Injustice destroys civilisation. The corruption of rulers leads to the ruin of dynasties.
~Ibn Khaldun
Purim falls on the 14th day of the Jewish month of Adar. It fell in late February in the year that I stayed in Jerusalem. There was a big fancy dress party, and then the day after was seemingly a fairly quiet one until my friend from down the corridor came to ask me if I'd heard the news about what had happened in Hebron.
Ziad Doueiri's 1998 film 'West Beirut' was quite the epiphany for me. Having for many years mentally pictured Beirut as a giant urban mantrap, with perfectly good reason given all the news that we were fed about the place throughout the 1980s, it was virtually impossible to visualise the lives of ordinary Lebanese people in the midst of the madness that engulfed them for fifteen years.
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.
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.