Lyd in Exile

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LYD The story of a city thatIN once connected EXILE Palestine to the world. Contents Log Line Synopsis Treatment Director Statements Still Frames Budget Production Stage Financial Plan Production Company Portfolio Director and Producer Bio Filmographies. Director and Producer Portraits Links to Project and Select Previous Work

Technical Details and Crew Title: Lyd In Exile Genre: Creative Documentary Runtime: 75 minutes DCP Color HD 1920 x 1080 and 4k Country: US and Palestine Producers: Rami Younis and Fivel Rothberg Executive Producer: Roger Waters Associate Producers: Reda Sabassi and Nancy Kallow Directors: Sarah Friedland and Rami Younis

Contact http://www.lydinexile.com/ Perinspire LLC By Sarah Friedland, Rami Younis, and Fivel Rothberg Contact : [email protected], Sarah Friedland: +1-917-859-8328, [email protected] Fivel Rothberg: +1-215-990-4442, [email protected] Rami Younis: +972-54-320-1894, [email protected], Logline The story of a city that once connected Palestine to the world.

Synopsis

There are moments when time abruptly stops, when daily routines are forever interrupted and the order they maintain is turned upside down. Over the course of two days in July of 1948, the city of Lyd, in what was then Palestine, experienced one of these moments. When Palmach soldiers (a Zionist militia) invaded the city, they found it swollen with refugees who had already been forced to leave their towns and villages in order to make way for the new State of Israel. Lyd was one of the few remaining Palestinian strongholds. However, after two days of ferce resistance, the Palmach persevered and the fghting culminated in the massacre of hundreds of civilians and the expulsion of tens of thousands of Palestinians from the city. Today, Lyd is called Lod in Hebrew and it is known for two things: it sits beside Israel’s international airport and it is the epicenter of Israel’s drug trade. It is also the site of contemporary displacement. New waves of religious Jewish settlers - supported by the State of Israel - have moved in to resettle the city, building new state-subsidised Jewish-only neighborhoods. The mayor, a Trump-like bombastic fgure, has openly proclaimed that the far-right Jewish groups “saved the city” from the Arab threat. This wave of ethnic cleansing and apartheid began in 1948, but continues today as an ongoing Nakba, or catastrophe.

This feature length hybrid documentary/fction flm uses multiple voices and stylistic approaches to question the construction of history and the shape of the present. Observational, essayistic and hybrid, the flm combines vérité, drone footage, archival and testimonies to create a visually striking storyscape. By weaving together different character-based vignettes rooted in Lyd, the flm creates a vivid portrait of a splintered community: Palestinian elders remember the events that turned their world upside down; Zionist soldiers return to the scene of the massacre and expulsion they committed in 1948; Jewish settlers re-shape Lyd in their own image, burying Palestinian archaeological sites in the process; a young educator fghts to preserve Palestinian identity for the next generation; all the while, Lydian refugees bide time in a refugee camp for 70 years.

Elias Khoury wrote, “The specifcity of the Palestinian Nakba...is a continuous tragedy without borders in space and time.” Lyd in Exile will explore how multiple pasts and presents convene in one city with an open wound that stretches far beyond its borders. But the flm also asks the audience to consider an alternative — or “What if?” — narrative. What if this moment never occured? What would an alternate present, not scorched by this foundational violence, look like? In collaboration with the flm’s characters and visual effects supervisor Suhel Nafar, we will develop fctional scenes that depict an alternate present that never experienced the massacre and expulsion. These scenes will be woven into the flm like surreal punctuation marks. Street names will change, houses will be re-built and people will have never been expelled. Treatment Present: Your blood has changed?

