October 2, the birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, has brought to mind the words he wrote in his November 1938 article, “The Jews”, in his magazine Harijan. It was published two weeks after Kristallnacht (Night of the Broken Glass), a pogrom in which Nazis ransacked Jewish businesses across Austria and Germany, and began rounding up Jews en masse to take them to concentration camps. This was also near the end of a three-year general strike, known as the Great Arab Revolt, during which Palestinians resisted the British-Zionist colonisation of their land.
In his piece, Gandhi ponders how Jews might nonviolently resist Nazi brutality, now showing how “hideous, terrible and terrifying it looks in its nakedness”. But he also clearly sees parallels in the behavior of Zionist Jews in Palestine. “The Palestine of the Biblical conception is not a geographical tract,” he wrote. “It is in their hearts. But if they must look to the Palestine of geography as their national home, it is wrong to enter it under the shadow of the British gun.”
This week a year of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and of rising attacks and war crimes against them in the West Bank. Since September 17, 2024 Israel has also made escalating terrorist attacks and aerial bombing raids on the Lebanese people. This is part and parcel of the history of living under the British-cum-Zionist gun. It’s also a part of the ongoing Nakba, the Palestinians’ name for their violent uprooting from their homes, family, and land in 1948.
The Nakba didn’t end in 1948. It has been ongoing in various violent forms ever since. That ongoing Nakba isn’t limited to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which is how Palestine is usually defined by the media and school textbooks.
Palestine constitutes the entirety of the land, from the river to the sea, that Israel has ruled with an iron fist for over 76 years. Palestinians living inside Israel (or what is also known as 1948 Palestine) are treated, as Palestinian-Canadian lawyer Diana Buttu notes, the “enemy from within.”
Two recent and remarkable films, illustrating what life was like in 1948 Palestine, will screen at the Bangalore International Centre on October 2. They are Rami Younis and Sara Ema Friedland’s Lyd and Lina Soualem’s Bye, Bye Tiberias.
Lyd infuses animation and science fiction into documentary, to tell the history of the city of Lyd. The city-as-narrator tells us, “The story of Lyd is the story of Palestine.” The city narrates her past, present and alternative future. We are privy to scenes of what Lyd could have looked like, had Jewish people sought refuge in Palestine rather than entering under the cover of British guns.
Narrating Lyd’s actual history are Nakba survivors living in refugee camps. A backdrop of archival footage shows Zionist militias ethnically cleansing Lyd. Members of the Palmach militia reveal their crimes while wandering through destroyed Palestinian homes.
We see hints of what Gandhi was concerned with: the danger of adopting the methods of Europe’s most violent regimes, the British and the Germans. These tactics and tools were forced upon people who had no stake in the battles being waged in Europe.
Remnants of what happened during World War II in Europe are repeated in Lyd, as in the rest of Palestine – massacres, forced exile, theft of land and family treasures, the separation of families, ghettoization. Colonisation takes root inside 1948 Palestine with the intrusion of Jewish-only colonies in the center of a Palestinian city. The land confiscations and home demolitions have continued unabated since 1948.
In spite of these and other forms of trauma, the film envisions other possible futures in its alternative timeline. We see what Lyd could have been: multicultural classrooms where teachers and students discuss the Sudanese and Eritrean refugees in their country, who “fled the horrors of ethnic cleansing like some of your grandparents who fled the Nazi holocaust in Europe.” This is a stark contrast to an earlier moment, where a room full of children talk to their teacher about identity, and most are not sure what it means to be Palestinian.
Younis, a native of Lyd, and Friedland, a Jewish American filmmaker, overwrite history with a sense of hope and the necessity of imagination. Their narrator leaves us with the thought, “If we don’t imagine a world that can include us too, we won’t be able to build the world we want. If we don’t imagine, we will end up in someone else’s world, shaped by their imagination.”
In Bye, Bye Tiberias, imagination enables the director, Soualem, to picture what her family endured during the Nakba. Her great grandparents fled to Lebanon, but were turned back after reaching the border, only to find Zionists had captured their town, Tiberias.
Narrating four generations of her family, Soualem captures touchstones in Palestinian history, beginning with the Nakba. The one absent presence in the film is Hosnieh, Soualem’s great aunt who fled to Syria with her family. Scenes of Tiberias at various points in the film – including footage taken by Soualem, home movies and archival footage – cover similar terrain of the city, of the lake, and the center of town. It’s most jarring to contrast the vibrant Palestinian marketplace of the early 20th century with the recent scenes of gaudy Hebrew signs erasing the Palestinian presence.
The trauma narrated in both these films might have been avoided if Gandhi’s message to the world’s Jews been heard and our world might have looked different, perhaps even like the one Younis and Friedland envision.
Instead we exist in a moment when Israel operates with a boundless level of impunity while committing a genocide in Gaza, and hinting of repeating them in Lebanon. The United States is Israel’s main partner in crime, but India has aided and abetted this genocide with its drones.
The International Court of Justice ruled that we must act to prevent Israel’s ongoing and ever escalating genocidal behavior. But India’s Supreme Court declined to get involved when it dismissed a case to halt military exports to Israel.
There are implications for our actions and implications for our silence. Allowing genocide to grow like a cancer throughout West Asia without any intervention from a country like India, which once was at the helm of the Non-Aligned Movement, is in itself a crime. When Jewish people said “never again” after World War II, we meant never again for anyone, anywhere.
Lyd and Bye, Bye Tiberias will be screened at the Bangalore International Centre on 2 October from 4-8 PM. Refreshments will be provided by Natuf.
Marcy Newman is author of The Politics of Teaching Palestine to Americans (2011). She is a member of Jewish Voice for Peace, the International Jewish Antizionist Network, and a founding member of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.
