I don't have any personal connection to the Middle East conflict, and until I decided to make the documentary I never paid unusual attention to it. In college, I was a Film and Russian Language major, and my only international experience was four years I spent in Russia.

In the end, the decision to make GAZA STRIP was almost a roll of the dice; I had a long list of other projects I was also interested in making, both in the United States and Central Asia. But what struck me about the Middle East conflict was the fact that few if any western journalists actually live in the Occupied Territories -- everyone is based in Israel itself -- and as a result there is very little intimate coverage of the Palestinian perspective. Also, news reports about things that happen in the Occupied Territories tend to be sketchy at best, and often made from telephone reports rather than live coverage.

As a result, getting a good picture of the Palestinian situation on a daily basis is very difficult -- and it was largely this frustration with the lack of coverage that inspired me to go there and make a documentary. I wanted to see it for myself. I chose to concentrate on the Gaza Strip rather than the West Bank because Gaza is a smaller and more focused area to cover, because it has even fewer foreign journalists working there, and because it exemplifies the prison-like quality of the Israeli Occupation. I started filming in January 2001 and worked continuously until the end of April.

Mohammed Hejazi, the 13-year-old main character of the film, is actually fairly unusual in that he works instead of going to school. All of his seven siblings go to school, and Palestinian children are generally quite well-educated. The first time I filmed Mohammed Hejazi - and he was the first person I filmed in all of Gaza - I didn't know his situation. I chose him to be one of the subjects of the film because of his strong, outspoken character, and because of the complexities he embodies.

Unfortunately, Israeli attacks in civilian areas of the Gaza Strip have become so common that for many Palestinian children they have simply become a fact of daily life. In my film, you can see kids walking home from school through Israeli machine-gun fire - some of them barely paying attention. In a place like Tel Aviv, to ignore bursts of machine-gun fire would be unthinkable, but in the Occupied Territories it is the only way to avoid going mad.

When I lived in Khan Yunis refugee camp, which I did for over two months, the Israeli military would fire heavy machine-guns and artillery into the camp every single night, usually for hours on end. Almost all the multi-story homes there are riddled with Israeli bullet holes. Entire neighborhoods were demolished completely while I was there, leaving hundreds of families with nothing, living in tents. It is impossible to describe what this is like; in the end it becomes normal, expected.

Certainly, every new generation of Palestinians that grows up living under military occupation is another generation for whom peace and freedom are a distant fantasy. People long for these things, but their growing unfamiliarity makes them harder to achieve.

- People on both sides repeatedly discuss "the land." What is your take on this attachment to the land and the will to fight for it?

For many adherents of the Zionist movement, the Land of Israel is a kind of religious and ideological Manifest Destiny that carries with it the idea and necessity of Jewish dominance and exclusivity. This idea of religious or ethnically-based destiny is often more important than a personal attachment or history with the land itself, which partly explains why some of the most vocal supporters of Zionism do not actually live in Israel.

For the Palestinians, though there are important religious connections to Christian and Islamic holy sites in Jerusalem and other cities, Palestine is most importantly defined as Home -- the place where their families have lived for hundreds or often thousands of years. When most Palestinians talk about Palestine, they aren't talking about God, they are talking about their mother and father, their earth and stones, their olive trees, their personal family history.

"The Land of Israel" is defined in the minds of many as a Jewish State or a Jewish Homeland. "Palestine," by contrast, is historically not a territory rooted to a single people or religion. Israeli Jews often claim that Palestinians advocate the destruction of Israel -- and in a way they are correct: It was my impression that most Palestinians would be happy to live as free people with equal rights along with Jews and anyone else in the land they know as Palestine. For many Israelis, however, this is tantamount to advocating the destruction of Israel, because a multi- or bi-national state assumes the end of Israel as the "Jewish State" and the failure of Zionist aspirations. It must be said, of course, that there are Israeli Jews sympathetic to this -- in my view - more moderate concept, just as there are Palestinian factions who have lost all notion of or hope for coexistence.

My basic feeling is that when peace is defined as giving land or hegemony to only one ethnic or religious group at the expense of all others, it is a peace that can only be achieved through ethnic cleansing and genocide, and is thus a peace not worth having. When both Israelis and Palestinians define peace as a shared land and a shared destiny, then real peace will be achievable -- but not before then. And the alternative is a thousand years of murder.

- How did you take it when the kids speak so harshly about wanting to die and wanting to harm "the Jews"?

When I filmed interviews with kids in Gaza, I didn't know what they were saying at the time; it was only after I had brought my material back to the United States and gone through months of translating work that I had the full picture of what was being expressed. It is inevitable that many Palestinian kids will grow up hating the Israelis, or "the Jews" as they refer to them, because the only exposure they have to Israeli people is in the form of soldiers, tanks and helicopters, attacking their cities and destroying their homes, killing their friends and so on.

The common propaganda is that Palestinians teach their children to hate Israelis. I didn't see much evidence of this. In my view, it is the Israeli government and the Israeli military that is teaching Palestinian children to hate Israelis, and by extension, Jews. They are far more effective in this than any hate-mongering textbook or TV program could ever hope to be.

- What would you advise those who want to learn more/do something to do?

I think that anyone who really wants to understand this conflict should go to Israel/Palestine and see it for her/himself - then decide what you think and what, if anything, you are prepared to do about it. Going to Israel is easy enough; going to the Occupied Territories is slightly more difficult. For this, I would suggest getting in contact with a group like the International Solidarity Movement, which regularly organizes groups of people interested in taking part in non-violent opposition to the Israeli Occupation in the Palestinian Territories. Their website is www.palsolidarity.org However, it is possible to go by yourself without any contacts or organizational affiliations - this is what I did.

- What are you working on now?

I would like to make a documentary film about Iraq.

To read an additional interview with James Longley, conducted by FreeSpeech TV that includes clips from the film, visit www.freespeech.org/fsitv/ramfiles/eyes_palestine_longly.ram

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