The real conflict is not about borders or territory; it is about mutual recognition and respect. Without acknowledging the humanity of the other side, there will be no peace.
~David Grossman
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.
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.