Last night we went to see Incendies at the Jerusalem Cinematheque and were deeply moved. Viewers who don't live in the Middle East would definitely get involved in the human (melo)drama of Canadian twins of Lebanese descent who discover the tragic truth about their origins. For people living very close to Lebanon - indeed I spent four or five months in Lebanon during the 1980s as an Israeli soldier - the film has more than human interest. I'm not sure whether an uninformed viewer would know the difference between Christian and Muslim Arabs, between Lebanese nationalists and Palestinian refugees, and so on. But my wife and I and everyone else in the Israeli audience did.
The film ends up by expressing the hope that love can overcome the painful past and the hatred that motivated so much killing. That might be possible in Canada, but it didn't seem as if the Lebanese Christian women, whom the young heroine met in her search for her family's past, were ready for reconciliation.
Seeing the brutality of the civil war in Lebanon on the screen, I wondered how the people of that country can bear the burden of the past, how they can avoid harboring deep resentment, that could only break out in violence whenever public order breaks down again.
Certainly a film like that doesn't leave me very hopeful about the possibility of reaching a stable and long-lasting peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. I'm afraid there's too much bad blood in our past.
But the issue of "bad blood" is not only a problem here in Israel-Palestine. The world is sodden with bad blood in the former Yugoslavia, in Rwanda, in Iraq, in Algeria, in so many places that it's pointless to try to mention them. Just think how long it has taken to overcome the rift between north and south in the United States. After 150 years, has the wound truly healed? Reconciliation is no easy project.
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