From Beirut to Jerusalem

Preface to the 2024 Edition

It has been forty-five years since I got off a Middle East Airlines flight at Beirut International Airport to start my career as a foreign correspondent in the Lebanese capital. In May 1979, I began working as the number-two reporter for United Press International at the age of twenty-five—a year after having been hired by UPI on Fleet Street. I would work for UPI in Beirut until 1981, when I was hired away by The New York Times and made its Beirut bureau chief in 1982, before being transferred from Beirut to Jerusalem in 1984.

What a good title for a book …

From Beirut to Jerusalem was meant to tell the story of Lebanese and Arab politics—as seen from my perch in Beirut—and Israeli politics and Israeli–Palestinian relations—as seen from my porch in Jerusalem—as well as America’s interactions with both, across a decade. Readers have told me that the book identified some enduring themes about the peoples of the region—and their relationships with each other and with America—that are still relevant, nearly a half century later. As an author, that makes me proud. But as a friend of so many in this region, it has left me perplexed and depressed that so much in this book from a bygone era is still illuminating today’s headlines. It suggests that way too few things have changed for the better in way too few places in the region.

As I write this new preface, the Middle East stands at a crossroads. The war between Israel and Hamas that began on October 7, 2023, with the vicious Hamas surprise attack on Israeli border communities and military bases, and the crushing Israeli response to dismantle Hamas that has left over 30,000 Hamas fighters and Gazan civilians dead, both reflects and underscores this situation.

The Gaza war, which was launched by Hamas not to secure a two-state solution but to prevent one, has brought this whole Palestinian–Israeli struggle back even further than 1979, to 1947. That is to say, to the primordial core of the conflict over the whole piece of territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River—and not how it will be shared but about who will own it all.

In that sense, we are back to a moment before the whole peace process era was kicked off by the Oslo Peace Accords, signed in 1993. Today, there are more people than ever on both sides—and among their supporters globally—who believe either that Israel in its entirety is an illegitimate colonial enterprise and must be replaced by a Palestinian state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, or that for religious-nationalist or security reasons Israeli Jews must entirely control the same area. Whether these mutually reinforcing maximalists are the majority on both sides is impossible to tell, but they have more energy today than at any time since I arrived in Beirut.

In that sense, we are back to the moment when this book was written—when Palestinians and Arabs did not dare meet with Israelis publicly and rarely even privately. When we lived in Beirut we called Israel Dixie rather than Israel. I never thought we’d find ourselves back at that divide, but back there is where we have gone. I hope this U-turn is just temporary—but so much depends on how the Gaza war ends. All I know is that over the course of the last forty-plus years, so many of my Arab and Israeli friends have gone from not talking to each other, to talking to each other, to not talking to each other again. That is tragic and disappointing for everyone.

But this need not be the end of the story. Obvious or not, a lot has also changed for the better in the region, in terms of Israeli–Palestinian–Arab relations and Arab–Arab relations and in the internal politics of many actors. Today profound forces of inclusion are also knitting the region together, and connecting it with the world at large, in more ways and from more directions. When I first wrote this book, I never dreamt that one day there would be restaurants in the United Arab Emirates called Kosher Arabia and the Kosher Place, serving Israeli tourists.

That is why I insist that as I write this new preface, while it may be a cliché, it’s still true: this region is either going backward, way back, but with more potent weapons that can tear apart nation states—or it is going to leap forward, way forward, with a totally different kind of peace process and vision of regional integration and inclusion. But the seemingly stable, no-war, no-peace status quo that existed between Israelis and Palestinians before 6:30 a.m. on October 7, 2023, is no longer available. To put it another way: it’s either going to be 1947, but with more lethal weapons that will enable the past to bury the future—or 2024, with much more creative ideas for enabling the future to bury the past and propel the region into the twenty-first century.

Both the forces of resistance and the forces of inclusion are now stronger than ever, which is why the struggle between them now is as ferocious as the outcome is uncertain.

