Quotes of the Day

At the premiere of Nizar Hassan's documentary film, Egteyah (Invasion), the emcee welcomed not one theater audience but two — in separate cities and separate nations — and apologized to those inside "Palestine" as they listened from their theater seats in Nazareth, the Arab town in northern Israel: "We used to think about you with prejudiced feelings," he said, "but we discovered through Nizar that shouldn't be the case." It was a moment of great symbolism for Hassan, a Palestinian director who carries an Israeli passport, because it brought together communities long divided by mutual suspicion. But the two audiences watching the documentary at the same time were not Jewish and Palestinian. The viewers — in Nazareth and Beirut, Lebanon's capital — were all Palestinian, members of a house divided against itself.

Hassan's film, which screened last week in Cairo and will be shown this week in Zurich and Barcelona, explores the aftermath of fighting between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian guerrillas in the Jenin refugee camp a year ago. It is particularly important to Hassan, who — despite the restrictions imposed on his movement in the Arab world by his Israeli citizenship — desperately wants his message to be heard throughout the Middle East, including Israel. That's why Hassan made sure his film would be the first documentary to depict people on both sides of the battle in Jenin. Hassan allows neither Israeli nor Palestinian to be seen purely as victim. "Before I criticize Israel, I should look at myself," says Hassan, 43. "We're not saints, but Israelis also can't be allowed to believe that they're saints who are somehow forced to do evil things."

A year ago, Hassan drove down from the hills around Nazareth, heading for Tel Aviv. On the plain near Afula, he watched columns of Israeli tanks moving toward Jenin. At night, he could see the explosions in the camp. Palestinian leaders claimed Israel had massacred as many as 500 civilians there during 12 bloody days of combat. In fact, 54 Palestinians, mostly fighters, were dead, as were 23 Israelis, but a myth of Jenin's heroism and martyrdom had been created. Just a day after the battle ended, and with only $9,000 from Swedish television, Hassan began 28 days of filming in the camp. What he learned was not about heroism, but self-respect. "Heroism never changed anything," he says. "People in Jenin resisted, and it enabled them to overcome the celebration of victimhood that's common on both sides."

Egteyah isn't the first documentary about Jenin — in the Middle East, a battle so mythic was bound to produce its own sub-genre. But it's the first to examine both sides of the fight without propaganda. Hassan found something else in the camp: "Victims feel hate because they are passive," he says. "But by resisting, the people of Jenin camp acted. They weren't passive at all."

Hassan focuses much of the movie on an Israeli soldier who drove one of the massive Caterpillar D9 bulldozers that demolished over 100 buildings in Jenin camp. In a chilling reconstruction, the soldier watches footage of the wreckage with Hassan. "I wanted to show how his nature became evil, how he was forced to internalize evil," he says. But Hassan also includes scenes of the soldier relaxing with friends, showing a human side to the Israeli that's absent from many Palestinian films. "He could have been someone I might bump into at the supermarket," he says.

That's a balanced stance toward the Israelis who have treated Hassan and the 1.2 million Palestinians inside Israel harshly over the years. They or their parents remained in their homes in 1948 and found themselves living in the new state of Israel. Though they lived under martial law for almost two decades, these Palestinians were distrusted by their cousins in the West Bank or in refugee camps throughout the Arab world. By accepting Israeli passports, they were seen as collaborating with the enemy. In fact, conditions were hard for them and their towns and villages remain the poorest in the country.

Hassan's craft is far more complex than a simple Arab-Israeli split. Of the 14 movies he has made, Israelis produced or co-produced his two best-known: Istiqlal, the story of Palestinians inside Israel on the country's Independence Day holiday; and Yasmine, about a Palestinian woman who participated in her sister's honor killing. By making his new film with Palestinian producers, Hassan found he could get closer to the truth about his own community.

"Other Palestinians face you like a mirror," he says. "So the reflection is immediate." Once Palestinians can look into that mirror, he believes, they'll finally be able to face the Israelis.

• MATT REES | Nazareth
• Nizar Hassan's new perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian divide