My PhD speaks about the impossible situation in Palestine and Israel as depicted in Fierté nationale : de Jéricho vers Gaza, the film that I shot in 2019 and completed in 2025, the object of this study. Rather than beginning with a predefined research question, the writing itself functions as a process of analysis, taking an inverted method triggered by a series of dreams related to the film. The questions that emerged during this analytical process are: What were the drives that led the film’s protagonist, Hassan Al Balawi—a Palestinian diplomat in Europe—to go back to Palestine, to take me there and to make a film? And vice versa, what were my own drives, as the filmmaker, to accompany him, to film this journey and produce this work? These questions converge around the issue of loyalty and resistance, and ultimately around what is at stake in the film itself. Through and in comparison with other films shot in Palestine and Israel, and drawing on the method of microhistory and Lacan’s mirror stage, I analyse the entangled relation of the European filmmaker and his subject, a relational dynamic in which Al Balawi emerges neither as the romanticised figure of the freedom fighter, nor as the stereotypical image of the Palestinian ‘terrorist’, but rather as the less mediatised representative of the Palestinian Authority, historically emerging from the PLO and Fatah, and marked by military and political surrender. Al Balawi is not an extremist whose position can be easily deconstructed, but a moderate voice, placed, perhaps tragically, in an impossible position—torn between different symbolic entities of national pride that both determine and constrain him. It is at the juncture where this situation emerges in its full contradiction, that the film’s immanence becomes operative.