This trend is not isolated to the Middle East. Indeed, as I write these pages in the spring of 2024, if you asked me to look out my window and define the biggest geopolitical struggles in the world today, I would sum it up as follows: Ukraine is trying to join the West and Israel is trying to join the Arab East—and Russia, with Iran’s help, tried to stop the first from happening; and Hamas, with Iran’s help, tried to stop the second.

While the Middle East and Ukraine may look like two very different battle fronts, they are more intertwined than one might think at first glance. Indeed, taken together, they are the most visible manifestations of a titanic geopolitical struggle underway today between two competing networks of nations and non-state actors, over whose values and interests will dominate the post–post–cold war world we’ve now entered—following the relatively stable Pax Americana/globalization era that was ushered in by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet bloc, America’s chief cold war rival.

This new struggle is between what I call the Resistance Network—dedicated to preserving top-down, dictatorial regimes that justify the militarization of their societies and their own autocratic, often thieving, rulers by courting enemies outside and inside; and the Inclusion Network—a loose alliance of nations that are not always democratic but tend to treat their people with decency and are focused on enabling them to realize their full potential, in part by connecting, trading, and aligning with like-minded nations near and far. Which of these networks prevails will determine the character of this post–post–cold war epoch. Think Russia, China, and Iran and its non-state proxies versus the United States and the European Union and all those who want to connect with the two of them to create greater opportunities for their citizens to work, learn, and play.

Ukraine is trying to break away from the choking Russian sphere of influence to become part of the European Union network, a development that would make the dream of a whole and free Europe virtually complete. Vladimir Putin is trying to block it, because he knows that if a Slavic Ukraine—with its vast engineering talent, giant land army, and rich agricultural breadbasket—joins the European web, his walled, kleptocratic, Slavic autocracy will be more isolated and delegitimized than ever.

Alas, at the time of the Hamas attack, Israel was trying to forge a normalized relationship with Saudi Arabia, which is the gateway to the Arab Middle East states and Muslim states in South Asia with whom Israel still does not have relations. But it’s not only Israelis who wanted to see El Al planes and Israeli technologists landing in Riyadh. Saudi Arabia, under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, itself aspires to become the hub of a giant web of economic relations that would tie Asia, Africa, Europe, the Arab world—and Israel—into a network with itself at the center. His vision is a kind of European Union of the Middle East, with Saudi Arabia playing the anchor the way Germany does with the EU.

Iran and Hamas wanted to stop this for joint and separate reasons. Jointly, Hamas and Iran knew that if Israel normalized relations with a modernizing Saudi Arabia, building upon its new ties with the Abraham Accord countries—the UAE, Morocco, and Bahrain—the balance of power between the secularizing, modernizing, pluralizing, more market-driven network in the region and the more closed, anti-pluralizing, political-Islam-inspired network could tip decisively against both Hamas and its patron, Iran, isolating them both. Hamas had an added concern—one, it must be acknowledged, that was shared by most Palestinians, not only those in Hamas. They worried that if Israel normalized relations with Saudi Arabia on easy terms, Palestinians would lose crucial backing for their cause. It is not that Hamas favored a future defined by a two-state solution. It does not and did not. But those Palestinians who did favor two states did not want the Saudis to give away the huge prize of relations with Israel for free. In that sense, the interests of Palestinians who favor and oppose a two-state solution overlapped in wanting to stop the deal—one to get a better price and the other to bury it altogether.

As this new preface goes to print, it is impossible to know whether the Resistance Network or the Inclusion Network will triumph in the European and Middle Eastern theaters and elsewhere. But I do know one thing for certain: where, when, and how these particular networks were born. You need to go back to 1979, when the groundwork for both of these networks was laid.

Yes, when I first arrived in Beirut that year, little did I know that the struggle between these two networks was being set in motion. Who knew that as I was banging away on my big, old, black typewriter at the UPI bureau in Beirut and filing my stories by telex to New York and London, I was participating in writing the first draft of a whole new phase in world history that would begin in 1979. There are vintage years in wine and there are vintage years in history. And the year I showed up in Beirut—1979—by pure coincidence turned out to be a Châteaux Margaux, one of those vintages that lingers on the palate, or in the news pages, long after the bottle has been emptied.