The flm opens with vérité footage of present day Lyd, showing the mix of people who live in the city: Palestinians, Jewish Israelis and immigrants from all over the world. Residents talk to camera about how they view the city. A Palestinian baker talks about discrimination in Lyd; a man with a huge star of David around his neck shares that he was one of the frst people in the city in 1948; a group of men explain that their families have been racing horses in Lyd for hundreds of years, and even though the city tries to prevent them from doing it, they will never stop. We enter the house of Manar Memeh, a 34 year old Palestinian educator from Lyd, as she prepares to leave for work. Her father picks grapes from the vine that has been in his family for generations as her niece cries, not wanting to be seperated from Manar for even a few hours. Manar comes from a family of native “Lyddians,” Palestinians who remained in Lyd after the Nakba. Through education, she tries to maintain Palestinian identity and narrative — a task that, we learn through her character, is almost impossible. We see Manar in her daily life, socializing with her Palestinian friends from the city, with her family members, and in her work at an Israeli NGO that supports young school students who excel in various felds. The NGO has four branches in Lyd: three for Jewish Israelis, and one for Palestinians. Manar’s employer sometimes resists her messages or methods, but they are not the only ones questioning her work. Her family, who raised her to be afraid of the painful past, also pushes back against her pedagogy, as do the young children she works with, who are paralyzed by confusion. During a vérité scene of an identity workshop that Manar conducts with Palestinian children in Lyd, we see that these eight year-olds lack knowledge of their history, narrative and identity. One boy says, “My blood was Palestinian but now it is Israeli.” To which Manar teasingly replies, “What? Your blood has changed?” Another child asks, “Why did the Jews choose this country?” After the workshops is over, Manar breaks down with her co-workers, she exclaims, “What will happen in ten years, there will be no Palestinians here.”

The intensity of this scene is broken by slow shots of the pre-1948 Palestinian buildings that remain in Lyd. The facades are crumbling and weeds grow through the windows. Slowly, through textured animation, the structures start to rebuild themselves. Stone by stone the landscape changes and modern buildings crop up and integrate themselves with the historic structures, in a way that speaks to both progress and historic preservation. In this fantastical scene, we witness a different Lyd come into being. The scene fades out and we are back in reality.

We fade up on towering glass and concrete buildings. At twenty stories, these immense structures dwarf the surrounding neighborhoods. Their facade is pristine, with small suggestions of life dotting the surface –– fower pots, israeli fags and wind chimes. The clothing of the residents reveal that they are Orthodox Jews. Children take scooters into the gated playground and men and women stroll around the grounds. Benny Printz, a spokesperson for this group, explains to camera that the neighborhood is called Ramat Elyashiv and that they are the Garin Torani, a group of Orthodox Jewish people who came to Lod decades ago. As we see more images of daily life, he explains that Garin translates to “seed” in English and the Garin Torani is one of many “seed communities” that exist in Israel. Most of the Garin have chosen to live in the North or in the South, in majority Arab neighborhoods. He continues to say that the community was started in Lod “in an effort to “re-invigorate the zionist ethos the country was founded with.”

Adjacent to the Ramat Elyashiv settlement is the old Palestinian burial ground. We learn from Maha Nakib, a former Palestinian city councilwoman in Lyd, that Ramat Elyashiv was built on top of the Palestinian neighborhood that surrounded their cemetery. She explains how the city sold the Garin Torani the land for a dollar and removed the Palestinians who were living there in order to make way for the construction of the new neighborhood. In the offce of the municipality, we meet Aharon Atias, the General Director of the Municipality of Lod, as he monitors various parts of the city through security cameras. He shares with us that there is another neighborhood in Lyd that is being earmarked for “Jewish only” housing for Ultra Orthodox religious groups. We visit the site and, through drone footage, see that it takes up multiple hectares of the city. Back in the municipal building we meet Yair Revivo, the current mayor. Throughout his interview, he talks positively about “coexistence” between Jews and Arabs in the city. He pushes a marketing campaign that calls Lod “mosaic city,” where Arabs and immigrants serve to add local color. However his true self is revealed when, two days later, we see him barge into Dahmash Mosque to interrupt the Muslim holiday prayer. He physically confronts Palestinian worshipers because their call to prayer and religious chanting are “too loud,” shouting at the congregants to “stop making so much noise.”

Outside of the mosque, etched into its facade, three plaques read: “The mosque was closed as a result of the monstrous massacre perpetrated by the occupation forces in 1948, and was partially reopened in 1996.” The camera then focuses on a sign in Hebrew pro- claiming the area in front of the mosque “Palmach Square,” after the Israeli soldiers who committed the massacre. In another fctional interlude, the word “Palmach” slowly fades from the marker, and the sign is left blank. What would this plaza be called if the massacre and expulsion had never happened? A montage of street signs commemorating Zionist victories, which can be found throughout Lyd, all slowly go blank. The scene fades out.

