On the the 74th anniversary of the Nakba, Palestinian journalist and filmmaker Rami Younis shares the city of Lyd’s past, present, and a possible alternative future.

Prevented from traveling due to the coronavirus, Jewish Israelis flocked to Nazareth and Haifa this holiday season with many saying it was like “going abroad.” It is time for the Israeli public to face the fact that it is in the Middle East, and remove the barriers – both physical and mental – that keeps them from doing so.

This week, Yitzhak Rabin will be remembered in Israel as a peacemaker on the anniversary of his assassination. One fact that will be ignored however is that Rabin was one of the key perpetrators of Israel’s ethnic cleansing policy.

Israeli forces are rounding up Palestinians en masse inside Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory as part of what Israeli police are calling “Operation Law & Order”, following two weeks of Palestinian uprisings over Israeli aggressions in Jerusalem, Sheikh Jarrah, and Gaza.

Over the past three decades, Israel’s main effort to “Judaize” the “mixed cities” inside Israel has been waged through a war of attrition. This has included moving religious settlers into Palestinian communities, as well as using tourism and archeological preservation to take over land. The coexistence model in Israel’s “mixed cities” was always an illusion, and one that the recent protests finally served to smash.

Palestinians disconnected from each other have struggled immensely to maintain a national project with clear objectives. Now, struggling together across the entire geography of historic Palestine, the disintegrated parts of our body are coming back together.

An update from Palestine as Israeli attacks continue and Norman Finkelstein talks about Human Rights Watch’s new apartheid report.

Following a night of racist attacks by far-right Israeli extremists, Palestinians living in Lydda (Lod) are calling for immediate international intervention to defend them before it is too late.

The recent violence in the city Lydd (Lod) and other Palestinian cities in Israel has been described by many as “civil war,” but this narrative is misleading. Rather, what we are witnessing is the Israeli settler state declaring a war on its colonized “citizens,” and Palestinians fighting for their liberation.

It is a fiction to argue that there is any “co-existence” or that there are “mixed cities” inside Israel. It is a reality of ghettos and apartheid: an ongoing colonial project of Jewish supremacy. The reality of settler-colonialism, of Judaizing Palestine, is present in Lydda, “inside Israel” as much as it is in Sheikh Jarrah, in the occupied territory.