There was not much missing. The film was almost shot in a movie theater on the outskirts of the city of Tel Aviv. But Palestinian activism found itself right along with radical Zionism. A few days before the premiere, a man in favour of crushing Palestine realised in time what was happening, that a fictional film representing free Palestine was to be projected, and sent a letter to the Israeli Government’s Minister for Culture, urgently calling for the “terrorist coup” to stop. This was done by Minister Miki Zohar, who set the machinery in motion. It would be the first screening of LYD in Israel.

The minister defined it as a “crude and malicious” film, “an unfounded lie”, manipulated, against the state of Israel, full of slander. This was corroborated by several media outlets and, in addition to asking the minister to the police, the media pressed for it not to be released. The police held a "warning conversation" with the director and programmer of the movie theater and, finally, the government said the film was withdrawn at the will of the room managers. Apparently, he did not have "permission" to carry out the operation, according to Interior. In fact, the Israeli Film Committee, of which the Ministry of Culture is a member, is responsible for reviewing all films requesting projection permits and, in the event of disagreement, the product becomes illegal.

The incident caused a tumult, because the people on the left were agitated and the Minister of Homeland Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, remained silent. “I hear the laments of the people on the left about the suspension of the screening with the film LYD. You have to understand that law is law and order.”

Fourteen Israeli organizations returning to the world of culture protested against censorship. “The Israeli police have an obligation to protect freedom of expression and not those who seek to destroy it,” they denounced. Well, they opened the way to justice and urged the Attorney General to clarify its functioning, to see if he sees well that the Ministry of Culture and the Police are in charge of any presentation of culture. In other words: to see whether, in the opinion of the Attorney General, censorship is legal or not. He answered with an inexpressive and sterile one so he wouldn't say anything.

This happened at the
end of October 2023, a few weeks after Hamas attacked Israel, a few weeks after the Zionist authorities started a more violent military action against Palestine. Since then, things have worsened, even in the world of culture. “Before 7 October 2023, making and projecting such a film was to literally put the skin in play, and the filmmakers were self-censoring because we were afraid; now they don’t even let us project, and cancellations are much larger, much more expected,” said Palestinian journalist Rami Younis, following the LYD film, to Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Ironically, he added: “What do you want? We live in a state where the Minister of Security is Ben-Gvir.”

It is not, of course, the only case of censure. The bread of every day is the bread of every day in the Zionist state. For example, just a month ago, the Israeli Film Review Committee censored the new film by filmmaker Neta Shoshani (1948). Remember, Remember Not, for understanding that it can generate “controversy” and “problems” in Israeli society. This documentary narrates the war of 1948 and gathers the testimonies of Jews and Arabs. He had to arrive in Israel after he had received an international prize.

In addition, the committee recently censored the film Yenin, Jenin, of director Mohammed Bakri, set in the Second Intifada and narrating the battle of Jenin.

The city of Lyd and the film LYD Rami Younis, journalist and activist, was born in Lyd in
1982 in occupied Palestine – when asked Google, it will tell you that Younis is is Israeli, and they have presented it in many places. It belongs to the third generation that suffered the Nakba of 1948. He went to London, and there he did his studies. He returned, however, and lives in the vicinity of the city of Tel Aviv, where, according to the network, he does not provide any information about his place of residence, since he has been persecuted by the far-right. He has previously made another fictional film about a young Palestinian living in the West Bank of Rammalah and who is later going to become a character, as he writes a book in a checkpoint about his relationship with an Israeli soldier. The film is titled Tel Aviv on Fire (Everything Happens in Tel Aviv) and is directed by John McCarthy and Michael Jackson. After seeing the light in 2018, the film won the award for the best lead actress at the Venice Film Festival.

There is a second significant person who has dedicated himself to the responsibilities of the LYD film: Sarah Ema Friedland. He is an Israeli filmmaker based in the United States, who has done a lot of work behind film cameras. Originally from Israel and from the Jewish family, the film reached the billboard of an Israeli film hall thanks to its support in the cinema. He has also suffered a chancellery and the far-right is campaigning in Israel against him and his family.

The two-hour fictional documentary is called LYD and it deals with the city of Lyd. She was occupied by Israel in 1948. It was an important city for society at the time: there was the airport of Palestine, which connected with the world, and geographically it was in the right place, it was the passage of many goods ... Until the Israeli army knocked everything down and occupied the land. Today, Loiu airport is still standing, but in the hands of the Israeli Government. And with another name: David Ben-Gurion International Airport The Israeli Prime Minister, Ben-Gurion, was the godfather of the Zionist State, which created the army and forcibly launched the occupation. The city called Lyd now receives another name: Lod. It is less than 15 kilometers from the great city of Tel Aviv.

In 1948, shortly after the founding of the State of Israel, the Zionist soldiers attacked the city without indiscriminate action. According to historians, some 50,000 people lived in the city of Lyd, including the Palestinians who had arrived from the lands that Israel had already occupied, and who were preparing to defend the city because they knew that the Israeli soldiers would arrive there before it was too late.

