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American science fiction is largely about taming the frontier or the implications of new technologies. But Israeli sci-fi is often about roads not taken, alternate histories, other Israels that are or once were just around the corner.
“Lyd,” playing this month at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, is far more a Palestinian film than an Israeli one, but it certainly fits that pattern.
The film — equal parts real-world documentary and alt-history reverie — is codirected by Rami Younis, a Palestinian, and Sarah Ema Friedland, an American Jew. It tells the story of the real Lyd, the Arabic name for the city of Lod near Tel Aviv. As a documentary, “Lyd” examines the 20th-century history of the city and its 21st-century present, told primarily from a Palestinian point of view.
During the Ottoman Empire and British Mandate periods, Lyd was a beautiful and bustling Arab town that connected the area to the rest of the world. Trains brought tourists from Egypt and Syria to the town, which was home to a famed Christian festival called Eid Lyd, celebrating St. George, its patron saint best known for slaying a dragon. On the eve of Israeli independence, Lyd even boasted an international airport — later renamed by Israel as Ben Gurion Airport.
But Israel’s War of Independence, or the Nakba as this film prefers, brought suffering to Lyd. It was invaded and conquered by the Palmach, the elite pre-state Jewish fighting force. Thousands of Palestinians fled — either of their own volition or at gunpoint, depending on which of the film’s subjects you believe.
But “Lyd” is not only a documentary. The film’s Arabic narration, by actor Maisa Abd Elhadi, who speaks in the first-person as the personification of the city, asks us, “Have you ever heard of the theory that claims that every event has multiple possible outcomes?” (American moviegoers today would be hard-pressed not to have heard of that theory. We live, after all, in the era of the multiverse blockbuster.) She continues, “These moments of change open doors to new realities. Alternate realities.”
The wrenching trauma of the Nakba and the expulsion of thousands of Arab residents created a rupture in reality, she tells us. Now there are two Lyds: the conquered one now called Lod and the alternative-reality Lyd that is a freer, happier one for its Arab majority.
Suddenly, we are watching the first of many adorably animated scenes about what happened in another timeline: a world in which the post-World War I colonial arrangement that carved the region up among European powers never came to be, a world in which Palestine is home to a multi-ethnic culture, part of a multi-state federation called the Greater Levant.
Beginning in the 1880s, European Jewish refugees are welcomed into the Greater Levant, joining the communities of Jews already living there peacefully. After the Holocaust, even more Jewish refugees are welcomed to Palestine.
The Greater Levant seems to our eyes, here and now, like a wildly utopian idea.
Then again, the Zionist enterprise was a messianic pipe dream — until it wasn’t. But that dream, now realized, has not resulted in a peaceful utopia, as this film is at great pains to remind us. At the same time, the idea that the Greater Levant would be a pluralistic, democratic wonderland is difficult to believe.
The land imagined by Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, in his 1902 novel of speculative fiction “Altneuland” (“The New Old Land”) is an equally impossible, utopian vision of Jewish sovereignty. But the impossibility of “Altneuland” was beside the point. It helped Zionists imagine their future.
This movie seeks to do the same, by going back and asking if everything happening today was always as inevitable as it now seems. The movie’s answer, of course, is no. Something else was possible — is possible.
The movie flits back and forth between the real world and the imaginary one. In the real world, we are witnesses to intense, disturbing interviews with Palestinians who live in Lyd today, including an artist, a teacher and a former politician, and a family who fled Lyd in 1948 and now live in Balata, a refugee camp-turned-town in the West Bank where many former Lyd residents now live. They tell us of horrors of past and present Lyd — theft of land and homes, “protests” that are little more than anti-Arab pogroms, the humiliation of driving through Palmach Square, named for the people who took Lyd from them.
In the animated world, each of these real-world interviewees gets a counterpart. In the real world, Eissa Fanous is an elderly, obscure artist who lived through the Nakba in Lyd as a child. He recalls being forced to help Israeli soldiers dispose of the decomposing bodies of Palestinians killed in the fighting. In his home is a small statue he sculpted of St. George. In the other universe, Fanous is a famous artist, recognized on the street by passersby. And his sculpture of St. George is a huge civic statue with pride of place in a public square, a symbol of the city.
Imagining the alternate, happier lives of the real-world interviewees is an audacious and breathtaking choice.
In the real world, a metalworker in Balata tells us that he actually wanted to be a lawyer. But the structural barriers to higher education that the occupation places before a third-generation refugee in the West Bank are too great. So of course, in the animated world, he is a lawyer.
In the real world, a local Palestinian teacher tells us of the inequality of the education system in contemporary Israel. We see her take her young students through a heartbreaking exercise that asks them to consider their own disjointed identities as Palestinians and citizens of Israel. In the other world, we see her take them through an exercise that asks them to consider their “Palestinian privilege” — a jaw-dropping moment.
But the animated portions are always brief. Jarringly, they flicker as they are replaced by stark, sun-drenched cinematography of the real world. It is a highly effective visual.
Imagining the alternate, happier lives of the real-world interviewees is an audacious and breathtaking choice.
Jewish Israelis are represented in the film primarily by archival interviews with some of the Palmach members who took part in the capture of the city. They are terse and conflicted. Describing the sight of thousands of Palestinians fleeing the city, one says, “It was an exile — an exile stemming from the need to escape a place where they would have been annihilated without the possibility of fighting back.” (His use of the Hebrew “galut,” the word we Jews use to describe thousands of years of exile and diaspora, is a devastating irony.)
The next Palmach soldier on screen tells us they “cleansed” the area, chilling language. He tells us that soldiers looted Palestinian belongings left behind and supposes that others later stole valuables from Palestinians on the road as they fled.
Later on, a woman in Balata who lived through this exile confirms that soldiers stole their money and other valuables as they left. We watch her wistfully tell her granddaughters what Lyd was like in the old days, fondly remembering the Eid Lyd festivities. In the animated world, she never leaves Lyd and we see her cheerfully take her granddaughters to the celebration.
After the “siege of Lyd,” the film tells us, “around a thousand Palestinians were allowed to stay in Lyd, but were forced to live in a ghetto and work jobs that maintained the city’s infrastructure.” This film, whether it’s the interviewees themselves or the filmmakers in voiceover and text on screen, always finds the most discomfiting words: galut, cleanse, ghetto.
Lyd the narrator tells us that most of her people, living now in exile, do not see her truly as she was and certainly cannot imagine her as she is. So much of what they remember is gone now. To them, she is “a promised land,” as hyperbolically perfect as the Israel I was so often taught about as a kid.
One place the film falters is in its too-brief mention of the Jewish refugees who came to the Greater Levant. We hear about them only in the early part of the alternate history. Each real-world Palestinian in the film has a counterpart in the other world. But the Israelis do not. What has become of the Jews of the Greater Levant today? The film leaves us wondering.
If you are uncomfortable with a narrative that defaults to calling that land Palestine and calling the events of 1948 the Nakba, this film will challenge you immensely. Even if you are comfortable with that language, it will disconcert you. But I daresay it’s a good time to be challenged by art from Israel, from Palestine — from the Greater Levant.