A crying shame

It was almost a year ago that I first visited Lod.

I did not simply drive past it, as I had done many times before, on my way to Ben-Gurion airport. This time, I drove through its neighborhoods, and walked the streets of the Old City, Ramat Eshkol and Ganei Aviv.

I cried.

I cried for those living in the Harakevet neighborhood, an unrecognized Bedouin community, most of which lacks a regular supply of electricity and water, or sewerage infrastructure.

I cried for the Jewish and Arab children here who have been born to drug addicts, many of whom have a reasonable chance of becoming addicts themselves.

I cried when I saw the anti-Semitic graffiti scrawled in Russian on the walls of a synagogue that serves the city's Russian-immigrant inhabitants.

I met young pupils from Tichon Hamada'im (the High School of Science) - Arabs and Jews from Lod, Ramle and surrounding communities - who should be among this city's next generation of leaders. I cried because I know that today, most of those potential leaders, when they finish school, leave and never return to Lod.

I cried for all of us Israeli citizens, for our apparent apathy toward a city of 75,000 inhabitants, situated here in the very heart of the country, just a 15-minute drive from cosmopolitan Tel Aviv.

Lod is a city that has enjoyed continuous human habitation for nearly 8,000 years, where pottery shards dating back to the Neolithic period have been unearthed, thus making it older than Jerusalem. One of the world's largest and best-preserved Roman-era mosaic floors was also recently uncovered here.

The Old City's "Peace Triangle" boasts a synagogue, a church traditionally considered to be the burial place of St. George, the Dragon Slayer, and a Mamluk-era mosque. They stand back to back, serving as a reminder of Lod's multicultural past and suggesting the possibility of future coexistence.

Its Ottoman-era oil presses made Lod the best-known oil-producing center along the coastal plain at one time. They stopped operating in 1948, and today serve only as artifacts attesting to the commercial prosperity this city once enjoyed. All it would take to turn them into a thriving tourist attraction is to clean up the sandy, littered path that leads to them from the Old City.

The World Monuments Fund recently added the Old City of Lod to its "Watch List" of monuments at risk. By doing so, it has recognized the historical value of this site, inhabited at different times by Canaanites, Israelites and scholars of the Mishnaic period, including Rabbi Judah Hanasi, the Mishna's principal editor. During the Roman era, Lod was a central crossroads in the province of Palestine, and was renamed Diospolis, the City of God. It was conquered by Byzantines, Crusaders, Mamluks and Ottomans, and the Muslims made Lod their first capital in Palestine after they conquered the territory in the 7th century. The British, too, recognized the centrality of its location during the Mandate period, and established here the largest railway station between Cairo and Damascus, as well as Lydda airfield, which today is Ben-Gurion International Airport.

The Lod Community Foundation, an independent, nonprofit organization, was created a year ago with the goal of serving as a platform for all of those agencies and individuals - whether local, national or foreign - who have a stake in developing different aspects of life in the city.

As its first order of business, the foundation recruited leaders of Lod's various ethnic communities - Ethiopians, Russians, native Israelis, Arab Christians and Muslims, and others - to meet and explore ways in which the city can once more become a source of pride for its inhabitants and for Israel, rather than a shameful backyard. Together, these leaders are establishing the town's first-ever visitors center, organizing a program, with the help of the British Council, to offer free English lessons for both children and adults, planting thousands of trees around town, and creating a strategic plan for the future infrastructure and legal recognition of the Bedouin neighborhood, among other projects.

To mark its official launch, the foundation also invited members of the business world and of local and state governments, as well as religious leaders, journalists, foreign diplomats and, most significantly, the men, women and children of the city, to an event in Lod two days ago.

The event marked the culmination of a year-long process of offering "ownership" of Lod to representatives of the different communities, who were - and continue to be - ready to develop their city. Simultaneously, we hope it sparked awareness among the more than 500 invited guests as to what can and must be done to help turn Lod back into a city that one does not simply pass by on the way to and from the airport, but a destination to visit and explore.

Ruth Lande Wasserman, a doctoral student at Oxford University in Middle Eastern studies, is a former adviser to Israeli President Shimon Peres. She is a resident of Lod and a founder of the Lod Community Foundation.