From Beirut to Jerusalem

Amidst all the violence Beirut could also be funny, the former sometimes contributing to the latter. Such absurdities made for good journalistic material, but Friedman and others found it difficult to verify information with no real authority in place. Yet the lack of order also allowed for nearly unprecedented access, provided they were brave enough to travel to the front lines or interview senior commanders. One American reporter even ripped the symbol of Hezbollah, a Shi’a militia, off of a poster and used it as credentials to gain access to areas they controlled. All journalists in Beirut faced danger, and Friedman felt particular anxiety as the only Jewish American. But overall he found Lebanon to be tolerant since “people there were quite used to living with lots of different religious communities” (56). Even the PLO was generally indifferent to his religion, although once Arafat’s spokesman strongly implied that Friedman’s Judaism biased his reporting.

Journalists were heavily reliant on locals to solve problems, and their point of convergence was the Commodore Hotel. Fixers offered information, delivered bribes in exchange for favors, and even helped provide alcohol after a Shi’a militia shut down the bar in 1984. The hotel maintained state-of-the-art communications technology, albeit at a high cost, and militants were as likely to talk to journalists in the hotel as in their own headquarters. Friedman found that the smaller PLO factions tended to be more willing to share information, but everything the militias said was questionable. They could deny responsibility for attacks they had undertaken or claim responsibility for attacks they had just learned about.

Friedman tried to “develop the access and intimacy with his subjects in order to gain real understanding of them” and also “remain disinterested and distant enough from his subjects to make critical assessments of them” (69). At the same time, unfavorable coverage could easily get a journalist killed, and once, when a Sunni militia demanded that Friedman cover a minor meeting between their leader and Italian officials, Friedman typed up a fake report which never actually ended up in the paper. In some cases, journalists withheld their names from articles or used attribution to create distance between themselves and negative reporters. Other times they buried stories out of fear. Pressure came from so many sides that there was no chance for journalists to be partisans for one camp against another. Journalists were kidnapped on a regular basis, and Friedman knew that the kidnappers were the people who did not talk to journalists, and therefore served as a reminder of the limits of his knowledge.

Friedman arrived at Hama, Syria, two months after the government under Hafez al-Assad (father of leader Bashar al-Assad) killed tens of thousands of people in the city. Friedman wanted to see if this terrible event was “an aberration, a one-time-only affair, or whether it could be traced to some more permanent features in the political landscape” (77). Hama is a large city north of Damascus and a longtime seat of Sunni Islam, making it a threat to the Alawite Shi’a Assad, who seized power in 1970. Sunnis are a large majority of the population, and the Muslim Brotherhood had been active in challenging the rule of Assad and his secular Ba’ath Party. After the Brotherhood attempted to assassinate Assad in June 1980 and, the very next day, the government massacred Brotherhood members in prison, violence erupted across the country between the government and the Brotherhood. After discovering a plot to overthrow the government, Assad decided to make an example of Hama. However, the first government forces to enter the city, who had planned on arresting a list of suspects, met with fierce resistance, and many were killed. Within two days, the army had called in reinforcements and began to fire indiscriminately upon the city and its population. Once the city was subdued and the Brotherhood commander killed, the army destroyed entire neighborhoods and tortured the survivors for information. By the time Friedman arrived, large portions of the city had seemingly vanished.

In trying to understand the Hama massacre, Friedman first identifies a tradition of “tribe-like politics” (87). The harsh conditions of the desert prompted the formation of small, tightly-knit communities engaged in ferocious competition with one another for limited resources. A reputation for violence was the most effective way to deter opposition, and a lack of brutality can easily be interpreted as weakness. The Alawite Assad accordingly needed to demonstrate to the Sunni Brotherhood the price of crossing him, because he “did not see the Sunni Muslim residents of Hama as part of his nation, or as fellow citizens. He saws them as members of an alien tribe” (91).

The next tradition Friedman identifies is authoritarianism, which derived from tribal patterns of patriarchal authority. Authoritarianism can be “gentle” (92), as with the Ottoman Empire, who conquered the area but were willing to share power with local authorities. Others ruled with an iron fist, prompting a later tradition of Islamic scholarship to justify such rule as the cost of social order. Friedman places monarchies like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Morocco in the former category, and the Arab republics like Iraq, Syria, and Yemen (then divided between north and south) in the latter category (countries that have become all the more dangerous with the advent of weapons of mass destruction).

The third tradition is the modern nation-state, a European import imposed on the region after World War I. Drawing boundaries with little regard for cultural conditions on the ground, they further brought in institutions like political parties and constitutions that have no place in Arab history. Rulers like Assad or Saddam Hussein in Iraq are thus trying to establish modern states, although they typically do so with the help of their fellow tribesmen. The most successful leaders are “effortlessly switching from tribal chief to brutal autocrat to modernizing President with the blink of an eye” (103).