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FROM BEIRUT TO JERUSALEM by Thomas L. Friedman...
...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...
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...
...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...