From Beirut to Jerusalem

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1989

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1

Chapters 2-4

Chapters 5-7

Chapters 8-10

Chapters 11-14

Chapters 15-17

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Chapters 8-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 8 Summary: “Betty Crocker in Dante’s Inferno”

Following the withdrawal of Israeli forces, a US-led peacekeeping mission entered Lebanon. Friedman depicts them as “good, milk-faced boys” utterly unprepared for the task awaiting them (188). The suggestion for an American force actually came from Arafat, and there had already been a small contingent in August 1982 to oversee the PLO’s withdrawal. After the assassination of Gemayel and the camp massacres, a much larger contingent came with French and Italian soldiers, with the ostensible goal of helping the Lebanese government establish full control. Confident in the rightness of their mission, and cheered by the seemingly warm embrace of the locals, they thought of themselves as exporting American values and institutions. They focused on training a national army, not understanding that Amil Gemayel planned on using that army, and the Americans, to pursue his enemies, not unify the country. He thwarted peace overtures from Shi’a leaders, turned a blind eye to Phalangist violence, and would accept only Israel as a local negotiating partner. Since the Marines were viewed as Gemayel’s enablers, they started coming under attack, with severe restrictions on their ability to fire back. In April 1983, a pickup truck drove to the gate of the US embassy and detonated a bomb.

After the attack, the US secured a deal between Gemayel and Israel “that deepened Lebanese Muslim resentment all the more” for favoring Israel (198). When Israeli forces withdrew from the Shouf Mountains, the area became a battleground, and the Marines were forced to back Gemayel’s attempts to seize control of the area. After a Syrian-backed militia pressed the Lebanese army’s position, the US conducted a retaliatory strike, making them a direct party to the war. On October 23, 1983, another truck detonated a bomb in front of the Marine headquarters, most likely with the support of Syria, Iran, or both.

Friedman regards the whole episode as an example of American arrogance, the belief that it could impose its will with its massive military without taking the time to understand local realities. Even after the experience of Vietnam, they had not quite learned that small and vastly less powerful actors could still “neutralize American policy in Lebanon with just 12,000 pounds of dynamite and a stolen truck” (206). President Reagan initially insisted that US peacekeepers would finish the job and not back down in the face of terrorist threats, but as the conflict between the Maronites and Druse intensified, they spent most of their time getting out of the way of the crossfire. By the early months of 1984, they were preparing to leave, “with a feeling that in such a place nothing was possible and nothing made sense” (211).

Chapter 9 Summary: “The End of Something”

The imminent withdrawal of American forces left Beirut in a gloomy mood—even though the peacekeeping mission was not particularly successful, it symbolized a reconciliation process which now had run aground. Friedman pauses to mourn the death of the Lebanese ideal, where different communities came together in a historic nexus of trade, science, and cultural exchange. The rise of nationalism after World War I gradually snuffed this ideal out of existence in every other part of the Middle East. But Beirut thrived, in part because “it was a city which had no natural resources other than the cunning of its multilingual inhabitants and their ability to make money serving as a bridge between Europe and the Arab world” (216).

The outbreak of civil war in 1975 did enormous damage to that ideal, but it mostly pit the Maronites against Syrians and Palestinians rather than their fellow Lebanese. According to Friedman, it was the battle for the Shouf, beginning in 1984, which marked the end of the Lebanese ideal. All sides recognized Berlin as the staging ground for operations in the mountains, and the city was torn apart by factional strife. Friedman experienced new levels of personal danger, and the escalation of fighting served as the last straw for the Marines, who departed in February 1984.

Friedman did not visit Beirut before the war and heard from many of its residents that it had been “the Switzerland of the Middle East” (224), but he starts to wonder if that ideal was always illusory. After witnessing a member of Hezbollah smash all the alcohol containers at the Commodore Hotel, Friedman wonders if tribal resentments had been lurking beneath the surface all along, waiting for a chance to reemerge. The Shi’a in particular had been “the country’s perpetual underclass” (226), and the outbreak of war combined with the revolutionary Shi’a government seizing power in Iran prompted them to seize control of West Beirut and then destroy the very concept of cosmopolitan unity. With parents teaching their children to be combatants from a young age, he despairs at the prospects for peace.

