From Beirut to Jerusalem

Content Warning: This section cites accounts of war violence, as well as criticisms of Arab culture that some readers may find offensive. 

In June 1979, Thomas Friedman and his wife, Ann, flew to Beirut to begin his work as a Middle Eastern correspondent, a major culture shock after his Midwestern upbringing. He grew up outside Minneapolis in a middle-class Jewish family, losing interest in religion but then as a teenager finding inspiration during a trip to visit his older sister in Israel. Leaving the Midwest for the first time, Friedman writes, “[S]omething about Israel and the Middle East grabbed me in both heart and mind. I was totally taken with the place, its peoples and its conflicts. Since that moment, I have never really been interested in anything else” (4).

Upon returning home, his fascination with all things Israel was inexhaustible, and at Brandeis University, he studied Arabic and developed a great appreciation of the Arab people following visits to Egypt. Pursuing graduate studies in Oxford, he learned as much from his fellow students, many of them Arabs and Israelis, as from his professors. It further taught him the diversity among groups within the Middle East, which went far beyond the simple binary of Arab and Jew. Friedman penned his first column on the Middle East for the Des Moines Register in 1976 and, after graduating in 1978, began writing for United Press International. In 1979, he was invited to join the Beirut bureau after his predecessor was nicked by a bullet and quit. Despite nervousness about being a Jew in Beirut, he saw the opportunity as a “moment of truth” after years of study (8), and so he went for it.

Life in war-torn Beirut was an immediate shock, as Friedman and his wife slept through the noise of gunfire their first night. After two years in Beirut, Friedman accepted a job in Manhattan with the New York Times, after which he returned to Lebanon in 1982. Shortly after his return, the Syrian government committed a massacre against its own citizens in the city of Hama, and Israel invaded southern Lebanon. After covering a tumultuous period in Lebanon, Friedman moved to Jerusalem in 1984, a position rarely given to a Jewish reporter. The book documents his experience as a Midwesterner encountering the unfamiliar world of the Middle East and as a Jew learning the complex realities of life in Israel. It also attempts to document the lives of people in both places whose struggles are similar, even as they find themselves on opposing sides.

Friedman then provides some historical background for his experiences. The Maronite Christians had endured as a minority for centuries, and after World War I, asked the French government to set up a state in which they would play the dominant role. They could not, however, dominate the area without access to Beirut, the main city, the fertile Bakaa Valley in the south, and the port cities of Tripoli, Tyre, and Sidon, all of which featured majority Muslim populations. The Muslim community in turn was divided among Sunnis, the majority who regarded succession to the Prophet Muhammad as a matter of communal affirmation, and Shi’a, who believed that it ought to be strictly hereditary. The Sunnis of Lebanon were far more prosperous and powerful than the Shi’a but put their differences aside to form a bloc capable of checking Maronite power, who had a constitutionally guaranteed 6:5 majority in the Parliament.

By the 1970s, Maronites had shrunk considerably as a percentage of the population, and Muslims demanded commensurate representation. Maronites formed private militias to terrorize the Muslims into compliance, prompting the formation of Muslim militias to fight back. Tensions in Lebanon coincided with the flaring up of conflicts between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. Starting in the late 19th century, an ideology of Zionism encouraged many Jews to form a new national homeland in their biblical homeland, where many thousands of Arabs already lived. The British assumed control over Palestine after World War I, promising to give Arabs a national homeland while also making similar promises to the Jews.

During and after World War II, as waves of Jewish immigrants fled Nazi persecution to join the Jewish communities in Palestine, tensions came to a boiling point. The British handed over the question of statehood to the United Nations, but upon their withdrawal from the region, the question was instead settled by arms, and an Israeli victory pushed the Arabs into the Gaza Strip on the Mediterranean Sea (under Egyptian control), the West Bank of the Jordan River, and the eastern half of Jerusalem (both under Jordanian control). Israel’s neighbors started hosting Palestinian militants, which Egyptian president Nasser formed into an umbrella group called the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964.

In 1967, fearing a simultaneous attack from Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, Israel instead attacked them, conquering the whole of Palestine along with capturing the Golan Heights from Syria. With Arab states no longer willing to press the fight on their own, PLO militants took matters into their own hands, including a sensational multiple airline hijacking in 1970, landing in Jordan on their own authority. In response, King Hussein of Jordan forcibly expelled the PLO from his country. PLO leader Yasser Arafat then took his forces to Lebanon, where they were welcomed as potential allies of the Muslims in their fight against the Maronites. With the government paralyzed, fighting among the various factions plunged the country into civil war by 1975.