How so? For starters, on January 16, 1979, after an increasingly widening and violent uprising by Iran’s poor and more traditional classes, university students, Shiite religious leaders, and bazaar merchants, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, quit his country and went into exile forever. Just over two weeks later, on February 1, 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini flew in from Paris, effectively taking over the country. On April 1, 1979, he initiated the process of turning the Persian heartland, long ruled by the secular Shah and his family, into a formal Islamic republic, run by clerics, that would attempt to export its revolution across the Middle East and the entire Muslim world. As Khomeini once remarked, the 1979 revolution was not about the price of watermelons.

That was a very important statement that remains true to this day: the Islamic Republic of Iran is not just a government, looking after the traditional geopolitical interests of Iran, but a profoundly aggressive ideological and revolutionary movement looking to reshape the region in its image. It is not just there to fight inflation in watermelon prices. The U.S.– Iran cold war that broke out in 1979—with Iran trying to drive the U.S. out of the region and make itself the regional hegemon, and the U.S. acting to hold its ground and protect its allies—has divided the Middle East ever since.

Who knew that a similar, but failed, revolution would convulse the Sunni world ten months later? On November 20, 1979, a group of heavily armed Islamist militants in Saudi Arabia—led by the charismatic but puritanical Juhayman al-Otaybi—burst into the Masjid al-Haram, Islam’s holiest site in Islam’s holiest city of Mecca, and called for purifying Saudi Arabia of all modern, secular, and Westernizing influences and for overthrowing the al-Saud ruling family that was slowly but steadily ushering in those changes. Because UPI had no bureau in Riyadh or Jeddah, and the Saudi government tightly controlled information coming out of international wire services like the AP and AFP, I had to scrounge around for information every day by sifting through the notoriously unreliable and highly politicized Arabic newspapers from the Gulf.

It would take years before the full story came out. On the fortieth anniversary of the takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, BBC.com produced a retrospective entitled The Mosque Siege That Changed the Course of Saudi History. It is as good a summary as one can find of what may be the least covered but most impactful news story in the second half of the twentieth century. Everyone knows about the Iranian revolution; virtually no one to this day knows about its failed but still hugely important sister revolution in Saudi Arabia.

In the early hours of 20 November 1979, some 50,000 faithful from all over the world gathered for dawn prayers in the huge courtyard surrounding the sacred Kaaba in Mecca, Islam’s holiest place, the BBC report noted.

Among them mingled 200 men led by a charismatic 40-year-old preacher called Juhayman al-Utaybi.

As the imam finished leading prayers, Juhayman and his followers pushed him aside and seized the microphone.

They had placed closed coffins in the centre of the yard, a traditional act of seeking blessings for the recently deceased. But when the coffins were opened, they revealed handguns and rifles, which were quickly distributed among the men.

One of them began to read a prepared speech: Fellow Muslims, we announce today the coming of the Mahdi … who shall reign with justice and fairness on Earth after it has been filled with injustice and oppression.

The Sunni Muslim religious extremists who took over the Grand Mosque, the BBC noted, belonged to an ultraconservative Muslim association called al-Jamaa al-Salafiya al-Muhtasiba (JSM), which opposed what it perceived as the degeneration of social and religious values in Saudi Arabia. At that time, following the sudden rise in oil prices that began in 1973, Saudi Arabia was awash in oil money and, as a result, the BBC explained, the country was gradually transforming into a consumerist society. Cars and electrical goods were becoming commonplace, the country was urbanising, and in some regions men and women began to mix in public. But the JSM’s members continued to live an austere life, proselytising, studying the Koran and the hadiths, and adhering to the tenets of Islam as defined by the Saudi religious establishment.

The Saudi police and National Guard turned out to be no match for the highly motivated and well-armed religious zealots, who burrowed themselves deep into the catacombs of the ancient mosque. The Saudi government had to appeal to French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing for help, and he sent a team of French security experts, who devised a plan to inject gas into the basement of the mosque where the rebels were hiding. It eventually worked: they were flushed out, arrested, and very soon after, decapitated in public.

