A Lyd without the Nakba
Screengrab from ‘Lyd’
Dikla Taylor-Sheinman reports in +972 on 25 October 2024:
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.