Th omas Friedman

Utopian to Cynic
Friedman recounts his journalistic and
personal journey through the Middle East
in the remarkable, just-released From
Beirut to Jerusalem. The book stands out
from the pack of tomes about the Mideast
published each year for a number of
reasons: It has a compelling lucidity that
more than does justice to a murky, elusive
land. It is eminently readable, personal and
scholarly, historical and as up-to-date as
tomorrow morning's headlines.
But maybe most importantly, From
Beirut to Jerusalem is surprisingly bal-
anced. Friedman is no calloused partisan
or blinded ideologue. He is as harsh on
Menachem Begin ("Bernard Goetz [the
New York subway vigilante] with an F-15")
as he is on Yassir Arafat (" the ultimate
Teflon guerrilla"). He is as cynical about
Israel's Labor Party as he is toward its
Likud Party. ("By the early 1980s, it was
clear that the functional differences be-
tween most of Labor and Likud over the
West Bank were quite insignificant. The
only difference between them was in
rhetoric.")
And he was as critical of some Reagan
administration officials ("weak, cynical,
and, in some cases, venal") as he is of
former Lebanese president Amin Gemayel
("sometime playboy, sometime business-
man, all-time zero") as he is of the PLO's
top hierarchy ("In Lebanon, the PLO
became so obsessed with social promotion
it stopped caring about Palestine . . . [It
turned into] brigades of deskbound revolu-
tionaries whose paunches were as puffed
out as their rhetoric?')
Like any other book on the Middle East,
From Beirut to Jerusalem is properly poig-
nant. But unlike any others, it even has
moments of humor. At a fashionable din-
ner in Beirut, as artillery salvos outside
were rocking the neighborhood, the
Lebanese socialite who was the hostess
turned to her guests and asked, writes
Friedman, "in an overture you won't find
in Emily Post's book of etiquette, 'Would
you like to eat now or wait for the
ceasefire?' "
That query — and Friedman's response
to it — embodies the first of Friedman's
Five Rules of Middle Eastern Reporting:

If you can't take a joke, you shouldn't
come.

(More about Friedman's other Rules
later.)
Friedman came to the Middle East a
novice to the land, but not to the region.
He had majored in Mediterranean Studies
at Brandeis and in Modern Middle East

Studies at Oxford. He wanted to become
a journalist, and not an academic because
he "wanted to work with the raw materials.
I didn't want to sit in an ivory tower
reading about the Middle East through
other people's eyes. I wanted to be out
there wrestling with the primary data and
learning about it first-hand?'
While at Oxford, Friedman wrote his
first pieces for a newspaper: Op-eds for the
Des Moines Register. Shortly before
graduating from the university, he asked
Leon Daniel, then UPI's news editor for
Europe, for a job. Daniel, now based in
UPI's Washington bureau, remembers
Friedman as having "some excellent clips.
I was particularly taken with their quali-
ty. Tom impressed me as a very bright
young man. He was an exceptionally quick
study?'
But Friedman's fascination with the
Middle East hadn't started when he was
some wet-behind-the-ears college sopho-
more. It started when his ears were even
wetter than that. In the winter of 1968, the
then-15-year-old Friedman and his parents
flew from their home in Minneapolis to
Israel to visit his older sister, who was
spending her junior year at Tel Aviv
University. Israel, especially Jerusalem,
bewitched Friedman. As he says in From
Beirut to Jerusalem, "something about
Israel and the Middle East grabbed me in
both mind and heart. Since that moment,
I have never really been interested in
anything else. Indeed, from the first day
I walked through the walled Old City of
Jerusalem, inhaled its spices, and lost
myself in the multicolored river of humani-
ty that flowed through its maze of alley-
ways, I felt at home . . . It may have been
my first trip abroad, but in 1968 I knew
then and there that I was really more Mid-
dle East than Minnesota:'
Friedman became an Israeli in every-
thing but address and citizenship. He
spent his next three summer vacations on
a kibbutz. For his independent study pro-
ject while a high school senior, he did a
slide show on how Israel won the Six Day
War. For a high school psychology class,
he created a slide show on kibbutz life.
"In the period of a year," he writes, "I
went from being a nebbish whose dream
was to one day become a professional golfer
to being an Israeli expert-in-training."
Friedman joined UPI when the Iranian
Revolution erupted and the West suffered
another oil crisis. He filled a gap in the wire
service and quickly became its OPEC and
petroleum expert. Nine months later, there
was an opening in the UPI's Beirut bureau.

THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS

CLOSE UP

"H

ave no illusions about
these guys," warned Tom
Friedman, leaning back
in a leather chair in the
living room of his home
in the Washington suburb of Chevy Chase.
"They're all bandits. I know that because
I lived with them. They can tell a foreigner
whatever they want, but give me a break."
Friedman wasn't breaking some fuzzy-
minded liberal's heart with a brutally frank
revelation about the guys in the local pen.
The 36-year-old New York Times cor-
respondent, who has won two Pulitzer
Prizes for his reporting on, and from, the
Middle East, was referring instead to
Israeli and Arab leaders. All of them.
Strong words from a journalist with an
international reputation for depth, dog-
gedness and balance — the ace reporter in
the Mideast.
Friedman had never been in the Middle
East before June 1979, first for the United
Press International wire service and then
for the New York Times. His tenure was
a reporter's luck — and a reporter's night-
mare. Summed up, it reads like a roll call
of disaster and betrayal: the bloody civil
war in Lebanon, the massacre of tens of
thousands of Sunni Muslims in the Syrian
city of Hama, Israel's invasion to the out-
skirts of Beirut, the slaughter of as many
as 1,000 Palestinians in Sabra and Shatilla,
the truck bombing of 241 U.S. Marines in
their barracks in Beirut, the duplicity of
Israeli politicians, the outbreak of the
Palestinian intifada.
For 10 years, Friedman dodged bullets,
bombs, stones and rhetoric. For 10 years,
he wrestled with his own personal crisis,
watching an Israel he had deeply believed
in while in high school and college recede
from gilded, heroic mythology to the
shadows of bleak reality.
And now, safe from the dangers of the
Middle East, but still reeling from his own
disillusionment, Friedman encapsulated in
one meaningful, cynical word his vision of
those who ran the show in the Middle East
— "bandits?'
But then he is careful to add that this
is "not to say that they haven't achieved
important things and that I have great
respect for what they've achieved. Some of
them are serious bandits. Israel was well
served at times by them. The PLO was well
served at times by them. But I don't have
this great reverential attitude toward
them. I've seen them all close up a little
too much. No man is a hero to his valet —
or to a reporter who has covered them for
a long time?'

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