But that was not the end of the story. It was actually just the beginning— a whole new beginning for Saudi Arabia and the Arab-Muslim world. The Saudi ruling family responded to the takeover and to the allegations that it had strayed from the core tenets of Islam with a panic that ended up being felt around the world. They forged a new bargain with their ultraconservative Saudi Muslim clergy that could be summarized along the lines of Let our family stay in power and we’ll give you a freer hand in setting social norms, relations between the sexes, and education, both religious and secular, inside Saudi Arabia.

One of the things the rebels demanded, for instance, was that the Saudi government remove all female newscasters from TV. So, after 1979, the ruling al-Sauds banned female newscasters for roughly the next three decades. A senior Saudi minister once shared with me pictures and YouTube videos of Saudi Arabia in the 1950s: women without their hair or faces covered, wearing skirts and walking with men in public, as well as concerts and cinemas. Saudi Arabia was still a traditional and modest place back then—but it was slowly heading toward more openness, more gender parity, and more personal freedom from religious dictates. It all went into reverse after 1979.

Not only did Saudi Arabia embark on this ultrareligious, puritanical path at home but it exported it to mosques and madrassas across the Arab and Muslim worlds. In the process, it changed the face of Islam from Morocco to London to Jakarta—as so many more women began to cover and so many clerics preached this austere Saudi version of Sunni Islam.

A few weeks after U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan in the wake of September 11, 2001, I visited the Pakistani frontier city of Peshawar, a hotbed of Islamic radicalism. I noted in my November 13, 2001, column that I stopped at the famous Darul Uloom Haqqania, the biggest Islamic school in Pakistan, with 2,800 live-in students. Then Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar had attended this madrassa as a younger man. My Pakistani interpreter and I were allowed to observe a class of young boys who sat on the floor, practicing their rote learning of the Koran from texts perched on wooden holders. The air in the Koran class was so thick and stale, I wrote, that it felt as if you could have cut it into blocks. The teacher asked an eight-year-old boy to chant a Koranic verse for us, which he did with the elegance of an experienced muezzin. I asked another student, an Afghan refugee, Rahim Kunduz, age twelve, what his reaction was to the September 11 attacks, and he said: Most likely the attack came from Americans inside America. I am pleased that America has had to face pain, because the rest of the world has tasted its pain.

A framed sign on the wall said this room was a gift of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Indeed, it was.

If you put these two political-religious upheavals in Iran and Saudi Arabia together, you could say that in 1979, in effect, the Vatican of the Shiite Muslim world and the Vatican of the Sunni Muslim world were both seized by fundamentalists. And though the al-Saud ruling family was able to hold on to power by bending to the religious winds, while the Shah of Iran was not, the impact of the two together was profound: Islam lost its brakes in 1979, Mamoun Fandy, a Middle East expert in London, once said to me.

And because, as noted, oil prices were surging at the time, these two powerhouses were able to compete to be the most authentic, conservative carrier of Islam with more fervor—and more cash—than ever before. Eventually, notes Lawrence Wright in The Looming Tower, his history of Al-Qaeda, Saudi Arabia, which constitutes only 1 percent of the world Muslim population, would support 90 percent of the expenses of the entire faith, overriding other traditions of Islam.

None of this was good for the forces of inclusion. Indeed, the fundamentalist fervor got amplified to a whole new level when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Arab and Muslim mujahideen fighters flocked to the cause of resistance, financed by Saudi Arabia, with American encouragement. This helped to tilt both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia in much more Islamist directions, as young men from both countries went off to fight the jihad against the godless Russians and then came home and reinjected that fervor back into their mosques and communities. It is no wonder that 9/11 was largely a coproduction of Pakistani and Saudi militants, brought together by one of the most fervent fighters in Afghanistan: the Saudi Osama bin Laden.

