25 years ago, I drove -- from Beirut -- dozens of times to this border between Lebanon and Israel (video is from the Lebanese side). 

It was the first experience that humanized Israel to me: I saw Israelis as people who lived in houses, raised their families, went around their businesses, just like all of us were doing in Lebanon. 

This was the starting point of a trip that has since taken me to learn the Hebrew language and the Israeli culture, and to drastically change my view of Israel from an eternal enemy that should be annihilated to an asset that should be nurtured and lived in peace with. 

My trips to the border allowed me to listen to [Israeli radio station] Reshet Alef on my radio (my only source of spoken Hebrew then) and -- when Hezbollah sentries would not find me to chastise me for doing it -- find Israeli troops with whom I tried to practice my earliest Hebrew words and phrases.

The video shows Metula, across from Lebanon's Kfar Kila. 

When Israel maintained and governed a security zone in southern Lebanon, until 2000, a border gate through which the Lebanese crossed to work in Israel was called the Gate of Good Hope, in Arabic, Bawwabat Fatimah (Fatimah's Gate). 

No one in Lebanon knew where the name came from, but legend had it that a certain Fatimah was rushing to somewhere to give birth, but ended up doing so at the gate. 

For history buffs, Metula in Arabic means "the one that overlooks." The Jewish Agency bought this Hill from absentee Druze landlord Bashir Jumblatt in the late 1800s. There are deeded plots of land, on the Lebanese side of the border, that show that the Jewish Agency still owns them from the time it bought them, some 70 years before Israel's independence. 

I've been an advocate of immediate and unconditional peace between Lebanon and Israel. My dream is that someday I will drive across this line between the two countries without even noticing the border. Perhaps I'd take for myself a house in this breathtaking peace of land.