Lyd. Directed by Rami Younis and Sarah Ema Friedland. Icarus Films, 2023. 78 minutes.

Two Blue Lines. Directed and distributed by Tom Hayes, 2015. 98 minutes.

Permission to Imagine: Palestinian Liberation and the Failures of Liberal Democracy

“Facts do not at all speak for themselves, but require a socially acceptable narrative to absorb, sustain and circulate them. Such a narrative has to have a beginning and end: in the Palestinian case, a homeland for the resolution of its exile since 1948.”
—Edward Said (1984, 34)

Edward Said’s essay “Permission to Narrate” can be a useful starting point to show Lyd and/or Two Blue Lines in the feminist classroom. Questions about who narrates Palestine and Palestinian liberation, how material conditions shape this narration, and which narratives can be heard in a world structured by anti-Palestinian racism, antisemitism, and white supremacy are central not just in feminist theory but also in Palestine studies, sociology, anthropology, and literary studies (Hammad 2024; Haraway 1988; Kelly 2023). Lyd and Two Blue Lines offer two very different narrative frames for exposing Israel’s settler colonial regime and the necessity of a free Palestine. While Lyd is told from a Palestinian point of view and introduces a speculative past, present, and future in which Palestine is already free, Two Blue Lines is predominantly told from an Israeli and Jewish American perspective, focusing on the incompatibility of liberal democracy and a Jewish state. Both documentaries were completed before October 7, 2023, and Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, financed and legitimized by the United States, the United Kingdom, and European states like Germany. Watching Lyd and Two Blue Lines today allows viewers to reflect on the broader structures of oppression that Palestinians have been subject to at least since the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948 (Eghbariah 2024). Their contrasting narrative strategies also offer a critical lens through which to interrogate the failure of the universalizing abstractions of liberal democracy—in Israel and beyond. Together, the films open up space for students from diverse backgrounds to think more radically, and, perhaps speculatively, about the possibility of a different world and their own role within it.

Lyd is a feature-length documentary that blends speculative fiction and historical storytelling to recount the 1948 massacre and expulsion of Palestinians from the city of Lyd during the Nakba (“catastrophe” in Arabic). Creatively told from the point of view of the city of Lyd herself, a place personified through the voice of Palestinian actress Maisa Abd Elhadi, the film recounts the forced transformation of Lyd from an important Arab capital connecting Palestine to the rest of the world to its current reality as one of Israel’s euphemistically called “mixed cities,” where ’48 Palestinians (Palestinian citizens of Israel) encounter the racist and violent reality of Israeli urban ethnocracy (Blatman and Sabbagh-Khoury 2022; Yiftachel and Yacobi 2003). It shows the connected histories and contemporary realities of Nakba survivors, young Palestinians in Lyd, and Lydian refugees and their children and grandchildren in the Balata refugee camp in the West Bank. In so doing, the documentary counters the hegemonic Israeli practice of spatially and epistemologically fragmenting Palestinians into different jurisdictions and identity categories (Bishara 2022; Salamanca et al. 2012). Lyd tells a powerful story about Palestinian identity, space, and everyday resistance across historic Palestine.

Alongside recounting the history of Israel as a settler colonial project through traditional documentary tools (Khalidi 2020), Lyd also introduces a speculative reality in which the Nakba never happened and Lyd is part of an independent Palestine. In this other reality, the Arab nations fought off European colonial powers in a “Great Anti-colonial War”; Lyd remains an important Palestinian capital, with connecting trains to Beirut, Cairo, and Damascus; and third-generation Lydian refugees never left and are studying in the Hannah Arendt Lecture Hall at Lyd’s George Habash University. In this slightly romanticized vision, Jews, Christians, and Muslims have equal rights, and multidirectional forms of memory are part of the school curriculum (Rothberg 2009). However, returning to contemporary realities, the film ends with a call for Palestinian liberation, with the voice of Lyd urging the viewer (who is implicitly addressed as Palestinian or Arab) to imagine a different future. For, in Lyd’s words, “if we don’t imagine a new world that can include us too, we won’t be able to build the world we want” (75:27).

Two Blue Lines is a straightforward, traditional documentary. Filmed over twenty-five years, it includes some Palestinian protagonists but mainly features Israeli activists opposing the occupation and perspectives of (predominantly American) Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank. The film shows footage from the occupied West Bank, occupied East Jerusalem, besieged Gaza, and from within Israel, deftly depicting the historical and ongoing reality of Israeli occupation, apartheid, and settler colonialism (Azoulay and Ophir 2012; Berda 2017; Erakat 2019). It introduces the viewer to the broader structure of Israeli rule and its various legal regimes and spatial infrastructures of control, including the ongoing occupation of Palestinian land, the extraction of Palestinian resources, and the exploitation of Palestinian labor. In so doing, Two Blue Lines challenges an understanding of the Nakba (1948), the Six-Day War (1967), the blockade of the Gaza Strip (2007), and Israel’s subsequent wars on Gaza—including today’s ongoing genocide—as separate and disconnected events (Sabbagh-Khoury 2021; 2025).

While the overreliance on Israeli and Jewish-American narrators feels limiting at points, this strategy nonetheless allows for two important points to emerge. Firstly, it shows the anti-occupation and/or anti-Zionist Israeli activists grappling with how the occupation and Israel’s unspeakable violence corrupt their own society. In their reflection on the constant dehumanization of Palestinians or the fact that many of the atrocities Jewish Israelis fear are the ones the Israeli military inflicts on Palestinians, they reveal the psychological (yet asymmetrical) effects that colonial violence has on both the colonized and the colonizers (Fanon 1961). Secondly, this perspective draws out the strong links between the US Empire and Israel (Lubin 2014; Naber 2017). In that sense, Two Blue Lines invites a crucial and timely examination of Western complicity and responsibility. Like Lyd, Two Blue Lines ends with a fundamental question posed by one of the Israeli activists. He urges the viewer (who is implicitly addressed as Israeli, Zionist, and/or Western) against overcomplicating matters, stating: “things are black and white, either you believe in democracy, or you believe in a Jewish state, and everybody has to make that choice” (96:32).

The following list of additional resources is compiled with an eye toward speculative, cultural, and artistic perspectives that would allow students to broaden their understanding of these two films.

Gala Rexer is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick’s Sociology Department and an Honorary Research Fellow at University College London’s Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation (SPRC). Before joining Warwick, she was a lecturer in race, ethnicity, and postcolonial studies at the SPRC as well as the centre’s inaugural postdoctoral fellow. Her work draws from the fields of feminist and queer theory, anti-colonial thought, and medical sociology and has appeared in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Body and Society, Comparative Sociology, The Sociological Review Magazine, and Social Text (Palestine Now series). Her first book, Demographic Anxieties: Bodies, Borders, and Reproductive Injustice in Palestine/Israel, is forthcoming in 2026 with the University of California Press.