From Beirut to Jerusalem
Friedman, Thomas L.
"You know what heaven would be?" Zeke said, looking over at Wayne from the diving board, where he was sitting. "Surf 'n' Turf," he said. "Heavy on the butter with the Turf, too. And a side of...
...lost heart and withdrew, that the "definitive dismemberment of both Beirut and Lebanon" came about...
...But the "overfocusing by reporterson the PLO and its perception of events" cannot simply have been the result of their fear of retaliation...
...We just need more from him...
...When the Moroccans first came to Israel, there was this thing that Moroccans always used to walk in.the road...
...How could you not see...
...I believe the democrats will eventually gain control, but they are not there yet...
...They did not act so destructively as Hitler, or Stalin and his successors...
...All the things here that Americans complain about I liked...
...Although he acknowledges that "most of the Palestinians convicted by the Shin Bet [Israel's internal security service] were guilty of planning or carrying out violent acts against Israeli civilians, even if the evidence against them was incomplete, inadmissible or obtained through intimidation," he blithely disregards the significance of this fact, insisting that there is no real moral difference between the violence of the intifada and Israel's efforts to control it...
...Not having to check with anyone to see whether they'd bear you out...
...would tolerate much seriously critical reporting of their activities...
...indeed on American culture, published in this generation...
...In addition, it seems reasonable that there be actual investment in Eastern Europe, not by our government, of course, but by businessmen...
...Not caring jack shit, unless you felt like considering their opinion...
...We also agree that Eastern Europe—and, though he doesn't say so, I assume he agrees, the Soviet Union as well—is extremely explosive...
...Yet he makes no reference to the journalistic rampage against Israel other than to note that "some of the news reporting out of Beirut that summer left something to be desired...
...If this is the author's way of making it new, so that rather than picturing Will we can picture as he does, it is more bewildering than exhilarating...
...A case in point is the confrontation he had with Amir Drori, the commander of the Israeli forces in Lebanon, a week after the massacre of Muslim civilians by Lebanese Christians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut in September 1982...
...The prospect of many more Palestinians getting themselves killed or injured—perhaps for nothing—does not seem to faze him, although his description of the stone-throwing and fire-bombing as "massive, relatively non-lethal civil disobedience" is clearly intended tomake his call for continued violence more palatable...
...The certainty of your convictions...
...I think heaven for you would be the certainty of your convictions," Wayne said...
...Blume says rightly that we need to withhold certain militarily useful technology from them...
...Indeed he cannot be, for in truth, as even he must acknowledge, the Israeli invasion waswelcomed by the many Lebanese who were grateful to be liberated from the PLO...
...As Friedman writes, "How many serious stories were written from Beirut about the well-known corruption in the PLO leadership, the misuse of funds, and the way in which the organization had become as much a corporation full of bureaucratic hacks as a guerrilla outfit...
...Not caring if other people felt the way you did...
...Unabridged Recordings ' Purchase or 30 Day Rental &,.> The Conservative Classics &b...
...Begin always reminded me of Bernhard Goetz...
...I believe we hold a pat hand because we have what the Soviet Empire needs to survive, and we can deprive them of it unless they meet our democratic and strategic conditions...
...That is precisely what made him so dangerous in Lebanon...
...Didn't they have sidewalks in Morocco...
...22.95 Steven C. Munson BOOKS ON CASSETTES &b...
...the situation in Lebanon is, after all, neither clear-cut nor easy to come to grips with...
...A similar disparity between reality and Friedman's politicized view of it emerges from his examination of the situation in the West Bank and Gaza...
...It is that anyone attempting a return to the bad old days must now ask himself if he wishes to risk Ceausescu's fate...
...If you read only one book about Vietnam...
...The idea that the country should have anything to fear any longer from the world, or even from its avowed enemies, is one that he simply refuses to take seriously...
...He seems even less willing to accept the truth about the Palestinians, which confronted him one day in the visa office of the U.S...
...Primarily, however, Fried-man's literary failure appears to be the result of certain inhibitions he feels when writing about Lebanon...
