Word: beirutization
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...FROM BEIRUT TO JERUSALEM by Thomas L. Friedman...
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...
...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...
...Beirut's warring factions, for example, have a prodigious capacity for remembering injury. So too the Northern Irish, whose Protestants celebrate the Battle of the Boyne -- next year is the 300th anniversary -- as if it took place yesterday. The inability to forget, to let the slate be wiped clean, freezes societies in anachronism and turns blood feuds into endless civil...
...Schoolboy, Le Carre devoted days to conversations with TIME Hong Kong correspondent Bing Wong. For The Little Drummer Girl (1983), set partially in the Middle East, Le Carre got useful background from Abu Said Abu Rish, a Palestinian journalist who at the time was office manager of TIME's Beirut bureau. Le Carre still treasures an unusual gift that Abu Said gave him -- a sword that once belonged to the Palestinian's father. "Have you ever tried to take a sword through security in the Middle East?" Le Carre asks with a chuckle. After much negotiation, the pilot agreed...