Canter Bridge

Friedman wraps up his book by talking about four dead men and what they must do if peace is to come to the troubled slice of land still fought over by Israelis and Palestinians. Yitzhak Rabin, Yasir Arafat, Hafez Assad, and Jordan’s King Hussein were very much alive a decade ago when Friedman wrote an appendix to this still-riveting work, though the shadow of Rabin’s assasin was almost upon him. This casts an eery veneer over Friedman’s sensible thoughts on shifting power and the need for all partners to ‘buy a ticket’ if peace has any hope of overcoming the region’s deeply etched pessimisms, even if one now needs to shift the burden of choice to the successors of these four men, only three of whom had the good fortune to die in their own beds.

Friedman is ubiquitous these days on television news, bookstore shelves, and award ceremonies. With good reason.

No one is better at spotting patterns in the apparent chaos of modern events, and then distilling them into understandable images. The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Longitudes and Attitudes, The World is Flat and his New York Times and syndicated columns have filled Friedman’s shelf with Pulitzers and placed his voice on the ‘must read’ list of anyone who believes our times can and must be understood. Yet From Beirut to Jerusalem is perhaps his finest, unwavering look at a concrete crisis, undergirded as it is by years of reporting in the small space that locks these two capitals in the grip of a land where memories endure too long.

Autobiography, as much as the places he describes, make Friedman’s study the success that it is. An American Jewish journalist with Oxford training in Modern Middle Eastern Studies and a pragmatic fearlessness about going where the story lies, the author’s common touch serves him well. He appears equally at ease with his Beirut glass seller as with Arafat, Shamir, and Rabin, though he does not conceal his disdain for the late PLO Chairman’s effete revolutionary pose. Though Friedman is remarkably personal about his subject throughout—yet without giving up his journalist’s distance—his final chapters are an almost passionate plea for sanity by a man who has lost friends and seen too much in nearly a decade’s posting to the Middle East, just as the citizens of the region have themselves.

Friedman is convinced that Beirut and Jerusalem, different as they appear, suffer under Middle Eastern tribalisms that devour their young when given the slightest chance. The author leads his reader into the human impact of this regional vice with page-turning narrative punctuated with brilliant, image-rich synthesis. Friedman is convinced that patterns of behavior are there to be understood and, if it can be said in the context of the Middle East without provoking scornful laughter, even managed.

He is particularly insightful on the role that is played by America’s distinct blend of naiveté and optimism, the latter quality being one that he insists the parties to the modern conflict need and know that they need.

His final prescriptions for a hard-nosed deal between Israel and the Palestinians are now overshadowed by a 13-meter wall and the rough tears in the fabric of the two people’s interdependence that were inflicted by the second intifada and Israel’s response. Yet, for all that has changed, surely much more has remained the same, and so Friedman’s suggestions read like medicine in need of a pair of doctors realistic and pig-headed enough to prescribe it and convince their respective peoples that only in this way will the patient mend. Or, more to the point, survive.

By my lights, this the single most effective book to place in the hands of a Western reader attentive enough to want to comprehend the Middle East’s ‘civilization of clashes’—to borrow a term from Niall Ferguson—and hopeful enough to have resisted the easier path of cynicism.