Past: to witness this sight of the march, of thousands

We fade up on Eissa Fanous, an older man with silver hair, who holds a cigarette with shaky fngers. He shows us his art, drawings and sculptures of St. George, a saint who slayed a powerful dragon. According to Christian belief, St. George’s mother was from Lyd and he was buried in the city’s church, which is named after him. Eissa shares his stories and poems, which revolve around 1948. Gradually, as his stories become more and more personal, and we learn about his painful past. He explains in a husky voice that he was 12-years-old during the Nakba. During the war, he survived by sheltering in a monastery. After the smoke cleared, Palmach soldiers kidnapped him and his friends and forced them to help burn the Palestinian bodies from the Dahmash Mosque Massacre. He painfully describes lifting body parts, which were left inside the mosque to rot in the heat of the summer. He recalls, “We would carry the bodies out, and they were burning them outside. Just across from the mosque in that open arena (what is now called Palmach Square).... They were all piled on top of each other. And it is only by chance that they didn’t do the same in the monastery.” Afterwards, he describes being dropped off at his parents’ house where his mom washed his hands and face with onions, to fght the smell and disease.

The camera returns to the same shot of the “Palmach Square” street sign, and the words on the sign have returned. Exact matching shots between the present day landscape and archival footage of Lyd in 1989 take the viewer back and forth in time and thread the past and the present together. The degraded quality of VHS footage evokes the worn feel of memory as former Palmach soldiers wan- der in and out of Lyd’s landscape remembering their 1948 wartime experience. This video, secured from the Dor Hapalmach Archive and originally shot for Israeli TV in 1989, contains never before seen footage of Palmach soldiers who occupied the city telling details of the massacre. Some of these details are damning, since according to the offcial Zionist propaganda there were no families in the mosque –– only fghters –– but the soldiers refute that narrative. The footage is most revealing in its outtakes, as when the former soldiers argue amongst themselves and with the flm crew about what they do and do not want to remember. Shmulik Ben David, a tank gunner, leans against a wall in front of Dahmash Mosque and re-enacts fring an an- ti-tank weapon into the walls of the mosque while another soldier adds how they went in afterwards and sprayed the Palestinians sheltering inside with machine gun fre. A Palmach commander remembers witnessing the expulsion of thousands of Palestinians from Lyd that he himself ordered. He recalls, “And to witness this sight of the march, of thousands with...they carried bound chickens with them, there were goats and cows and horses with belongings loaded on them. Hand pushed wagons too. It was a breathtaking sight…”

The footage cuts to a wide shot of the same archival footage on a laptop. The screen is being watched by an older Israeli man, and his face reveals pain and discomfort. The viewer is Uri Goldstein, is the Israeli flmmaker who was commissioned by the Palmach Ar- chive to flm the soldiers almost 30 years ago. In stylistic contrast to the rest of the flm, Sarah Friedland and Rami Younis are visible on camera as they talk to Goldstein, directors to director, about the choices he made while flming these scenes. We ask him to address the omission of some of the more damning information from the fnal product and the fact that it does not include any Palestinians. We bring him back to Palmach Square, where he talks about how, over the course of his career, he became more and more leftist and was eventually sensored and pushed out of the Israeli TV industry for his politics. He talks about how the flm would be different if he were to make it now and poetically describes how history is made and narratives are constructed, but also how “Nothing is hidden. Look around you, it is all clear what is happening and what has happened here.”

Still in Palmach Square, we meet Dina and Lulu Dahmash, two carefree young women of Lydian descent, who, using their foreign na- tionalities, are able to come and visit Lyd. The two speak perfect western English, and seem so eager to learn more about the city their parents came from. They heard about a mosque that Khalil Dahmash, their grandfather, built in 1922. We follow them as they enter the mosque for the frst time, a place which was once their family’s pride and today is a painful remnant of the Nakba. They achieve a form of closure when the two of them decide to pray in the mosque. For a moment, as we see the two washing their hands in preparation for the prayer and then actually pray, the possibility of return for Palestinians seems reel. However, this closure is short lived.

Exile: The 8th Nation

Narrow pathways weave through bustling Balata Refugee Camp in the West Bank, 67 km from Lyd. The expulsion of the Palestinian community in 1948 resulted in millions of refugees and their descendants living refugee camps throughout historic Palestine and the diaspora. Many of them, such as the people of Balata refugee camp in the West Bank, suffered from double occupation – that of 1948 as well as 1967. Markets, restaurants, martyr posters and houses stacked vertically fll one of the largest Palestinian refugee camps, where 27,000 people live in 0.25 square km.

