World: You've interviewed Palestinians in Lyd, and then animated their imagined lives if the Nakba hadn't happened. Can you tell us about one of these characters? And how did they feel after seeing their imagined freedom on the screen?

Rami Younis: Not only Palestinians in Lyd, but also displaced refugees in a refugee camp. One of them, for example, was Jihad Baba, a metal worker from Balata refugee camp in the West Bank. Jihad, now in his 30s, is a descendant of displaced Lydians from 1948.

He describes in the film how he always dreamed of being a lawyer, but he couldn't because of the occupation. In the alternate reality, in which the Nakba never happened, we not only place him back in the city he's originally from and never got to see, but made him a law student in a university in Lyd.

Now, just to be clear, the real Lyd has no university in it. Lyd is a very marginalised place. In the alternate reality, if it weren't for the occupation, it is still the city that once connected Palestine to the world, with displaced Palestinians back in the city.

The real characters also recorded their own lines for the fictional animated sequence and it was a lot of fun to work with them on that. It felt like they were partners in the making of the film, and not only just as passive subjects. Jihad's reaction to his participation in the film was very positive.

We premiered the film last August, during the Amman International Film Festival. Amman has a large population of Palestinian refugees, and many of them are from Lyd. They came to watch the film and we saw the profound impact it had on them. Finally, for the very first time, they got to see that place they've been dreaming about their entire lives, but without the atrocities that took place in 1948.

It was very satisfying for us, as filmmakers, to realise our film not only moved people, but answered a much needed need very few talk about: The need of refugees to imagine the place they were displaced from, but without the reason for their displacement.