One reason oil money kept flowing into Saudi Arabia and Iran was because of something else that happened in 1979. The accident in the Unit 2 reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Middletown, Pennsylvania, on March 28, 1979, involved a cooling system malfunction, which caused part of the reactor’s core to melt, releasing some radioactive gases. The fact that the release was tiny, quickly contained, and didn’t harm anyone did not matter. As a result of the Three Mile Island accident, virtually all new building of nuclear power plants in America was halted for nearly four decades. This only reinforced our addiction to fossil fuels—coal, oil, and gas—for generating power and transportation.

But even as our addiction and the Afghan jihad strengthened reactionary forces in the Middle East, a big, pathbreaking inclusive event unfolded. On March 26, 1979—after several years of negotiations at Camp David and elsewhere, and following Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s breakthrough visit to Israel in 1977—the U.S., Israel, and Egypt formally signed the Egyptian–Israel peace treaty. This was a big leap forward for the Inclusion Network. It broke down the walls between Israel and the Arab world, paving the way for the Jordan–Israel peace treaty and the Oslo agreement between Israelis and Palestinians.

These parties were fused not only by the U.S-assisted pursuit of peace but also by the pursuit of trade, free markets, globalization, and increasing connectivity with the U.S. and Europe. They looked to the West as a model of emulation, not the Soviet Union or later Russia. And for good reason. The European Union, as we know it today, would not be officially forged until 1993. But the European unification process accelerated in 1979, when European citizens from the nine members of what was then called the European Economic Community for the first time directly elected members of a single European Parliament, making the EU look and feel more like a United States of Europe. Before that election, members were delegated by national parliaments. The directly elected members held their first parliament session in Strasbourg on July 17, 1979. By the way, Pope John Paul II made his first papal visit to Poland in 1979, having become pope in 1978, which helped encourage the dismantling of the empire of resistance and exclusion that was the Soviet Union.

If the 1979 Egypt–Israel treaty helped birth the Inclusion Network in the northern part of the Middle East, another event that year helped do so in the southern end. In that momentous year, Sheikh Rashid ibn Saeed Al Maktoum—the ruler of the port city of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates—completed a project called Jebel Ali Port. It was inaugurated by Queen Elizabeth II on February 26, 1979. Jebel Ali would eventually grow into the world’s largest man-made harbor and is now the world’s ninth-busiest port. This propelled Dubai and its neighbor Abu Dhabi into global hubs that would connect the Arab world—through trade, tourism, services, shipping, investments, and world-class airlines—with almost every part of the globe at a speed, depth, and breadth never seen before in the Middle East. This would become a powerful engine of inclusion, creating new connections within the Arab world and between the Arab world and the rest of the globe. Today, Dubai-based Emirates airlines is the world’s largest international airline. It flies to 158 different cities in eighty-five countries.

Dubai is not a democracy and does not aspire to be. It aspires instead to be a place of decency where Arabs, first and foremost, can be Arab, modern, pluralistic, and globalized and can embrace a moderate interpretation of Islam—fostering a more integrated Middle East around those core values. Dubai is ruled with an iron fist when it comes to politics and an open hand when it comes to business and tourism. Its formula incorporates a relentless commitment to economic diversification and talent recruitment and a core belief that the more people of different faiths and nationalities learn to live, work, and collaborate together, the more peaceful and prosperous the region and the world will be. The emirate has been rightly criticized for its harsh treatment of manual laborers from South Asia; and, at the same time, it has been a magnet for educated South Asians looking for economic opportunity to build their nest egg.

Saudi Arabia Reverses 1979

When I published From Beirut to Jerusalem in 1989, the forces of resistance and inclusion were at a stalemate, at best. Lebanon’s long civil war was finally winding down, but autocratic Syria was effectively in control of the country. The devastating Iran–Iraq conflict had come to an end, with both militant regimes still entrenched. In the 1990s, after this book was first published, the Oslo Accords promised a fresh start—but the 9/11 attacks, the second intifada, the unilateral Israeli withdrawal from south Lebanon followed by Hezbollah filling the vacuum and, most of all, the violent disorder that flowed from the U.S. overthrow of Saddam Hussein (which I supported because I thought it would lead to democracy in the Middle East, not because I was convinced that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction that had to be eliminated) took a heavy toll. Amidst all the turmoil, though, somehow the Inclusion Network actually strengthened. This was due to three surprising, unexpected events beginning in the early 2000s. I had front-row seats for all three.