But the ravages began before the official army arrived. The Palmach soldiers, Israeli militiamen, one of the brigades before the founding of the Zionist State, began the attack. They entered a mosque and fired missiles, and within a few minutes, at least 200 people died. There began the last resistance of the city. In addition to causing thousands of deaths, the Israeli Government created its own ghetto in order to keep the city’s minimum infrastructure running, rather than suddenly passing to Israeli hands. About a thousand people, including the family of Rami Younis, were imprisoned in his city when all the others were displaced and many were killed.

The necessary infrastructure and services were maintained, but the city changed radically. By the way, besides. Unlike Haifa, Jaffa or other occupied Palestinian cities, Lyd – the current Lod on the map of Israel – is urbanistically a completely different city, as the documentalists, as the urbanists also confirm. Everything collapsed. Moreover, in the history written by Israel, the terminology is revealing: the event of the city of Lyd in 1948 is not described as occupation, but the liberation of the city of Lyd in 1948.

The daily details of the city are stronger. There's a long street, called Tsahal, which is the name of the Israeli army, and close to where the mosque was, although it didn't exist physically, where the terrible events happened, there's a roundabout and a big square called Palmach. The perpetrators of the massacre are honoured, according to a plaque, "to honor that the city was liberated from the claws of the Palestinians".

“Unfortunately, the history of the
city of Lyd has never been told, has been intentionally erased, and we have decided to tell it,” we read in an interview with Rami Younis, director of the LYD film, in the Democracy Now medium of EE.UU. Younis says that what happened in the city of Lyd, the story, is the story of the whole of Palestine.

“Much has been written about the nakba, fortunately it has been documented… but we wanted to turn the way we count.” That's why they've turned to fiction. Its objective is to represent an alternative way of life: “What would the reality be if it wasn’t for them, without cruelty?”

LYD is a hybrid work between documentary and fantasy. In order to tell the history of the city, in addition to recordings and archival interviews, new speakers have been found, there has been talk to a direct victim – who died before the publication of the film, Eissa Fanous – as well as relatives of those families, and has combined animations with these documents. In addition, the city becomes “character”, anthropomorphized, takes a voice to represent a positive panorama, never occupied. Lyd is a flowery place, alive, prosperous, of course... What would Lyd look like if it hadn't turned around?

But this question is not just a question of the 1948 Nakba. Nor will there be the famous 1916 agreement for the distribution of the Middle East in the English and French colonies, corresponding to the “Small Asia”, as is well known in the West and that has marked the story.

They have created a "parallel universe," "certainly a fantasy," according to director Younis told Israeli newspaper Haaretz, who has just published the book. It is a record that after that Israeli media has offered such a long dialogue. The dialogue has been made public after the Zionist State announced that it has taken Haaretz as an enemy, that it has taken economic measures to suffocate the newspaper for criticizing the Government.

The responsibility of telling the
story “We’ve told the story in which Arabs beat Europeans,” says Younis in the interview. They have imagined that they would form a Palestinian state such as Palestine, a Palestine of happy Arabs, with their everyday problems, such as those of the whole world, but also the Jews, in a peaceful and beautiful society based on equality.

Upon hearing him, the Haaretz journalist asks Younis whether this is the ideal situation he would like to live in. Answer: "What I want is for the Israelis to understand that Zionism is racism and to understand that it is not acceptable that they should not admit crimes of the past. And it is that, as Israeli rapper Tamer recently wrote in his diary, if a crime is not recognized, it repeats itself. Characters such as Avi Dichter [the Minister of Agriculture of the Government of Israel] cannot be allowed to threaten a second Nakba. It's stupid. Apart from a few left-wing sentiments, no one recognizes what happened to us. And if you admit it, you don't say it too loud. If this is the case, if we are not critical of the past, it is clear that it can be done again. That’s what I’d like people to understand.”

“The Jews, and not only the Israelis, have grown up with disinformation and historical distortions of all kinds,” says Younis, focusing on current generations, that is, those who have stayed far from Nakba: "Many years have passed and now a young man born in Israel does not know his story, because he does not know it because he has previously lived it by his hand and is far from it. It is a serious problem. People have no doubt that there was no massacre for the people, but in 1948 the Arabs left their lands by their own will. People come here. He doesn’t think anymore and doesn’t want to think.”

The journalist asks him to follow the thread, and Younis, who is born and lives in lands dependent on the State of Israel, tells him from his own experiences that he has heard other comments that say that in the early twentieth century the Jews went to those desert lands [to Palestine] to lead a “glorious life”, because there were no living conditions there. "What was it all a desert? What to undo?” says Younis: “Did my grandmother live in a desert? What nonsense is that? It is simply false. Here people have lived for centuries in peace.”

Without listening to these comments, Younis has felt the responsibility of putting the truth on the table, and above all of telling the city’s past, Lyd – or the current Lod, as it appears in an interview in the Haaretz newspaper – “The film shows that Palestine lived before 1948 and that Lod, although today it is a hole for the Israeli government, is close to Tel Aviv and it only has an important airport. And that was deliberately destroyed.”