Apartheid? Segregation? Discrimination?

No, not in Israel.

In Tyre, Lebanon:

Tyre has its own charm...the city still has an old core composed of two haras (quarters) separated by a street. The quarters are locally known as Haret el Masihiyeh (Christian quarter) and Haret el Jalaji’ (the quarter of the everyman – Muslim quarter) and a street (built in 1956 to separate the Christian quarter’s Chamoun supporters from the mostly Muslim backers of Abdel Nasser) which has created two worlds with a distorted vision of the ‘other’.

Spaces are segregated through class, religious and political dynamics. And the haras, are the two spaces par excellence, where the interrelations of these three factors produce spaces which exclude or include individuals.

The Christian core is located at the northern end of the tiny peninsula, while the Muslim quarter occupies the southern part. Both are encircled by a newly built corniche whose name is not very welcoming: al-Kharab, the wreck.

When you tell people from Tyre “I live in Haret el Masihiyeh,” eyes shine and you might even hear “lucky you!” A sort of urban utopia, the hara is a small agglomeration of winding streets, where mostly stone buildings of the turn of the last century or older are accompanied by small gardens or courtyards and share an uninterrupted relationship with the street.

Its low density, the surprise and composition of its scenes, the light reflections on its walls, and its proximity to the sea are specifically important features for those who think this is Tyre’s best place to live. The port is adjacent to Tyre’s Christian hara which houses most of the city’s fishermen...

and more

...the Christian and Muslim women of the haras rarely mingle, go to mass together, or secretly plan the lives of men...Religious differences can be a substantial obstacle to the development of friendships along those lines. Not to mention that those coffee breaks include certain amounts of badmouthing “the other.”

While Muslim women don’t necessarily wear the veil, a class factor plays a role. The middle and higher classes wear veils less than lower income-earners. So while Muslim hara women belong to a low-income community, there is a higher percentage of veiled women, and a non-veiled woman would more often belong either to a higher-income class or to another religion.

Walking on an afternoon along the corniche, the women of the two areas do look like Nadine Labaki’s women. But only from afar. They occupy the same space, speak the same dialect, and may have similar dreams and share similar fears, but they have not been able to cross that wide street which is ‘saving’ them from one another.

Is that the norm?

Oh, well.

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