...As it was, even after the Israeli invasion liberated southern Lebanon from PLO control, there was hardly more than a handful of stories about the ten years of PLO occupation, the crimes committed against the Lebanese, or the nature of the PLO state-within-a-state...
...Michael David Blume Annapolis, Maryland Michael Ledeen replies...
...It has done so much, in his view, that he urges the Palestinians to continue what they've started—even though, as he sees it, it could take years before the Israelis might finally be worn down enough to give them a state...
...They were his pornography...
...But Rumania is the purest example of the triumph of Communist Gorbachevites at the expense of real democracy...
...Not only do we have greater interest in the outcome, in Eastern Europe, but there is more healing needed...
...Far from adopting the placating tone that marked his exchange with PIA spokesman Labadi, he took the Israeli general to task in a fit of moral pique: I banged the table with my fist and shouted at Drori, "How could you do this...
...Robert J. Powers Shreveport, Louisiana More Fear and Loathing It frightens me as to how my name got on your mailing list...
...If the rules of the game have changed, then let me know and I'll go back to the Commodore and, pack my bags...
...I read Tyrrell sometimes when my blood pressure is too low...
...Years of instability, economic stagnation, and somewhat authoritarian rule may sap these peoples of their drive to rejoin Europe, and give darker forces their chance to reassert themselves strongly...
...Perhaps Mr...
...They told him that the only thing they wanted was to get an education, or to resume their children's education, and to escape the fear and violence created by the intifada...
...In his eyes, for example, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin was a man who "loved the idea of Jewish power, Jewish generals, Jewish tanks, Jewish pride...
...Unfortunately, such moments are few and are ultimately overrun, or driven out, by Friedman's anti-Israel bias, which does almost as much to ruin the book as his politically inspired reticence about the PLO...
...Fine," I said...
...Had he told the full story of the PLO statewithin-a-state, however, it would have been all but impossible for him to go on, as he does in the second half of the book, to present the case for a full-fledged Palestinian state in part of the territory now occupied by Israel...
...IMPORTANT Allow six weeks for address change ^ Renew my subscription for one year (twelve issues—$30) ^ Payment enclosed ^ Bill me later Name: (please want) Address: City...
...I liked the bad manners...
...consulate in Jerusalem...
...Day in and day out, week after week, the Israelis were depicted in the newspapers and on television as ruthless aggressors raining death and destruction on the helpless civilians of Beirut and, like modern-day Nazis, committing genocide against the Palestinians...
...I hope that he will be afforded an opportunity to respond, so that we can see...
...We were all Jews in the park yesterday . . . we wept, we embraced each other...
...This sort of' carelessness about other people's lives is displayed throughout the book, but it is about Israel's survival that Friedman seems to be the most cavalier...
...training statisticians...
...acquainting them with the ways various legislatures expedite business, especially as pertains to oversight responsibilities...
...he was Bernhard Goetz with an F-15...
...Over the past ten years, he has been the recipient of numerous other honors, including an Overseas Press Club Award, a George Polk Award, a Livingston Award for Young Journalists, a New York Newspaper Guild Page One Award, and a New Israel Fund Award for Outstanding Reporting from Israel...
...Now they can walk in the f--king street if they want to...
...Second, our hand is not pat...
...I'm grateful to Michael David Blume for his thoughtful comments...
...But it is clear, despite his best efforts to minimize the implications of what he is saying, that the factions in Lebanon that posed the greatest danger were also the ones that received the most deferential treatment...
...The fall of Ceausescu was a purge, pure and simple...
...Walker Percy $10.95 THE LINCOLN READER Edited by Paul M. Angle "The best all-round one-volume biography of Lincoln that can be bought...
...Is he, indeed, so terrified that he feels compelled to continue writing the kind of public-relations fluff that can be found in his chapter FROM BEIRUT TO JERUSALEM Thomas L. Friedman/Farrar, Straus & Giroux/525 pp...
...Finally, I agree with Mr...
