Rocky Decade in the Middle East

...He speaks both Arabic and Hebrew...

...He was about five-foot-four, fifty years old, and a native of Jerusalem, he told me...

...11 Trudging through the shambles of West Beirut in August 1982, looking for the building which housed the Palestine Liberation Organization's spokesman...

...Israeli tanks and soldiers swarmed about and I spied what looked like a football at one corner...

...It is the sad, oft-told story of Maronite Christian and Moslem Sunni dominance gradually being eroded by the influx of Yasir Arafat's Palestinian refugees and the demographic rise of the Lebanese underclass, the Shiites...

...Two years later, The New York Times hired him and, after a brief sojourn in New York, sent him back to Beirut, where he stayed until mid-1984, when he became bureau chief in Jerusalem...

...I thought I knew something about this area in the Middle East...

...But can there be nothing like it again...

...Israel also isn't a coffee-table book with an introduction by Abba Eban that you keep out in the living room and never read...

...We stopped for a few moments in Nabatiya, and no more than twenty feet from my car I saw a young Shiite woman stare straight into my eyes and spit...

...I've never seen such hate...

...won a scholarship to take a master's degree in Modern Middle East Studies at Oxford...

...The chapter headed "Israel and American Jews: Who Is Dreaming About Whom...

...I am astonished and delighted with its thirty-six-year-old author, now The Times diplomatic correspondent in Washington...

...Friedman compares the "benign" twenty-year Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip from 1967 to 1987 to a fault line waiting to rumble out of control...

...I walked over to inspect and it turned out to be a Syrian soldier's head...

...Friedman has encapsulated his ten years of experience in reporting from Lebanon and Israel (and occasionally Syria, Jordan, and other nearby countries) in a book that is almost impossible to put down...

...Over all, this is the best book I have ever found about the Middle East...

...Within an hour Syrian and Libyan shells and rockets were landing in the field a couple of hundred yards away...

...If Driving to the Southern Lebanon town of Nabatiya in March 1985, with machine-gun-mounted Israeli jeeps fore and aft of my rental car...

...He reports, in the best sense of the word, with levels of depth I have found nowhere else...

...He doesn't claim to have answers to the killing questions of the Middle East...

...He was also pastor of the local church, a Palestinian, and his eyes blazed as he told me he'd been "evicted" from Jerusalem by the Israelis...

...H The Alexandre Hotel in East Beirut, the Christian side...

...Every journalist who has spent any time in Lebanon, Israel, and nearby Jordan and Syria has some memories akin to those of Thomas L. Friedman, correspondent of The New York Times...

...That may account for his two Pulitzer Prizes...

...It is packed with anecdotes, color, personalities, humor, fairness, and the wisest analysis of the Lebanese and Israeli-Palestinian situations that I have come across...

...And he offers hope, writing: "Hope in Lebanon is not a flower, it's a weed...

...Give it just the slightest ray of sunshine, and the tiniest drop of water, and it will shoot right up and multiply between the cracks in Beirut's rubble...

...No body, just head...

...Friedman tells the story better than most writers, interspersing interviews and anecdotes with the downward spiral...

...Then he looked up at me and said, "American policy is shit...

...One of the points Friedman stresses, a point to which I'd never given any thought, is that in the twenty years between the 1967 Six Day War and the intifada the Palestinians became more and more "Israelized," so that in another generation or two they might have lost their culture and personalities completely without the intifada...

...I checked in one afternoon in late May 1981, and was given a room overlooking a field back of the hotel...

...is potent stuff...

...As I read, there were times when I wanted to ask, "Tom, how did you get so smart...

...The first half of his book is devoted to Lebanon and the intercommunal warfare in this Connecticut-sized nation...

...Personally, I recall: H A crossroads near the Syrian border town of Kuneitra on the fourth day of the 1973 Yom Kippur War...

...I found him—sitting in debris in the building's lobby, depressed...

...He was much better prepared for his Lebanon and Israel assignments than most reporters...

...Here, I am more hopeful...

...He repeated the sentence and walked away...

...Some essence of the old Lebanon still remains beneath the rubble and ruins...

...As he came to the traffic circle I could see he was an Eastern Orthodox priest, wearing the distinctive hat and gown of that Christian sect...

...And that's exactly what began in December, 1987, when the intifada—'Xhe earthquake"—started...

...U Walking around the main traffic circle of Ramallah, a West Bank Palestinian town a dozen miles north of Jerusalem, at the end of last November...

...One reason, I think, is that there is nothing pretentious about Friedman...

...If Israel and American Jewry are ever to be one in any meaningful sense, then the foundations for real unity will have to be constructed anew from the bottom up, and that must begin with certain myths being set aside on both ends of the ocean...

...I had worked as a reporter in it seven or eight times over sixteen years...

...In his final chapter, which should be read by anyone in the State Department who has even the slightest impact on Middle East relations, Friedman suggests that the United States has to assume "several different diplomatic roles simultaneously"—that it must "learn to think like an obstetrician, behave like a friend, bargain like a grocer"—he means a Middle East grocer, in the souk—"and fight like a real son-of-a-bitch...

...Friedman, a Minneapolis Jew, writes: "Israel in the eyes of American Jews has gone in twenty years from a substitute religion to a source of religious delegitim-ization, and from a source of political identity to a source of political confusion...

...America in the eyes of Israelis has gone from a huge Disneyland to an essential lifeline, and from the world's largest pool of potential Jewish immigrants to Israel to the world's largest magnet for Jews, including Israelis...

...Israel is not a Jewish summer camp...

...William Steif (William Steif is a former national andforeign correspondent for the Scripps-Howard newspapers...

...One such myth, says Friedman, is the Israeli myth that "the Diaspora does not count and that Jewish life there is not authentic, that American tolerance and pluralism won't last...

...We get glimpses of the "old," pre-civil-war Beirut—"the Paris of the Middle East"—and the destruction caused by fourteen years of war...

...That trend is being reversed, and Arafat now must pay far more attention to the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza than to the Palestinians still living in "refugee camps"—towns, actually—in Lebanon and elsewhere...

...The intifada had closed every business in town, but a lone figure walked toward me, looking from a distance like Charlie Chaplin...

...He hired out with UPI in London and by 1979 was on his way to UPI's Beirut bureau...

...The Lebanon of old is gone now...

...But all indications are that life for Jews in America is viable...

...After graduating from Brandeis University, he...

...At the same time, Friedman writes, "American Jews are going to have to rethink some of their basic attitudes toward Israel...

...But after reading Tom Friedman's book I know I knew just a little...

...He explains this in considerable detail, so that the diplomats in Foggy Bottom can't miss the clues...

...The book's second half focuses on Israel and the Palestinians...

...My hunch is that Friedman may be in line for his third Pulitzer Prize, this time for From Beirut to Jerusalem...

...it cannot be rebuilt as it was, any more than an egg can be sewn back together...

...Israel is the most difficult, outlandish experiment in Jewish history—an attempt to build a Jewish nation out of Jews who have never lived together...