Blame It All on Tribalism: From Beirut to Jerusalem Got It Backwards

I am not a big Thomas Friedman fan. So when I read his famous 1989 book From Beirut to Jerusalem before traveling to Lebanon this summer to work as a reporter, I was surprised to discover an accurate and still-relevant description of the political landscape of the Middle East in the 1980s. As Friedman describes the nearly ten years he spent in Lebanon and Israel, he shows an impressive empathy with the fears and hopes of people on all sides of the regions conflicts – not only in Beirut and Jerusalem, but also in Ramallah, Damascus and Tel Aviv.

Still, the book has serious shortcomings. They are often difficult to spot because Friedman is a persuasive writer and his analyses are grounded in the hard-to-refute gravity of first-hand experience. But the faults are most evident when Friedman tries to answer the fundamental questions of the book (implied more than articulated): Why is the Middle East so intractably married to conflict, and how can the United States offer more practical policy solutions to the strife?

In answering these questions – quite unsatisfactorily, as it turns out – Friedman relies on the typical methodology of a journalist. He witnesses many pivotal events first-hand. He interviews major political figures such as Yasser Arafat, activists like an American Jewish teacher in Palestine, as well as more common folk (often serving him in some capacity as taxi drivers, golf caddies and the like). While a journalist’s approach is necessarily more immediate and less scholarly than an academic’s, it is not Friedman’s information-gathering methodology that does him disservice in his attempt to answer his underlying questions about the nature of conflict. Rather, he is failed by his assumptions that superficial political realities directly mirror deeper causes, and that the political vocabulary of the region’s inhabitants today – tribe, sect and nation, for example – have a self-evident antiquity that need not be questioned.

A typical explanation that Friedman repeatedly offers to his question about the underlying cause of Middle East conflict is that the indigenous politics of the region are dictated by something called “Hama Rules”. Hama Rules are those that Friedman says the late Syrian president Hafez al-Assad observed when he brutally suppressed the Muslim Brotherhood in the Syrian city of Hama in 1982, which resulted in the death of an estimated 20,000 people, many if not most of them civilians. According to Friedman, Hama Rules mean viewing all battles as zero-sum games in which ultimate allegiance must be paid to tribe. He uses the Rules as a paradigm not just to explain Syria but also Lebanon, Israel and Palestine. Friedman cites three major “traditions” that define Hama Rules. The first, “tribe-like politics,” are inherited from their “purest original form among the Bedouin of the desert,” where allegiance to tribe and absolute retribution for transgressions were the only way to survive in a harsh environment. The second tradition is “authoritarianism,” which Friedman says is endemic to the Middle East because effective rulers of empires had to use it to tame the “primordial, tribe-like loyalties” that would have otherwise rent their empires apart. The final tradition is that of the nation-state, which, Friedman writes, European powers imposed on a region not organically predisposed to such organizations.

In Friedman’s account, Assad’s attack on Hama, though vicious, was also a logical response to indigenous Middle Eastern political realities. “[Assad] has managed to rule Syria longer than any man in the post-World War II era,” Friedman writes. “He has done so by always playing by his own rules …. Hama Rules.” According to Friedman, Assad understood that in the Middle East such force was necessary to impose the system of a nation state against the tide of “tribe-like loyalties” and “retrogressive … elements” like “Islamic fundamentalism”. [1]

Friedman in no way approves of the violence that Assad’s army wrought upon the innocent people of Hama. But he almost sympathetically contrasts Assad’s understanding of Hama Rules to the bumbling idealism of some Israeli and American leaders. The architects of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Friedman argues, believed Lebanon’s Christians to be kindred spirits who would form a durable alliance based on a similar understanding of the world. In so many words, Friedman says that what these Israeli idealists did not realize is that Lebanese Christian leaders were native sons of the Middle East who intuitively played by Hama Rules. For them, allegiances to groups other than tribe and sect were easily discarded friendships of convenience that had no deeper ties to sentiment. Thus, the alliances eventually proved weak.