The camera settles on a restaurant, and the sign out front reads “Lyd Restaurant.” Inside the proprietor busily serves the lunch rush as he talks to camera. “I have never been to Lyd but my family is from there. I have never been granted a permit to go into Israel.” He stirs a pot of foul and minces an onion. “Do you want to know stories about Lyd? Let me call my friend Jihad, he is a better storyteller than me.” He puts down the knife and calls Jihad. The lunch rush continues and a few minutes later Jihad Baba walks through the door. He is holding a computer circuit board, which he puts on the table as he hugs his friend. “These guys want to know stories about Lyd. Tell them your joke.” Jihad smiles, looks into the camera, and says, “How do you know if someone is from Lyd? They are probably blind or have one eye because they have eaten too much prickly pear cactus.” He continues, “In 1948, during the invasion, a Palestin- ian fghter gets prickly pear thorns in his eyes and is blinded. Accidentally, this blind fghter bombs the mosque thinking it is where the Israeli soldiers are, not the Palestinian civilians. This is actually what happened in Dahmash Mosque. That’s what helped destroy our cause.” Jihad and his friend are overcome with laughter at the absurd joke, and there laughter trails off into far off looks of sadness. They go on to talk with pride about the brave fghters in Lyd, and how Lyd was called “The 8th Nation” (one of the Arab nations at the time) because of residents’ bravery in 1948.

Down another narrow alleyway, seated under a tapestry of the Dome of the Rock, we meet Mahasin Tarteer as she teaches her two granddaughters how to make stuffed vegetables. She shows the kids how to do it properly, while we see the children struggling to follow the exact moves of their grandmother. Perhaps they are distracted because she is also telling them about their land in Lyd and how she yearns for them to go back there. “Lyd is full of prickly pear...we haven’t had any since we were exiled.” Mahasin explains to the girls that she was only seven-years-old when her mother sent her to the communal oven in Lyd’s center to bake the week’s bread. While the bread was in the oven, the Palmach attacked the city and expelled her family from Lyd. They were forced to walk the two day journey to this refugee camp, where they have lived ever since. The girls hold the hollowed vegetables up to their eyes like a telescope, trying to imagine the homeland to which that the occupation forbids them from returning. Yet what would they fnd if they returned to present day Lyd? In another immaginary sequence, the girls run through the streets of Balata and, through the visual effects work of Suhel Nafar, the streets of Balata are transformed into the streets of Lyd. We watch as the girls run by familiar landmarks that we have seen in Lyd throughout the flm. However, it is all a little changed –– the old Palestinian homes still stand, the street names are different and the the girls are no longer refugees. Director Statements

Rami Younis Director Statement As a Palestinian activist from Lyd and a director of this flm, my vision is to help create a “go-to flm” for all people who want to learn about the Nakba. But why make a flm about Lyd specifcally? The sad truth is you won’t fnd too many depictions of the ethnic cleansing and expulsions that took place in my hometown, especially when compared to other atrocities from the Nakba like Deir Yaseen or Tantura. I know frst hand that my hometown still suffers from an ongoing Nakba, a creeping Nakba. Our national catastrophe didn’t quite end in 1948, and Lyd serves as a case study to show exactly that: the Judifcation of the city; the ongoing discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel; the Palestinian home demolitions (80% of the Palestinians in Lyd live under what is being called by the state “illegal conditions” with no building permits); the sky-high crime rates; and the unbearable poverty. Lyd is a true symbol of Pal- estine’s ongoing loss, pain and resilience. I see this flm as part of my larger body of work and activism, which includes writing for the online outlet +972, organizing the Palestine Music Expo and creating a new fctional Arabic TV drama.

