Journey Through a Troubled Region

From Beirut to Jerusalem

By Thomas Friedman

Farrar, Straus, Giroux

$22.95, 509 pp.

THE Middle East captures the attention of Americans like no other region of the world. It fascinates, enthralls, captivates.

Striking pictures from the region are featured nightly on the evening news. We sit, glued to our television sets, gasping in wonder at the complexities and conflicts of a world so different from ours.

And we don't understand.

From Beirut to Jerusalem is Thomas Friedman's introduction of the Middle East to Americans, and his engaging narrative format accomplishes exactly what he sets out to do.

Friedman, who spent five years covering Beirut and four years covering Jerusalem for The New York Times, details his experiences in the Middle East. These are the experiences of an American fascinated with the region but shocked when the reality he finds there is strikingly different from that which the media portrays.

Most refreshing in a book about the Middle East is the preponderence of anecdotes, interviews and observations--and the limited amount of opinions.

Friedman guides the reader through his assignments in the Middle East, exploring the never-ending conflicts between Christian Maronites, Syrians, Israelis, Phalangists, and Druse in Lebanon and the Israelis and Palestinians in Israel.

His tales of life in Beirut are less subtle and more hard-hitting than the section on Jerusalem, which meanders between various explanations of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the conflicts within Judaism in Israel and the unique relationship between American Jews and Israelis.

Friedman explains what on the surface seems inexplicable, such as why Syrian President Hafez Assad would destroy an entire city--Hama--in his country. He knows and understands how the shackles of tradition and history have shaped the policies of leaders involved in nation-building in the Middle East.

But most of all, Friedman experiences, and the reader experiences with him.

Friedman's ability to draw the reader into his world is epitomized by his description of a stone-throwing attack by a Palestinian on his family's car. You feel the rock hit the windshield, you see the determined, unemotional look on the stone-thrower's face and you understand the reactions of the scared wife and two young children facing a shattered windshield.

This is life in the Middle East.

WHILE split into two distinct sections on Beirut and Jerusalem, From Beirut to Jerusalem consistently develops Freidman's underlying theme that both Lebanon and Israel, two very different societies on the surface, are actually beset by similar problems.

The framework of Friedman's analysis of the Middle East is Assad's destruction of Hama, which the author feels characterize the three conflicting elements that have caused conflict in the Middle East: tribe-like loyalty, authoritarianism and modern nation-state building.

Assad liquidated the city because the Sunni Moslem revolt based there could have spread throughout the country. He didn't see the Sunnis as Syrians but as an alien people. And he was able to exercise his power in such a horrific manner by taking advantage of the tradition of authoritarian rule.

Hama represents Assad's difficulty in forging a unified state out of people with several ethnicities, traditions and cultures.

The result--the entire demolition of a major city with the massacre of what Amnesty Internation estimated to be 10 to 25 thousand people--is derived from what Friedman labels "Hama Rules"

Hama Rules are the only ones that apply in the Middle East, but the U.S. cannot understand them. Players obeying the Hama Rules orchestrated the 1983 suicide truck bombing attack on U.S. marines stationed in Beirut. Even Israel follows the rules--it invited Phalangist militia into the Lebanese towns of Sabra and Shatila and failed to stop the massacre of up to 1000 people.

This was one of the most disturbing elements of Friedman's assignment, the disillusionment of a Minneapolis Jew who idealized Israel as a "City on the Hill" in the Middle East but found its actions sometimes too similar to those of the other factions in the area:

Sabra and Shatila was something of a personal crisis for me. The Israel I had met on the outskirst of Beirut was not the heroic Israel I had been taught to identify with. It was an Israel that talked about purity of arms' to itself, but in the real world had learned to play by Hama Rules, like everyone else in the neighborhood.

IN Jerusalem, Friedman finds the same governmental paralysis as in Beirut. But this time it is caused by unity, not factionalism.

It is the consensus in Israeli politics, highlighted by the Labor-Likud coalition governments which have glossed over the deep-rooted divisions in the country--divisions based on how much Israel should be based on Judaism.

He finds that the Israeli leaders have not changed in the last 20 years, since Israel became a major power in the region. They do not recognize that Israel is strong enough to compromise, and their policies are shielded from criticism by defensive references to the Holocaust.

Or as Abba Eban says, "Israeli rhetoric is no longer based on contemporary realities but on Jewish memories, and that is a failure in leadership."

The failure in leadership handicapped Israel when dealing with its most recent crisis, the Palestinian uprising. Friedman compares the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to a fault line that for 20 years was capable of absorbing slight tremors so well that many forgot about its existence. But the earthquake finally struck in the form of the intifada--the Palestinian uprising of anger couched in vows to throw off "Israeldom."

According to Friedman, the Palestinians were never the most brutalized people in the Middle East, but they were easily the most humiliated.

AFTER all the narrative, Friedman finishes with two recommendations. Israel should never forget that its own nationhood, more than the Torah, is the spiritual glue for Jews all over the world. Israel should avoid measures, such as efforts to strictly define who is a Jew, that could isolate Jews abroad. Secondly, Friedman emphasizes that despite the apparent hopelessness of the situation, the United States can help the Middle East escape from its conflicts.

And through these two recommendations Friedman relates to the reader what he considers the most important lesson he learned in the region: the Middle Eastern attitude that "tomorrow can be different from yesterday."