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Book: From Beirut to Jerusalem
Quotes of Book: From Beirut to Jerusalem

Thomas L. Friedman _ From Beirut to Jerusalem
Would you buy a used car from your occupier? For the first six months of the intifada, Ehud Gol was the official Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman. Every day he had to go before the world's press and defend Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. But in the spring of 1988, Gol was made the Israeli Consul General in Rio de Janeiro and he had to sell his car before he left the country. Practically the first place he went was to a Palestinian car dealer in the West Bank town of Ramallah. "Intifada or no intifada, this was business," Gol explained to me. "The car dealer even came down to the Foreign Ministry and we went over all the papers in my office. There I was, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, and this guy, whose son was probably out throwing stones, was ready to buy from me-and it was a used car!" A Palestinian teacher I knew was driving from Ramallah to Jerusalem one afternoon when he saw a colleague of his from Bir Zeit University and offered to give him a lift. "This fellow came from a small village near Ramallah," said my teacher friend. "The whole way into Jersualem he was talking to me about the intifada and how it had changed his village, how everyone was involved, and how the local committees of the uprising were running the village and they were getting rid of all the collaborators. He was really enthusiastic, and I was really impressed. As we got close to Jerusalem, I asked him where he wanted to be dropped off and he said, 'The Hebrew University.' I was really surprised, so I said, 'What are you going there for?' and he said, 'I teach an Arabic class there.' It simply didn't occur to him that there was any contradiction between enthusiasm for the intifada and where he was going.
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Thomas L. Friedman _ From Beirut to Jerusalem
While their parents knew a different life and would never really feel at home again without it, their kids had never known anything else and would never really feel whole because of it. Over
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Thomas L. Friedman _ From Beirut to Jerusalem
These alliances began with the most basic blood association-the family-and then expanded to the clan, the tribe, and then to other tribes.
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Thomas L. Friedman _ From Beirut to Jerusalem
The first and oldest of these traditions is tribe-like politics. I use the term "tribe-like" to refer to a pre-modern form of political interaction characterized by a harsh, survivalist quality and an adherence to certain intense primordial or kin-group forms of allegiance. Sometimes the tribe-like group that is in power in the Middle East, or is seeking power, is an actual tribe, sometimes it is a clan, members of a religious sect, a village group, a regional group; sometimes it is friends from a certain neighborhood, an army unit, and sometimes it is a combination of these groups. What all these associations have in common is the fact that their members are all bound together by a tribe-like spirit of solidarity, a total obligation to one another, and a mutual loyalty that takes precedence over allegiances to the wider national community or nation-state. The
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Thomas L. Friedman _ From Beirut to Jerusalem
The Levantine political idea, which grew naturally among the communities of the eastern Mediterranean, was an original way of dealing with diverse tribal, village, and sectarian identities, and it inspired the Beirutis and ultimately the Lebanese to believe that they could build a modern Arab republic, melding together seventeen different Christian, Muslim, and Druse sects.
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Thomas L. Friedman _ From Beirut to Jerusalem
Beirut's enduring lesson for me was how thin is the veneer of civilization, how easily the ties that bind can unravel, how quickly a society that was known for generations as the Switzerland of the Middle East can break apart into a world of strangers. I have never looked at the world the same since I left Beirut. It was like catching a glimpse of the underside of a rock or the mess of wires and chips that are hidden inside a computer. Steven
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Thomas L. Friedman _ From Beirut to Jerusalem
In the wake of World War I, however, the British and French took out their imperial pens and carved up what remained of the Ottoman dynastic empire, and created an assortment of nation-states in the Middle East modeled along their own. The borders of these new states consisted of neat polygons-with right angles that were always in sharp contrast to the chaotic reality on the ground. In the Middle East, modern Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine, Jordan and the various Persian Gulf oil states all traced their shapes and origins back to this process; even most of their names were imposed by outsiders. In other words, many of the states in the Middle East today-Egypt being the most notable exception-were not willed into existence by their own people or developed organically out of a common historical memory or
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Thomas L. Friedman _ From Beirut to Jerusalem
this is a real double blow. It is akin to having your life-long hero, the person around whom you have modeled your whole identity, tell you that you are a fraud-but don't take it personally.
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Thomas L. Friedman _ From Beirut to Jerusalem
The resulting article-an almost hour-by-hour reconstruction of the massacre-was published across four full pages of The New York Times on September 26, 1982; it eventually won me a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting.
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Thomas L. Friedman _ From Beirut to Jerusalem
Some of our bonding moments were times of great tragedy, but there were many happy memories as well. Though we each have since retreated to the different worlds from whence we came, the bond between us will never be broken.
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Thomas L. Friedman _ From Beirut to Jerusalem
When I asked Marine Sergeant Jeffrey Roberts what he thought was happening in Lebanon, he explained, "To me it was a civil war, only it wasn't just the North against the South. It was North against South, East against West, Northeast against Southwest, Southeast against Northwest, and we were in the middle of it all. There were just too many different sides. If we picked one, we had four others against us." Marine
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Thomas L. Friedman _ From Beirut to Jerusalem
Second, in the desert there was no outside mediator or government to enforce laws or to adjudicate disputes in a neutral way between tribes when they resorted to predatory behavior in order to survive.
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