...Assad was a brutal realist with a very limited agenda— survival...
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...and other such help through which they can expeditiously grapple with the problems of constructing modern liberal democratic societies...
...The fact remains that it's not true, and one is left with the horrible suspicion that Miss Beattie would reply with sixties profundity: "Like, man, what is truth...
...Do as thousands of people have done already, and start listening to Classics on Tape...
...He says that, after Rumania, no one should think that we're at "the beginning of the beginning...
...Israel is how Jews behave when they are off the plantation—when there are no Gentiles around watching over them...
...In addition to being a celebrated journalist, Friedman has recently become a celebrated author...
...It is still only the beginning of the beginning...
...so are some politicians...
...I have been trying up to now...
...That we interest ourselves in helping with institution-building, in proportion to the liberalization of any given country...
...Of course, among this group of noble guerrillas there were undoubtedly many who had participated in the running of the Palestinian state-within-astate that the PLO had established in southern Lebanon...
...Dean Rusk $17.95 ./A DA CAPO PRESS 4 233 Spring Street New York, NY 10013 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1990 47 always the case...
...I felt comfortable with these people...
...0 I n 1983, Thomas L. Friedman won 1 a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from Lebanon...
...And while he depicts Yasir Arafat as a flawed genius and a moral hero, Friedman takes a dim view, to put it mildly, of Israel's political leaders...
...Such was not Spring Paperbacks from DA CAPO PRESS THE 25-YEAR WAR America's Military Role in Vietnam by General Bruce Palmer, Jr...
...3. Return this form to us at the address listed below...
...We have strong strategic, as well as humanitarian, interests in trying to influence the outcome, when social and economic prospects are uncertain due to the terrible ravages of Communism...
...By and large, though, I think that Western participation in the development of Eastern bloc economies will be a "good infection," encouraging the process of economic liberalization...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR Circulation Department P.O...
...I belong here...
...this should be it...
...Furthermore, despite his omissions and distortions, he is unable to obscure the fact that it was only after Israel was forced to withdraw, and the U.S...
...In 1988, he won another Pulitzer, this time for his reporting from Israel...
...not a single defense ministry...
...It is not fear that impels him to hold his pen now, any more than it was fear, primarily, that impelled him to hold his pen in 1982...
...It may be hard for many people to remember what it was like reading the papers or watching TV in the summer of 1982, but surely Friedman remembers...
...N or does he take the opportunity afforded him by his book to set the record straight concerning the PLO...
...Again, determined not to comprehend the meaning of what he has seen and heard, Friedman breezily dismisses it, concluding that, "Nevertheless, the intifada has done a great deal for the Palestinians...
...suggesting ways of defining the legal status of non-governmental public institutions—for example, non-profit corporations...
...Unlike [Syrian dictator] Hafez Assad, Sharon did not know when to stop...
...The excrement of the Florida fish commonly referred to as the jack...
...But there is a long way to go, and I cannot imagine it all happening without considerable violence...
...The answer, clearly, is no...
...How many Communists with sufficient fanatic edge to risk vicious internecine war exist in the East...
...Much of the novel, that is, is kept at a distance from anything recognizable as actuality, even within the limited terms established by its halfhearted attempts at verisimilitude...
...Don't forget TAS Address Changes Made Easy 1. Please write your new address in the space provided...
...There is still not a single security service in Eastern Europe under democratic control...
...Like Zeke himself, the world in which he lives seems to matter hardly at all to our perspective on Will...
...To some extent, this disconnectedness —incoherence, really—probably reflects the reporter's difficulty in making sense of his circumstances...
...He gives over several pages, for instance, to a discussion of allegations that Palestinians have been tortured, unreasonably detained, and denied due process by Israeli authorities...
...I do not think it will last, indeed I wrote long before most others that Gorbachev's lack of understanding of democratic revolution and his cowardly refusal to enact an effective economic program had led him to adopt a doomed strategy...
...Third, Franco and Salazar were despots and their societies were backward, but essentially they tried to protect traditional society against the dynamic side-effects of modernization...
