Monday, November 5, 2012

From Beirut to Jerusalem by Thomas L. Friedman

During his first few eld in Jerusalem, an Israeli plug driver examineed to fishing gear him, trying to coerce him into paying a highly noble-minded price for a very short hacker ride. When Friedman resisted this attempt at being bullied, the Israeli taxi driver grew correct more aggressive, threatening to involve the authorities if his commands were non met. Friedman could not keep from laughing at this point of culture shock. The taxi driver had mistaken him for a new arrival to the kernel East, not as one already hardened to the mundane grind of months living amidst Lebanese bombings and torture scenes. Friedman told the driver categoric eithery "Look I just came from Beirut" suggesting that he could not even be agitated by this poor pomposity of petty bullying.

One of the most remarkable qualities of Friedman's book is its open-handed fairness. In the prologue Friedman contends that the Israelis and Arabs atomic number 18 simultaneously undergoing transition and although they do not consent it to one another, they share the same identity crisis (9). From Beruit to Jerusalem is wildly readable precisely because Friedman attempts to be comprehensive and just. His strategy leads him into back up excursions into his first-hand experiences told with a wry wit seasoned by days of saturation in experiencing both the greatness and travesties of Middle Eastern


life. His early report on the taxi driver's welcome marks the front-seat style Friedman adopts. Not only does this improvement allow the perplexing incongruities of the Middle East to be humanized for a Western audience but it also offers a outstanding immediacy which forces the reader to care as passionately virtually Friedman's topic as he himself does. His own self-proclaimed fanatical quirk about Middle Eastern affairs led Friedman to search St. Antony's College in Oxford, a leading center for Jewish-Arab studies, to witness the Lebanese Civil War and Israeli unrest. His dedication to seeing all sides of the truth even when they disrupt his own prior convictions produces smart as a whip craftsmanship.
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Friedman's early drastic realization that Israel was not "the Jewish spend camp of his youth" shapes the book and creates a voracious appetence within his readers for further unveilings.

Friedman painstakingly names all these particulars as background for the eruption of war when the British troops evacuated the region. When the Zionists tell their own state, the Palestinians "aided by the armies of Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Iraq advanced against the Jews. notwithstanding the Israelis not only maintained the land which the UN allotment had depute them but actually seized a portion of the land stripe aside for the Palestinians (15).

From Beruit to Jerusalem is marked by its mission to cook readers at one remove from the Middle East who are quickly lost by the intricacies of its socio-political life. Although Friedman's strategy is to lure readers into his narrative's meshing by stringing together a series of compelling stories, he does recognize the giant obstacles which an uninitiated audience must overcome. To this end, he cleverly places a brief timeline labeled as "A Middle East Chronology" at the book's beginning (xi-xiv). His objective appears to be to offer a condensed guide to the major events and players in the striking life of the Mid
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