From Beirut to Jerusalem

Content Warning: This section cites accounts of war violence, as well as criticisms of Arab culture that some readers may find offensive.

“I learned 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 accepted or trusted by the Arabs, and he will never be fully accepted or trusted by the Jews.”

In the first chapter, Friedman is particularly attentive to the way in which he straddles two worlds. He is an expert on the Middle East, but given how this issue can easily inflame tensions in Western politics, he wields that expertise with care. When in Lebanon or Israel, he is not just a Westerner but a Jew, and therefore he is also mindful of the ways in which people in the region will use that to discredit opinions they find unfavorable. Objective information is hard to find, but even when he finds it, Friedman also finds it difficult to pass on to audiences, who have their own biases.

“That was Beirut. No one was keeping score. No matter how you lived your life, whether you were decent or indecent, sinner or saint, it was irrelevant. Men and women there could suffer wrenching tragedies once or twice or even three times, and then suffer some more…death had no echo in Beirut. No one’s life seemed to leave any mark on the city or reverberate in its ear.”

Friedman discovers that for someone living in a city at war, the sheer ubiquity of violence and terror could generate a wide variety of psychological effects. A prolonged experience of acute fear would drive someone to exhaustion, or madness, and so people develop coping mechanisms for tolerating acutely traumatic experiences. The sense of randomness Friedman describes here betrays a kind of fatalism that itself could be a coping mechanism: If one’s fate was written, and nothing they did would change that, they could go about living their lives as normally as possible.