London is hosting a Palestinian film festival for its tenth year. Not an Arab film festival, but a Palestinian one. Chicago and Houston also hold their annual Palestinian film festival. There are many other annual Palestinian arts festivals in Western cities.

One of the most poignant events is the Images of Palestine: 1982 to 2009 exhibition.

The exhibition is presented by artist Ryuichi Hirokawa, who is also screening the documentary NAKBA: Palestine 1948.

For me what is most touching about this is the persistence of the Palestinian question. The early Zionists thought they could just settle in Palestine, commit ethnic cleansing, establish an apartheid Jewish state, and that the Palestinians would just submit to such an injustice. Theodore Herzl, the father of political Zionism, predicted in a 1907 book that the Palestinians would not resist the Zionist project. After the ethnic cleansing of over 800,000 Palestinians in 1048, Israel’s founding Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion famously uttered, “the old will die and the young will forget.”

I have heard Palestinians swear that Ben-Gurion’s words will never ring true. That every generation of Palestinians will bear witness to the cause and that they will not forget the injustices of Zionism. And that they will keep the cause going until full liberation and return.

The early Zionists thought they could just push aside the Palestinians and that they would not complain. They never, never could have predicted that over 60 years after Israel’s violent birth, the Palestinians would still be engaging in resistance. Zionism has tired to destroy the Palestinian people.

It is ironic that a state established to protect a people who were always the victims of rules whom sought their destruction, would then employ terrorism and weapons to seek to destroy another people.

Israel has killed Palestinian poets and banned the colors of the Palestinian flag in the West Bank and Gaza Stripe, and Arab-Israeli poet Mahmoud Darwish was placed under house arrest all for evoking Palestine. Imagine a country that behaves like this! Israel has done all this because it has sought to destroy the Palestinian identity and, yet, in the face of Israel persecution and crimes committed by Arab governments [and the Lebanese fascistic militias], the Palestinians remain steadfast.

The London film festival is artistic evidence that in many ways the Zionist cause has failed for it has not resolved the issue of Arabs and Jews in the Holy Land.