After a failed peace conference in Lausanne, Switzerland, Gemayel attempted to form a coalition government including all factions, but fighting continued nonetheless. Friedman concludes that in addition to the war between the Maronites and Muslims, there was also a war within both of those communities, and still another between fighters of all sides and civilians. The private armies that emerged from the war were at least as interested in self-enrichment and power as the political victory of their side. A fledgling peace movement took root, hoping to launch a campaign of nonviolent resistance, but the militias intentionally stepped up their shelling in order to prevent a march from happening. After Gemayel left office in 1988, Lebanon split between two rival governments each claiming to represent the whole, but according to a Lebanese friend of Friedman’s, “the idea of Beirut is still there. The challenge now is to rebuild it on real foundations” (241).

Chapter 10 Summary: “Time to Go”

As violence in Beirut became endemic, Friedman decided to leave, especially after his neighborhood endured shelling and he realized that the Times would not consider that newsworthy. Preparing to leave, he reflected on what he had learned about “the boundaries of men’s compassion alongside their unfathomable brutality […] their insanity alongside their infinite ability to endure” (244). Friedman also tried to keep in mind that what for him were compelling anecdotes to send home to the reading public were for the locals a daily nightmare without end. Friedman recalls a moment in 1982 when after watching the PLO department, he stayed up finishing an article on which he had been working for months. Just as he completed it, all lines of communication went dead and he missed the deadline, leaving the story to stand as an entirely personal memory.

Chapters 8-10 Analysis

Up until this point in the story, Friedman himself is an example of Enduring the Unendurable. He vividly describes the risks facing anyone in Beirut, and how journalists in particular were targeted as either sources of dangerous information or one of the few available foreigners who could be captured for ransom or some other benefit. His wife had been with him sharing those dangers for practically the entire time, and after a certain amount of time, they were taking greater risks for diminishing rewards. Certainly he had done his duty to inform the public on the cascading set of interventions which first brought in the Syrians, then the Israelis, and then, ultimately, the Americans.

One could retroactively wish that his American readers had heeded the advice of his earlier comments and put away any notions of fitting Lebanon within their own ideological template. Yet the arrival and subsequent conduct of the Americans validated to Friedman that every nation has a bottomless well of self-deception. Given The Fragility of Political Identity, such deceptions perform an important and even vital function. Social life itself is a complex web of arrangements that live mainly in the minds of participants, ordering their lives in ways that they may not even realize. People develop their own sense of identity by imagining a set of collective virtues to which they can contribute and therefore see such qualities manifested in themselves. Unblemished reality is almost never kind to these illusions, but that means reality must be held at bay, at least to a certain extent, to preserve the hope of accomplishing anything good and worthwhile.

Friedman’s writings from Beirut could be just as likely to spur action than deter it, especially if they had come to believe that the PLO and Israel were the causes of the problem, rather than its symptoms. Upon arriving in Lebanon, it may have been less important that the Americans actually have a plan for fixing the country than reaffirming the belief America was the kind of country willing and able to solve such problems, especially after the horrors that already ensued. As one embassy staff member told Friedman, “the Marines were sent to Beirut because we felt guilty about what happened in the camps. We couldn’t say that of course” (191).

The presence of the Marines appeared to give Gemayel the cover to oppress his rivals, a policy similarly employed by American proxies like Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam and Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan. But unlike the earlier and latter instances, the Marines were not there with the numbers or mission to extend Gemayel’s position beyond what it could sustain on its own. When he overreached, and the Marines tragically bore a substantial cost, the Reagan administration refused to throw good money after bad. Shortly thereafter, Friedman reached a similar conclusion. He had been the chief foreign chronicler of the war, at least in English, and now his country would leave the Lebanese to their own devices and apply a ludicrously high standard of newsworthiness to any subsequent missives.