From Beirut to Jerusalem

In June 1984, Friedman moved from Beirut to Jerusalem. After confounding guards on both sides of the border by having golf clubs in his trunk, he settled into Israel and came to see it as an inverse of Lebanon, where acute political divisions were buried rather than confronted openly.

From its founding in 1948, Israel was supposed to be “a Jewish state, a democratic state, and a state that would be located in the historical homeland of the Jewish people” (253) from the Jordan to the Mediterranean. Its founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, was willing to cede the third goal, at least for the time being, especially once the UN proposed dividing the territory between Jewish and Arab states. Following the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank after the Six-Day War, it controlled the territory at the cost of democracy, with few rights allotted to those in the occupied territories.

Rather than settle this dilemma once and for all, Israeli leaders of both parties kicked the can down the road. This was in part due to the longtime hostility of their Arab neighbors, but even for left-wing politicians, the allure of a Jewish state covering all of Palestine was very difficult to resist.