Last month I was invited to the Israeli ‘Haifa Film Festival' and I went. I went although many Palestinian friends and colleagues had told me not to go. Some told me that it was not the ‘right' time, some said that Israelis will use it (our presence in such function) to show how liberal and democratic they are, while we ‘Palestinians' need to show how ‘barbaric' they are.

I told everyone I had a discussion with that, it is important that Israelis see our work. It should be on the top of our concerns that Israelis see our films,, read our poetry and hear whatever we have to say about ourselves. The dominant Israeli attitude is to forget us, and try not to see us or hear us. The Israelis are building a wall eight meters high in order to help themselves just to do that.

But I believe that we should not help them so, that we should not give them the opportunity to forget what they have done to us. And that we should help them to, realize and accept to take responsibility in what have happened to us. Everywhere I look at it I feel compelled to make Israelis realize how I live. When I work, when I make films or write, I always feel that Israelis are my first presumed audience. They are the people I try to talk to even when I pretend to do otherwise.

I like to see Palestinian documentaries screened in Paris, Amsterdam and Locarno, but I believe that they'll be more important when screened in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Yes we need the world's understanding but more important we need Israeli's realization. We need their help so that we can have peace with ourselves and in doing so, be able to have peace with them.

After the screening of my two short films, I stood in front of the audience for a Q&A. What I remember of the two-hour long conversation are the parts about my memory, a refugee's memory.  I feel that Israeli intellectual's most problematic issue in their dealings with us is our memory. Our memory scares the hell out of most Israelis. They prefer to see us without it. We are much better and easier to take and deal with when we approach them and make them approach us not through our memory.

The problem is that at the very core of a Palestinian's sense of identity is memory. We have not lost that yet, or maybe it is better said that we have not developed an alternative yet. Memory is what connects Palestinians in Chile, San Francesco, Lebanon or Egypt. As an uprooted and dispersed nation we have no common experience but the  ‘memory' of our fathers and grandfathers, their memory of a certain homeland.

Palestinian documentaries and non-documentaries as well, almost all of them, deal one way or another with memory. Memory is the text or the context or the subtext or the meta-text of Palestinian films. Our literary narratives, political discourses and our imaginary spaces, all are made up of memories. 

Although there are no resources for filmmaking in Palestine the number of productions each year is increasing. Every year there are new films and new filmmakers. Some with training in film some without, but we all feel that urgency to speak, to say something about ourselves. We all feel compelled to communicate some of the miseries we live.  Palestine films, some times I see them as a patient on the analyst's couch. They speak endlessly, they verbalize the problem, they make explicit the pains and they keep repeating the same story.

The years of relative peace that followed the Oslo agreement and the establishing of the Palestinian National Authority, allowed Palestinians or part of them at least (the three million that live in the West Bank and Gaza) allowed them the chance and for the first time to publicly communicate without fear of persecution. For four decades Palestinians who were (and still are) living under Israeli occupation were not permitted to make films, to open book stores, to build colleges, or to have relatives visit from neighboring Arab countries. There were no phone lines that could connect us with relatives scattered all over the Arab world. To send a letter to Jordan, Syria or Lebanon, one needed to send it first to London, and from there it needed to be resent to this or that  Arab country.

Suddenly we could make films and screen them to our public in our own cities. We could have theaters and music festivals. We had local newspapers, although very limited, and relatives in neighboring Arab countries could come to visit or live and invest. Many new businesses were founded and some kind of commercial life began to develop until it was stopped again four years ago.  Technological developments on the other hand have made possible for a larger number of people and institutions to afford working with multi-media. Inexpensive digital video gave more people the chance to make stories or films with video.

During the last fifteen years I had the chance to participate in many film functions that focus on Palestinian film in various cities in the world. In these events we would see a Palestinian film made in Gaza another made in Israel, a third made in the US a forth made in Paris and so on. They all are Palestinian films and they all are saying the same thing but differently. And in these films one could sense a certain Palestine, that is not geographical, not territorial, a virtual Palestine, that belongs to everyone equally. The Palestine that is produced in these films is not the product of political negotiations, assassinations, bulldozers and the apartheid wall. It is Palestine made out of desires, dreams and disappointments.

All these films and filmmakers have brought new voices, visions and histories into the way we Palestinians conceive of ourselves and construct our identities. Palestinian film I believe is a future project. More than politics it will be able to bridge the gab between memory and the future. Film will help us to invent the world we aspire. If reality is too harsh, too oppressive, then imagination is our royal way to freedom. And what is better than film as a vehicle for our imagination.