From Beirut to Jerusalem

Content Warning: This section cites accounts of war violence, as well as criticisms of Arab culture that some readers may find offensive.

Tom Friedman’s work in Lebanon and Israel proved difficult for both professional and personal reasons. As a journalist in Lebanon, Friedman was a potential target, as various militia groups were quick to punish journalists who spread unfavorable stories or kidnap them to make themselves the center of the next news cycle. As a Jew, Friedman worried that his religion would make him suspect to Arabs, relying on the relative ignorance of Western names to achieve some anonymity. Upon moving to Israel, he traded one problem for another, as his Jewishness stuck him with the charge of disloyalty in the event of any critique of Israel. He tells the amusing story of his father-in-law receiving a phone call that “your son-in-law Tom Friedman […] is the most hated man in New York City” (478) for his reporting on the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

Going to Lebanon relatively early in his career, and then bearing witness to a series of transformative events, provided him with critical lessons on proper journalism. Where possible, Friedman tries to extract general truths from specific instances, such as viewing the massacre at Hama as an example of ancient tribalism and authoritarianism merged with the modern capabilities of the nation-state (98). His job is both to report events and put them in context, and so understanding the Intifada of 1987 is impossible without discussing the war of 1967.

Complete objectivity is impossible, as everyone has their own biases; Friedman is upfront about his own childhood fondness for the state of Israel, which was hard to shake entirely, even after he saw its warts and all in person. It is impossible to capture an entire story, and the most neutral journalist is dependent on sources with biases of their own. Friedman understands that objectivity is an illusion, but he can nonetheless work to represent as many sides of a story as possible. As the book illustrates, this often comes with risks and requires Friedman to put himself in harm’s way. But Friedman recognizes that he is not fulfilling the responsibility he has as a journalist if he is reporting on events that are often violent, unpredictable, and even deadly that he is not himself personally acquainted with.

In addition to providing context and analysis, the journalist is a storyteller, and mere slivers of life in Beirut can help shed light on something people will never see or understand in full. Friedman is renowned for having the ear of political leaders, and his later articles tend to have the overt air of policy prescriptions. By contrast, when he left Beirut, it was arguably worse off than when he found it, and no more of his writings would even make the front page. Even so, the mere fact of his having testified to “the boundaries of men’s compassion alongside their unfathomable brutality, their ingenuity alongside astounding folly, their insanity alongside their infinite ability to endure” made it a noteworthy journalistic endeavor (244): Friedman’s journalist approach, whereby he centers context and real-life stories in his reportage, sheds light on the lived experiences and the human stakes of events that are often reduced to statistics.