"As fledgling postcolonial states committed to the Palestinian issue, the two countries had a just cause and a sound aspiration to prosperous independence. But beyond brute patriarchal force – a force embodied in the stinginess and cruelty of Deeb’s maternal grandfather – they had no way of articulating either. Moral certainty made them impotent, the film implies, and so they ended up hurting their own citizens more than the enemy."
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51