Making Sense of the Middle East
Stephanie Schacht
Issue date: 7/29/02 Section: books
From Beirut to Jerusalem by Thomas L. Friedman
(original copyright 1989, updated 1995)
Anchor Books
571 pages
Thomas L. Friedman, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, has written for The New York Times as a correspondent in Beirut and Israel, the material from which he derives his best-selling From Beirut to Jerusalem.
With the current focus on the Middle East in United States media broadcasting, much of the American public is left to point fingers and take sides in issues that are sensationalized but of which they have no knowledge or in which they have no political history background. The war hawks may aim anger at a region they do not understand, while the pacifists can watch series of events unfold without feeling passionately attached to any particular side. From Beirut to Jerusalem addresses the intellectual, political, and popular audience, making clear that the conflicts in the Middle East are 1) not new and 2) not simple. Furthermore, it provides vivid snapshots of Lebanon and Israel from a Jewish reporter who was educated in Middle Eastern history and politics at Oxford but felt it first-hand in his on-site correspondent positions. With this basis, readers emerge more educated and understanding of the area's history, conflicts, and the resulting impact on the rest of the world.
Friedman preludes his journey to Beirut with the line: "It was in this bizarre city, caught between a Mercedes and a Kalashnikov, that my journey began." He proceeds to tell of a country where it doesn't seem odd for a woman to draw a pistol out of a Gucci handbag to riddle a thief with bullets and where kidnappings and murders are nameless, faceless, even ordinary. Those that survive, the reader realizes, are those that play by the rules, the bared and basic nature of humanity that Friedman terms "Hama Rules." When Palestinian women start beating guerillas and screaming at them in Arabic, we realize Beirut is not a land of blind acceptance. In Beirut the reader meets the religious factions that antagonize and ally and gets a sense of the historical significance of Middle Eastern struggle. As Yassar Arafat says, "We had a slogan from the beginning: 'It is not a picnic. It is a long hard struggle.' The Vietnamese took 35 years of continuous war. The Algerians, 150; the Rhodesians, about 100; the Saudis, 500. But from the beginning we believed that sooner or later, we would achieve our goals, because we are with the tide of history, while Israel is against it."
(original copyright 1989, updated 1995)
Anchor Books
571 pages
Thomas L. Friedman, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, has written for The New York Times as a correspondent in Beirut and Israel, the material from which he derives his best-selling From Beirut to Jerusalem.
With the current focus on the Middle East in United States media broadcasting, much of the American public is left to point fingers and take sides in issues that are sensationalized but of which they have no knowledge or in which they have no political history background. The war hawks may aim anger at a region they do not understand, while the pacifists can watch series of events unfold without feeling passionately attached to any particular side. From Beirut to Jerusalem addresses the intellectual, political, and popular audience, making clear that the conflicts in the Middle East are 1) not new and 2) not simple. Furthermore, it provides vivid snapshots of Lebanon and Israel from a Jewish reporter who was educated in Middle Eastern history and politics at Oxford but felt it first-hand in his on-site correspondent positions. With this basis, readers emerge more educated and understanding of the area's history, conflicts, and the resulting impact on the rest of the world.
Friedman preludes his journey to Beirut with the line: "It was in this bizarre city, caught between a Mercedes and a Kalashnikov, that my journey began." He proceeds to tell of a country where it doesn't seem odd for a woman to draw a pistol out of a Gucci handbag to riddle a thief with bullets and where kidnappings and murders are nameless, faceless, even ordinary. Those that survive, the reader realizes, are those that play by the rules, the bared and basic nature of humanity that Friedman terms "Hama Rules." When Palestinian women start beating guerillas and screaming at them in Arabic, we realize Beirut is not a land of blind acceptance. In Beirut the reader meets the religious factions that antagonize and ally and gets a sense of the historical significance of Middle Eastern struggle. As Yassar Arafat says, "We had a slogan from the beginning: 'It is not a picnic. It is a long hard struggle.' The Vietnamese took 35 years of continuous war. The Algerians, 150; the Rhodesians, about 100; the Saudis, 500. But from the beginning we believed that sooner or later, we would achieve our goals, because we are with the tide of history, while Israel is against it."