Injustice destroys civilisation. The corruption of rulers leads to the ruin of dynasties.
~Ibn Khaldun
The Middle East Film Festival
Following the very strict rule of balancing as evenly as possible between the Arab and Israeli perspectives, those three films will be complemented by three Israeli films which present three stages of Israel's invasion of and eventual long-protracted withdrawal from Lebanon.
This film is set in Haifa, Israel's third city, which has always been thought of as one of the more normal places in Israel, as far as "normal" goes anyway in that country. It's more mixed and more secular than either the Greater Tel Aviv area (taken as a whole) or Jerusalem. Buses mostly run on Saturdays, and the admittedly not so large Arab minority lives relatively harmoniously next to the Jewish majority.
I don't know who I heard this from, or even whether I heard it at all from someone's mouth, but the saying goes that all roads to understanding the Middle East pass through Lebanon. It's just a throwaway cliché, but there's probably a lot in it. Younger readers won't remember the 1975-1990 Lebanese Civil War, which was a defining world conflict for anyone with a developing political consciousness in the 1980s. That's me, then.
Here I'm going to write about a film which is gentle and wistful, occasionally funny, and occasionally sad and touching. The beauty of this film lies in the fact that - despite not containing one single word of dialogue between either of the two protagonists and an Israeli character - there are more than enough references, oblique and acute, to reveal what it's like to live day to day as an Arab citizen in the Jewish State.
There may well be people who were initially drawn to this blog by a list of Palestinian films, and who then after a couple of taps or clicks have found themselves looking at a post about a film depicting life in the Israeli army. Some of those people who land here unknowingly will immediately leave in a big disgusted huff, but hopefully a few will linger on this page and give me a chance here.
Imagine that the chairman of your Neighbourhood Watch is a DJ and mixtape composer with an interest in Tibetan mysticism, who smokes weed and carries a baseball bat around the hood. In characterisations of Israel which break it down into something more complex and less monolithic than 'the Zionist Entity', there are multiple communities which need to be understood if we have any serious intention of healing the gaping wounds of the Middle East.