A Shared Storefront
Lod/Lyd
On rebuilding in a mixed city after the 2021 riots.
Lod is a mixed Jewish-Arab city in central Israel, twenty minutes from Tel Aviv and much further in every other way. It was a majority-Palestinian city before 1948, when most of its residents were expelled during the Nakba. Today it is home to around 25,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel and 52,000 Jewish Israelis living side by side, sometimes with each other and sometimes past each other.
Lior Benisty moved to Lod twelve years ago as part of a group of five friends. The city had no elected mayor at the time, only an appointed one. The government had largely left. Lior and his friends came to help revive the city through community work and youth activism.
He directs HaTachana (The Young Adult Center), a place where local young adults, most of them born and raised in Lod, come to build careers and lives that the city on its own does not always make possible. He described his job as bridging the distance between where the young adults are and where they want to be.
In May 2021, riots broke out across mixed cities in Israel. In Lod, businesses were burned, others were boycotted. Jews refused to buy from Arabs, and Arabs refused to buy from Jews. Anger from both communities landed hardest on business owners, the people trying to make daily life work.
Once the violence slowed down, Lior decided to design something small in response: a program to help Jews and Arabs open new businesses together, as co-owners. Not as a movement or peace initiative, but shared businesses, shared economic and social dignity.