Sarah Friedland Director Statement As a Jewish American, I grew up completely deprived of any knowledge of the Palestinian narrative around the founding of the State of Israel. As I began to learn this history, I became voraciously hungry for more information, images and stories of Palestine past and present. As a flmmaker and artist, I want to make visible the processes of cultural erasure that have been underway for almost 70 years in Palestine, and create a cultural document that stands in the way of those processes. All of my work is about how personal geographies are impacted by historical geographies, and how people memorialize their personal and collective histories. This can be seen in The Rink and Here After. I am increasingly interested in staging and performance, which can be seen in Any More A Portion. These ideas feed into Lyd in Exile, which is also infuenced by the work of other many artists and their lineages. Having gone to flm school in Cuba, I am inspired by Santiago Alvarez and Sarah Gomez, who made the beautiful hybrid doc/fction flm De Cierta Manera. The way Elias Khoury’s writing describes the Palestinian Nakba has impacted my understanding, as has the recent flm Ghost Hunting by Raed Ando- ni, which uses re-enactment to engage with trauma. The polyvocal and form-blending work Illinois Parables by Debra Strapman informs my approach to place and history. We are creating something that Rami Younis and I both care about immensely on personal levels, but in opposite ways. For me it is about (dis)owning a narrative that has been a part of me my whole life. For Rami Younis, it is very much about owning a narrative that has been delegitimized by hegemonic narratives. I feel that the only way to honor these truths is with a cinematic exploration that is political in both form and process. Tarteer family in Balata Refugee Camp Dina Dahmash praying in Dahmash Mosque Production Stage

We are currently in the late production/editing stage of our project. We have completed one round of research and three rounds of production. We have secured releases from all characters and a materials release form for the archival footage that we use from the Palmach Archive. We have one more round of shooting that we need to complete, during which we will follow up with our characters and develop and flm our fctional scenes. Simultaneously, we are working with our consulting editors to start editing the flm. We hope to complete this fnal round of shooting in July and August and complete editing in the Fall-Spring of 2018/19. We will fnalize the score, color correction, and sound mix June- August of 2019 and will be ready to submit to festivals in the Fall of 2019.

Financial Plan

Working with our Executive Producer, Roger Waters, we will reach out to celebrities and other potential investors who are sympathetic to the flm’s artistic framework and social issue goals. With the help of the Dahmash family we will meet with potential successful Pales- tinian individuals who are living in exile and may be interested in investing or donating. We have already had success in this vein during our Indiegogo campaign, which raised over $40,000. We aim to present at flm market or pitch opportunities, such as Berlinale DocSa- lon, Cannes Doc Corner, CineMart, DOC NYC, Film Independent, Good Pitch, Hot Docs, IFP Week, Sheffeld, Sundance and Qumra of the Doha Film Institute. Additionally, we will hire a grant writer to help compose applications to foundations such as Ford (JustFilms), Fledgling and the Sundance Institute. Because we could not change the amount of rows on the provided budget spreadsheet, we did not include the following “to apply”/potential sources of funding: Derek Freese Film Fund, Doha Film Institute, Gucci Tribeca Documen- tary Fund, Cinereach and Impact Partners.

Production Company’s Portfolio

Founded in 2013, Perinspire LLC is a small, Brooklyn-based production company that specializes in creative nonfction flms. Previous titles include Jeepney (2014), The Rink (2014), Here After (2018). Our flms have screened around the world, have been broadcast in the U.S., and have received prestigious honors such as The Paul Robeson Award and a New York Emmy Nomination. We have entered into co- productions with the Center For Asian American Media (a PBS affliate) and Meerkat Media, and our flms have been distributed by Cinetic Media and Kanopy. Crew Biographies Sarah Friedland, Director/Cinematographer, documentaries have screened widely in the U.S. and abroad and have aired nationally on PBS. In 2009, after the debut of her feature documentary Thing With No Name, she was named one of the “Top 10 Inde- pendent Filmmakers to Watch” by the Independent Magazine. She has received grants, residencies, and fellowships from many organizations including Jerome Foundation, the Paul Newman Foundation, and the Ford Foundation JustFilms, the Center of Contempo- rary Art in Pont- Aven France, and the MacDowell Colony. She is a recipeint of the Paul Robeson Award and a New York Emmy Nomination for her flm The Rink. Friedland is the Director of MDOCS Documentary Storyteller’s Institute at Skidmore College.

Rami Younis, Director/Producer, is a Palestinian writer and activist from Lyd, who grad- uated From Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He currently writes for the online magazine +972, and serves as a writer an editor at the Hebrew sister site: “Local Call”. He is one of the founders of the Palestinian activist group, “Khotweh,” which was active on the issues Sarah Friedland of home demolitions and Palestinian identity in Lyd and Ramleh, mixed Jewish-Arab cities in occupied historical Palestine. Rami served as a parliamentary consultant and spokesperson for Palestinian member of Knesset Haneen Zoabi. Rami is also co-founder and manager of the frst ever “Palestine Music Expo”: an event that connects local Palestinian music scene to the world wide industry.

