From Beirut to Jerusalem

From Beirut to Jerusalem is Thomas Friedman's account of the decade he spent covering the Middle East, first in Beirut for UPI and then the New York Times, and from 1984 to 1988 as the Times bureau chief in Jerusalem, and for a generation of readers it was the book that made the region's conflicts comprehensible. The Beirut half is war reporting of the first order: Lebanon's civil war with its shifting militias and its logic of the neighborhood, the 1982 Israeli invasion, the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, the barracks bombing that drove America out, all told with the reporter's appetite for the telling scene and the survivor's dark humor of the city itself, where Friedman lived through shelling and learned, as he puts it, how ordinary life persists inside catastrophe. The Jerusalem half turns analytic, examining Israel through its own internal fractures, secular and religious, Ashkenazi and Sephardi, and through the first Palestinian intifada, which erupted while he was there, and closing with his prescriptions for how Israelis and Palestinians might escape the trap the book has spent hundreds of pages mapping. Friedman's method, arguing by anecdote and parable, made the book enormously readable and left it open to the criticism, pressed most famously by Edward Said, that its frames flattered American and Israeli assumptions; readers can weigh that argument against the reporting, which no one disputed. The book won the 1989 National Book Award for Nonfiction, and became the standard first book on the modern Middle East, assigned in classrooms for decades.