I drove along the Israeli-Lebanese border earlier this week -- something that's been impossible to do since all this began back on July 12. Watching a team of Israeli soldiers knitting together the fence that had been cut to allow their tanks to drive through five weeks ago, I finally started to believe that this is really over, at least for now.

But fixing the problem will require something more than building better fences. A wall of misunderstanding and misconception has been built that's far tougher to breach than any physical border. The politicians on both sides can tell you why this war was fought. Most of the people who lived through it will tell you what a bad idea it was.

The problem starts at the most basic level. Lebanese and Israelis both complain of having the worst neighbours in the world. But neither really knows, or cares, much about life on the other side of the fence.

For those who are in Lebanon, looking into Israel for the first time elicits a flurry of emotions that often spill into each other -- hate, envy and curiosity run together in a muddy river of pent-up feelings.

 "Right over there is the Western world," said Dergham, the fast-talking Lebanese who drove the Boston Globe's Thanassis Cambanis and I to the perimeter. Dergham couldn't help but stare longingly at the red-roofed homes and neat farmers' plots across the way in the Israeli town of Metulla. It was a sharp contrast with the destroyed buildings and burned tobacco plantations on the Lebanese side. We were parked under a poster that marked the spot where a "martyr" named Abu Zainab had carried out a suicide bombing against an Israeli target in 1985.

 "We don't even live in the Third World anymore," Dergham chattered on. After living 21 years in the United States, he likes to add "man," or "dude" or a random expletive at the end of each phrase. "We live in the Tenth World, man, or maybe the Twentieth."

Israel was barely a kilometre away, but Dergham and I both knew it was highly unlikely he’d ever go there. "I wish I could go," he said. "But if we step out of this car, we're dead." 

He was likely right. The Lebanon-Israel border, for obvious reasons, is still very tense.  

I had peered into Israel from a different hill a few days earlier, this time with my regular translator, Jamal. A Palestinian who was born in Lebanon but still refers to himself as being from Haifa, it was the first time he had seen the land he calls home.

Like Dergham, Jamal was taken aback by how physically attractive Israel is, and by how developed it seemed compared to the run-down suburb of Beirut that he and his family now live in.

Between soft promises that one day the Arab armies would conquer Israel (his first reaction), he told me that if he was offered Israeli citizenship, and a chance to move to his family’s historic home in Haifa, that would be enough for him. He said that as long as a Palestinian state was allowed to exist on the 1967 borders of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, he would have no problem calling himself an Israeli, as many Arabs already do.

The reactions of Jamal and Dergham, especially their surprise at what the other side actually looked like, reminded me of a conversation I had two months ago with a security agent at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv. My wife and I were heading to Beirut, via Athens, and he wanted to know why we were going to vacation in a country that most Israelis see as a terrorist haven.

Because it's a beautiful, friendly country, we told him. He grilled us for the next 20 minutes about who we knew in Beirut, sniffing for any suggestion that we might be up to something nefarious. Then he dropped his guard.

 "Actually, I'd love to go to Beirut," he told us with a hint of embarrassment. "I hear it really is beautiful there." 

That was the saddest thing about this war. If there are two countries in the Middle East that a Westerner might immediately feel something close to at home in, they are Lebanon and Israel. They are the two real democracies in the region, and each is as Mediterranean in nature as each is Middle Eastern. Both are nations of well-educated polyglots with multiple passports. Both continue to struggle to find a balance between holy and hedonistic.

If anyone would ever let them meet at the border for dinner, I think Jamal, Dergham and the Israeli security agent (I wish I'd asked his name) would get along just fine. They are next-door neighbours who have never been introduced.

If that dinner ever did happen, I think all three -– Palestinian, Lebanese and Israeli -– would be surprised to find out how alike they and their countries are. What I'm even more confident of is that they’d agree is that decades of war have accomplished little, and that maybe it's time to talk to the people on the other side of the fence, and to give something else a try.