...Just be sure to allow six weeks for your change to take effect...
...The invasion also paved the way for a renewal of American interest in Lebanon, a renewal that, by his account, was widely interpreted by the Lebanese to be the beginning of the end of the decade of internecine warfare that had begun after the arrival of the PLO...
...I will try to be fair...
...What, then, do I propose...
...I want to keep the controls on, until and unless the democrats come to power in those societies...
...He also reminds us that in those days, among people like himself—that is to say, liberals—Israel enjoyed the blessings of a heroic image...
...I had a little bit of that feeling myself...
...as his newspaper's chief diplomatic correspondent, he is still afraid of what the PLO might do to him if he dares to tell the truth...
...But if his political ideas are thoroughly conventional, his acceptance of them does have a distinguishing aspect: he embraces the current anti-Israel perspective as a Jew...
...We have nothing against Jews...
...He tells how he and his colleagues devised all manner of ingenious tricks in order to write stories that would not get them into trouble and would be more than just fluff...
...The contrast between his cordiality toward the PLO and his hostility toward Israel could not be more striking: when it comes to Israel, Friedman doesn't coddle, doesn't cower, and doesn't cover up...
...Box 10448 Arlington, VA 22210-1448 (Please attach address label here...
...What inhibits Friedman from telling the truth about the PLO today, just as it inhibited him when he was in Beirut, is his political sympathy for the organization and the cause he-claims it represents...
...Instead of examining the PLO conquest and how it destabilized the country, he devotes an entire chapter to the life and times of the man he calls the "symbol" of Palestinian "resistance," Yasir Arafat...
...Out of five hundred pages there are no more than a few paragraphs in which he refers—as though the whole episode were so well known that the details were not worth bothering about—to what the PLO was up to during its years in southern Lebanon...
...We observed a moment of silence for all who had fallen, heard the melancholy summons of the shofar...
...I am uncomfortable with the contemptuous allusion to capitalist rope-sellers...
...Some businessmen are idiotic and venal...
...To show just how popular the country was back then, he quotes an old Washington Star column by Mary McGrory: Some of us never knew what a simcha was...
...aiding in the development of capital markets and credit instruments...
...2. Attach the mailing label from your most recent issue...
...T he Israel section of From Beirut to 1 Jerusalem is more focused, more straightforward, more down-to-earth than the portion devoted to Lebanon...
...Perhaps they do in the dream-setting where they also spend their time planting out rhododendrons...
...You won't find these master works anywhere else and your satisfaction is guaranteed "NEW" Books by: A Gilder • Friedman W Hayek • Sowell • Roche ENGLISH Burnham • Kirk PEOPLE Solzhenitsym • Buckley Chesterton • Muggeridge Paul Johnson & scores of others CLASSICS ON TAPE P.O...
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...I'm Jewish and you know I'm Jewish...
...The over-focusing by reporters on the PLO and its perception of events also led them to ignore the Lebanese Shiites and their simmering wrath at the Palestinians for turning their villages in south Lebanon into battlefields...
...Do Florida landscaping operatives really talk like this...
...He is busily decontrolling all sorts of exotic technologies for sale to Eastern Europe (which promptly turns it over to the Soviets) and even to the Soviets directly...
...He himself admits that as a reporter in Beirut he fell far short of giving his readers a complete picture of what was going on...
...Otherwise, there would have been plenty of stories about the PLO's depredations in southern Lebanon once the cause of the journalists' fear had been removed...
...After the meeting, Labadi took Mohammed aside and told him, "We know hes not bad...
...Sharon "had his own fantasies about power...
...helping train CPA's...
...It quickly became a bestseller and ended the year by garnering a National Book Award...
...That's what a simcha is...
...Like the reporting that won him his two Pulitzer Prizes, the book revolves around what Friedman heard, saw, and felt in the midst of two large events: the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and the Israeli effort to quell the Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza that began in 1987...