Fivel Rothberg, Producer, specializes in producing short nonfction flms for NGOs and long-format documentaries. He received the 2015 DoGooder Award for Best Impact Vid- eo from YouTube and See3 Communications, for our production on behalf of the Fund for Modern Courts, Now Is the Time. Currently, he is producing a feature-length documentary by Nathan Fitch, Island Soldier, about Micronesian citizens serving in the US military. Fivel Rothberg and Rami Younis Island Soldier has the backing of the PBS-affliated funder Pacifc Islanders in Communi- cations. Previously, he was the Associate Producer of Kelly Anderson’s flm, My Brooklyn, which aired in 2014 on the PBS series America ReFramed. Roger Waters, Executive Producer, is a founding member of the band Pink Floyd and a successful solo artist. His commitment to activism and human rights can be seen through his work on a multitude of causes including: justice for Palestine, disaster relief, extreme poverty and malaria, global climate change, veterans rights, and many more important areas of struggle and solidarity.

Reda Sabassi, Associate Producer, is a Los Angeles based entrepreneur who started his career in Tech and IT. He is a Palestinian from Jordan who is interested in supporting projects that call for justice in Palestine.

Nancy Kalow, Associate Producer, is a folklorist and flmmaker who has taught at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies since 2000. Her video documentary, Sadobabies, was the winner of a Gold Hugo at the Chicago Film Festival and the Special Jury Trophy at the San Francisco Film Festival. She has been co-chair of the Selection Committee of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival since 2003. She was a co-convener, with miriam cooke and Maha Houssami, of the 2015/16 Mellon Humanities Writ Large project, Arab Refugee Oral History: Collecting Life Narratives. Her e-book, Visual Storytelling: The Digital Video Documentary was published by CDS.

Suhel Nafar, Visual Effects Supervisor, is a motion graphics artist and flmmaker who helped launch Complex Snapchat Discover channel, the fastest growing platform in the history of Complex Networks. Recently, he was an artist-in-residence at NYU, co-produced and did the GFX for the award winning feature, Junction 48. He is also part of DAM, a Hip Hop Group from Lyd. Consulting Editors

Rabab Haj Yahya is an Emmy-nominated documentary editor and a Sundance Edit and Story Lab Fellow. Her recent work includes the award-winning feature documentary SPEED SISTERS (HotDocs 2015), LOVE THE SINNER (Tribeca 2017) and the web series THE SECRET LIFE OF MUSLIMS (Peabody Finalist, Vox and USA Today, 2016). Rabab has also edited numerous documentaries commissioned by the Al Jazeera Documentary Channel, including ENEMIES OF THE SOUTH (2015), which was featured in multiple prime-time slots on the network. In between projects, Rabab has dedicated a signifcant amount of her time helping aspiring editors and flmmakers, through training and pro-bono consultations in the Middle East, West Africa, and the Balkans. Rabab speaks English, Arabic, and Hebrew fuently and currently lives in New York.

Jay Arthur Sterrenberg is a Canadian-American documentary director, editor an cinematographer whose work has broadcast on PBS, HBO, and CNN, and has screened at festivals such as Sundance, Tribeca, Berlin & IDFA. Documentary editing credits include DARK MONEY (Sundance, 2018), TROPHY (CNN Films, 2017), Tribeca award winning UNTOUCHABLE (2016), NARCO CULTURA (Cinedigm, 2013), Academy Award nominated RE- DEMPTION (HBO, 2013), and Emmy Nominated SECTION 60 (HBO, 2008).

Advisors Tamer Nafar: Musician, actor, and activist. Member of the Lyd based Hip Hop group DAM. Star of Junction 48, fction flm based in Lyd. Hannah Mermelstein: Founder of Librarians and Archivists for Palestine. Suha Arraf: Fiction flm director and screenwriter. Director of Fiction Film, Villa Touma. Oren Moverman: Academy award winning fction flm screen writer, director and producer. Credits include Time Out Of Mind, Love and Mercy and Junction 48. Jonathan Cook: Award-winning British author and journalist reporting from Nazareth on the Middle East, including the Israel-Pales- tine confict. Orwa Switat: City planner and doctoral candidate in geography whose research includes the erasure of Palestinian features of “mixed cities” in Israel. Joseph Atrash: Chairman of Al-Midan theater in Haifa. Dina Dahmash and Lamia Dahmash: Palestine advocate. Granddaughter of Khalil Dahmash, who built Dahmash Mosque in Lyd.