Perhaps unintentionally, Friedman’s analyses elevate warmongers like Assad and then-Israeli defense minister Ariel Sharon – whom he also portrays as understanding Hama Rules – to the status of antiheros. The reader is left with the impression that these men are somber realists who have resigned themselves to the facts of Middle Eastern life – always tribal and inevitably brutal. They know that they must be willing to shed blood for their causes, and pursue their goals to their extreme conclusions. Their errors, in Friedman’s depiction, are more related to their fatalism or to strategic miscalculations than they are to other possible motivating factors. Thus, even as Friedman aggressively condemns the Israeli-Phalangist organized massacre at the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps – a story he broke for the Times – he also sees it as a logical extension of the Hama Rules.

The assumptions behind this explanation of the Middle East are deeply flawed. A quick analysis of Friedman’s definition of Hama Rules shows why.

Friedman takes it as a given that the fundamental state of Middle Eastern society is that of “tribe-like loyalties”, which are rooted in the biological and geographical realities of the region. His phrase describing these loyalties as being in their “purest original form among the Bedouin of the desert” sets off alarm bells in the head of any anthropologist trained in the last 25 years. In fact, the notion of a “pure original form” in a human society is grafting of language from the racial “sciences” of the 19^th and early 20^th Century – the same theories that were used to justify slavery, colonialism and apartheid, in turn. The description casts culture as an extension of race, and tribalism as a sort of pernicious gene in the DNA of Middle Easterners. The unspoken message of such a description is that there is something wrong with the Semitic people of the region. It is ironic because Friedman himself is Jewish, but the message is a deeply anti-Semitic one. It does not help at all that he describes tribalism as an inevitable product of environment, seemingly letting these stiff-minded Middle Easterners off the hook – their backwards mentalities are not, strictly speaking, their fault. Worse, this assumption of a quasi-genetic tribalism infects the rest of Friedman’s analysis. It’s also just plain wrong – through the ages, Middle Eastern societies have often been polyglot, multi-religious and multi-ethnic havens of cosmopolitanism, not primordial stews of tribalism.

Authoritarianism for Friedman is a natural reaction to tribalism. In support of this conclusion, he glosses over (in six pages) 1,400 years of Middle Eastern history – from the earliest Islamic dynasties to Saddam Hussein and al-Assad – to show that authoritarianism has always been the means to effect unity in the region. This summary brutally simplifies the complex histories of many peoples and religions into a single, manageable narrative that supports Friedman’s thesis. No region in the world has such a single-trajectory history, and Friedman’s account is so short on details that it is hard to know where to start in showing its inaccuracy. Suffice it to say here that through the centuries Arab and Ottoman leaders advanced countless innovations in governance that did not involve authoritarianism.

The point that Friedman should have started with in describing his Hama Rules – but which he mentions almost as an afterthought – is European powers’ imposition of nation-states on the Middle East. For Friedman, this has only aggravated the natural conflicts set up by the existing patterns of tribalism and authoritarianism. What Friedman does not consider – and what is closer to the truth – is that Europe’s political cartographers may have invented or amplified the patterns of tribalism and authoritarianism to justify and implement their projects of colonialism. Friedman simply continues this Western tradition. It is true that Lebanon, Syria, Israel and Palestine have no long-standing or innate existence as political entities. But the emphasis on tribalism as part of Middle Easterners’ essential character, and the use of authoritarianism as a means to suppress them, are tools that Europeans marshaled to great effect to impose their will.

“Hama Rules” may indeed be an observable, contemporary way of approaching politics in the Middle East. But in explaining the rules’ provenance, Friedman effectively observes the setting sun and concludes that it orbits the earth. His condescending understanding of Middle Eastern societies means that he casts the United States as a savior that can free Middle Easterners imprisoned by their own cultural backwardness: Middle Easterners have chose “passion” and “tribe” over “modernity” and “expanding economies”, Friedman writes, concluding that “Arabs and Israelis … desperately need someone to free them from the paralyzing past.”

It is little wonder, then, that 14 years after the publication of From Beirut to Jerusalem, Friedman supported the American invasion of Iraq. That debacle suggests that what Middle Easterners really need is liberation from colonialism disguised as benevolence, encoded in the lies of a fictitious history that some of our most respected journalists continue to promote.

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[1] As a matter of accuracy, it should be noted that Islamic “fundamentalism” is actually a more recent movement.