...For them, as for Friedman, it serves as a special kind of moral license, entitling the bearer to add his own contribution to the campaign of defamation against Israel, and to do so without fear of rebuke...
...It suffers from an accumulation of trivial, pointless, or irrelevant information, and more than a few of the stories he tells about Iife in Beirut sound forced, or out of place...
...Even more of a monster than Begin, by Friedman's lights, was Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon...
...Ledeen and I are not so far apart...
...Yet nowhere, perhaps, does he make his identification with the PLO and its goals more vivid than in his almost lyrical tribute to the Palestinian guerrillas trapped in Beirut—a band of brave and dedicated men who, we are meant to believe, would have thrown themselves in front of Israeli tanks, if only Arafat had given the word...
...erhaps no group benefited more 1- from this state of affairs than the PLO...
...Per cassette our prices are the lowest on the market...
...What there was, instead, was a torrent of misreporting of the Israeli invasion and the attribution to Israel of crimes that existed only in the minds of those who invented them and the journalists who publicized them...
...We just want you to do a little better in the future...
...No, no," said Labadi, waving his hand...
...And as for the Soviet Union, we are presented with the hilarious spectacle of the monopoly"position of the Communist party being destroyed by . . . a unanimous (save Yeltsin) vote of the Communist party leaders...
...Carl Sandburg $15.95 ROOSEVELT AND CHURCHILL Their Secret Wartime Correspondence Edited by Francis Loewenheim, Harold Langley, and Manfred Jonas "One of the most important books of our time...
...Buttered steak...
...Needless to say, it is difficult to imagine such a column being written to-day...
...helping to train legalscholars in, for example, the principles of commercial law...
...He is now forced to cope with his own failures—political and economic—in his own society, and I believe that in the end the forces of democracy will prevail there as well...
...The truth is, the Western press coddled the PLO and never judged it with anywhere near the scrutiny that it judged Israeli, Phalangist, or American behavior...
...I quickly realized I felt at home here, even though these people were not like people I had grown up with...
...Wondering why all the people there were so desperately trying to leave their "homeland," he interviewed a number of Palestinians who rejected his claim that "this is a crucial moment in Palestinian history...
...This does not mean merely aiding with elections...
...But what made Begin even more dangerous was that his fantasies about power were combined with a self-perception of being a victim...
...John G. Kester, The Washingtonian $12.95 THE OMNI-AMERICANS Black Experience and American Culture by Albert Murray "The Omni-Americans well may be the most important book on black-white relations in the United States...
...We agree on most things, such as the desirability of private investment in Eastern Europe, and the obvious need for support to democratic forces there (he calls it institution-building...
...Like other journalists, he worked under conditions of constant fear and uncertainty, and had no illusions that the various Lebanese factions—Christian, Muslim, PLO, Syrian Steven C Munson, a frequent TAS contributor, has also written for Commentary and the National Interest...
...It is hard to tell, for he was being a bit cagey...
...This is madness, for it encourages the Kremlin to believe that it can weasel its way out of the jam...
...From Beirut to Jerusalem, a memoir of his experiences as a New York Times reporter in the Middle East, was published last summer to glowing reviews...
...It is not that massive repression is impossible...
...That Friedman himself was quite prepared to coddle the PLO is clear from his account of a meeting he and his assistant Mohammed had with Mahmoud Labadi, Arafat's personal spokesman in Beirut, in July 1982: "Mahmoud," I said, "let's get everything out in the open...
...Box 969 Ashland, Oregon 97520 For FREE CATALOG, Call 1 (800) 729..2665 46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1990 on Arafat, "The Teflon Guerrilla...
...Rather, it means encouraging currency reform...
...At times, Friedman even manages to bring his subject to life, as with this memorable description of the country by the American-born writer and former government press spokesman Ze'ev Chafets: For two thousand years, all these people have been crying and pleading and begging God to give them a country...
...How is it possible, one cannot help wondering, that he has ended up committing the same journalistic sin twice...
...borrowed or stolen...
...About the exact nature of the danger posed by Begin and Sharon to Lebanon Friedman is never very clear...
