Battling The Myths and Dogma

By Paul Gray

FROM BEIRUT TO JERUSALEM by Thomas L. Friedman

Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 525 pages; $22.95

Ten years as a journalist in Lebanon and Israel taught Thomas L. Friedman two important lessons. "First, when it comes to discussing the Middle East, people go temporarily insane, so if you are planning to talk to an audience of more than two, you'd better have mastered the subject. Second, a Jew who wants to make a career working in or studying about the Middle East will always be a lonely man: he will never be fully accepted or trusted by the Arabs, and he will never be fully accepted or trusted by the Jews."

That last clause will raise some eyebrows and hackles, but Friedman, who has mastered his subject, fully documents its accuracy. During most of the 1980s he covered the Middle East for the New York Times, initially as bureau chief in Beirut and then in the same post in Jerusalem. In Lebanon, Friedman was "the only full-time American Jewish reporter." In Israel he was not. Solitude had its comforts, he found. "People assumed that if you were in Beirut you couldn't possibly be Jewish," he writes. "After all, what Jew in his right mind would come to Beirut?" But members of his faith knew what Friedman was, and some were quick to interpret fact finding as heresy or treason. Why? The author answers, "I had helped to inform the Jews of New York City of the less-than-heroic behavior of the Israeli army in Lebanon, the Sabra and Shatila massacre and other unsettling stories."

Other readers placed a different value on Friedman's dispatches. His reporting from Lebanon won him a Pulitzer Prize, and his subsequent work in Israel won him another. Friedman, 36, is the Times's chief diplomatic correspondent in Washington. Freed from daily deadlines, he can look back on a period punctuated by excitement and narrow escapes. He had not been in Beirut long before the apartment house in which he was living was destroyed by a bomb; near the end of his stay in Jerusalem, as he was being driven to a farewell lunch by his wife, his car windshield was shattered by a thrown rock. Such experiences add dizzying moments to Friedman's crowded, fascinating memoir.

Among its many virtues, From Beirut to Jerusalem shows why messengers from the Middle East who try to remain impartial will find many factions eager to throttle them. The place lives and dies on faith and mythology; a mere fact is useless, possibly dangerous, until it has been modified to fit within a dogma. Most of the region's bloodiest episodes during the '80s, the author argues, arose from failures to recognize complex realities.

To say that powerful people in the Middle East sometimes behave irrationally is to flirt with the obvious. But Friedman buttresses this familiar thesis with fresh, arresting details. He chronicles the mounting debacle of Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which began with the announced goal of ending the safe haven enjoyed by Yasser Arafat and his Palestine Liberation Organization troops. In this Israel succeeded. That was almost easy, since a lot of Lebanese also wanted to get rid of the P.L.O. The Israeli soldiers were welcomed as saviors: "Everywhere you went in Lebanon, Jews were getting their pictures taken. This was not a nation at war, it was a nation on tour."

But the welcome quickly ran out. Friedman maintains that Israel's hidden agenda -- wiping out Palestinian agitation once and for all and playing midwife to a friendly or at least neutral government in Lebanon -- was the stuff of fantasy. The dispersal of their leadership would not stifle Palestinians' aspirations; and there was no force in splintered Lebanon capable of uniting the country.

Friedman was also on hand at the birth of the intifadeh, the stone-throwing rebellion by young Palestinians living in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Here was David vs. Goliath with a vengeance, shown nightly throughout much of the world on the evening news. But Friedman argues that the myth -- stones triumphing over might -- threatens to bury reality. Israel will not be brought down by slingshots; tanks and troops will not quash resentments. If anything is to be accomplished, a photogenic revolution must give way to hard bargaining.

Those who believe in the power of reason to solve disputes will find From Beirut to Jerusalem glum reading. Oddly enough, Friedman remains optimistic. Amid all the shambles and contradictions of the Middle East, he met and worked beside Jews and Arabs who passionately want to live together in peace. Their will may be thwarted, by habit or history, but no one who reads this book can resist rooting for their success.