...not a single interior ministry...
...This is certainly the case with Friedman, who makes no claim to originality and, indeed, seems to prefer the company of the pack...
...It Won't Be Easy My wife, native New Orleanian that she is, wishes to thank Victor Gold from the bottom of her heart for "We Never Called It 'The Big Easy" (TAS, February 1990...
...We tend to forget that there has already been a lot of bloodshed, but when the Chinese do it in front of CNN the world denounces it...
...For that I would turn in my passport...
...When my editors asked me how they could send a Jew to Beirut, I told them it was no problem...
...Ledeen that occasional humanitarian aid may be appropriate...
...We sang the Israeli national anthem, "Hatikva...
...As he makes a point of confessing, "high school for me, I am now embarrassed to say, wa's one big celebration of Israel's victory in the Six-Day War...
...I never really articulated it, but on some unconscious level I got off the airplane and thought to myself, This is the place...
...There's no plantation owner around...
...Or perhaps to Will's own childish perspective on an adult world where everything is still as strange as Florida rhododendrons are to us...
...We know now...
...Can it be that, although he is now safely ensconced in Washington, D.C...
...The new regime is "reformist Communism," just as Gorbachev intended from the beginning...
...Attitudes toward Israel have undergone a radical shift from sympathy to hostility, and ideas that were once inconceivable to many people—that Israel has lost its soul, that Israel is the main obstacle to Middle East peace, that Israel is no better than its Arab neighbors—have been embraced with a vengeance...
...We disagree over where things stand at the moment, not over where things are headed and where our interests lie...
...Somehow, however, we can't summon up the energy to care very much...
...It's what happens when the Arabs admit they've had it—again—and there are 30,000 Jews in Lafayette Park to celebrate...
...And people would ask why...
...That's all there is to it...
...Beyond technology restrictions, I see little reason to hamper it...
...I told them I had never encountered any difficulties with the PLO because of my religion...
...training pollsters...
...when the Russians do it in Azerbaijan, with no TV cameras, we cluck understandingly, and the President expresses sympathy for the invaders...
...In other words, Friedman is guilty in his book of precisely the same kind of "over-focusing on the PLO and its perception of events"—that is, precisely the same kind of self-censorship—that he and his colleagues were guilty of in their reporting from Beirut...
...He makes much of this in the book, and his many admirers, in singing the book's praises, have made much of it as well...
...How could you not know...
...We want a situation which yields healthy, democratic, stable societies, as rapidly as possible...
...His portrait of Lebanon is highly personal and atmospheric...
...Let him say that to Secretary Mosbacher, who hasn't gotten the message...
...State: Zip: Date of change: 48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1990...
...Pray we do not find out, but also admit that the beginning is rather hopeful...
...And a side of steamers with broth to dunk 'em in to clean out the sand...
...This sympathy is evident throughout the book, from his characterization of Arafat as "the Ronald Reagan of Palestinian politics" and "a kind of Arab Pope" to his insistence that the PLO is a genuine "national liberation" movement to his rationalization that "terrorism, while morally repugnant, was functionally relevant for the PLO at its takeoff stage...
...Sharon was a brutal realist with a strategic design...
...That is not necessary...
...What scares me more than anything is that if I subscribed to your magazine, a little of that may go to the fund to put silly Reagan's face on Mount Rushmore...
...Despite the neglect this subject has received from journalists like Friedman, no one disputes the fact that the primary activities of this mini-state were pillage, blackmail, and terror—that it was, in short, largely an organized criminal enterprise...
...I liked the directness, I liked the excitement, the adrenaline...
...LI CORRESPONDENCE (continued from page 9) number of Reform Communists in the new regime, of course...
...The reason was that this was their country...
...I wanted to see it, but when I came here I found out that Israel resonated for me...
...Now if some other kind soul could do the same for me, native Manhattanite that I am, and pen a "We Never Called It 'The Big Apple,' " I'd be eternally in your debt...
Vol. 23 • April 1990 • No. 4