The first was the move by Saudi Arabia away from its 1979 fundamentalist turn. It started a few months after 9/11, in which fifteen of the nineteen hijackers turned out to have been Saudis. September 11, 2001, was in a way the culmination—or the nadir—of all the jihadist ideas that the Saudi-funded mosques and madrassas had pumped into Arab and Muslim youth since 1979.

I was one angry columnist after 9/11, and I used my column repeatedly and pointedly to blame post-1979 Saudi Arabia for having contributed to the ideological environment that fueled the hijackers. At the same time, ever the optimist, I tried to think about how certain forces of reconciliation might be strengthened following the tragedy.

To show solidarity with the people of New York following 9/11, the organizers of the Davos World Economic Forum decided to hold their next annual confab at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in Manhattan, instead of in the usual Swiss mountain resort.

In January 2002, I attended the event but arrived with an idea stirring in my head. In those days I used to write columns in the form of letters to foreign leaders, composed in the name of the U.S. president. I played at being Bill Clinton writing to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak or Syrian President Hafez al-Assad. I would make up these letters in my head, but they always had a large grain of truth based on my reporting—and so they would cause a lot of trouble, as foreign leaders assumed that they had been dictated by Clinton himself.

I had never done a letter impersonating President George W. Bush before, but after 9/11, I thought to write a letter from Bush calling on the leaders of the Arab world to offer a peace deal to Israel—full peace and normalization in exchange for full withdrawal from Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. With that idea in my head, I went off to Davos-at-the-Waldorf, where I ran into Amr Moussa, the Secretary-General of the Arab League.

I asked him, Amr, I am thinking of writing this column from Bush to Arab leaders—what do you think? He said, Do it.

Then I ran into André Azoulay, a prominent Moroccan Jew, with a long, close relationship to Morocco’s royal family. I asked André what he thought of the column idea. He said, Do it.

So, on February 6, 2002, I did it. I wrote a column that began:

Memo to: President Hosni Mubarak, Crown Prince Abdullah, King Abdullah, President Bashar al-Assad and the rest of the Arab League

From: President Bush

Dear Friends: You’ve all warned me privately about the foul wind of anti-Americanism that is now blowing through your region, fed by the perception that I’ve bowed out of Mideast diplomacy and given a blank check to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel. So let me explain to you exactly my position: I believe your problems with us grow from a misreading of Arab-Israeli history. You think somehow that if we just squeezed the Israelis they would roll over and do whatever the Palestinians demanded. You’re wrong.

The relevant balance of power is not between us and Israel, but between you and Israel. All the peace breakthroughs happened not when we threatened Israelis, but when you enticed them. That is, when Arab leaders—Anwar el-Sadat, King Hussein and even Yasir Arafat in Oslo—made clear to the Israeli silent majority that they were interested in real peace in return for real Israeli withdrawal, they got exactly what they wanted from Israel …

You have an Arab League summit set for March in Lebanon. I suggest your summit issue one simple resolution: The 22 members of the Arab League say to Israel that in return for a complete Israeli withdrawal to the June 4, 1967, lines—in the West Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem and on the Golan Heights—we offer full recognition of Israel, diplomatic relations, normalized trade and security guarantees. Full peace with all 22 Arab states for full withdrawal.

Since you’ve all told me privately that this is your position, why not make it public and get the benefit? This is how to bury Osama bin Laden and define for the world who the Arabs really are. If you can’t take that risk, why should I?

While I was working on the column, I was approached by Adel Al-Jubeir, then the spokesman for the Saudi embassy in Washington, D.C., who would later become foreign minister. Adel asked me if I had ever been to Saudi Arabia, and I told him that I had been many times—but only for a day or two—while covering Secretary of State James A. Baker III. Well, he said, since I was writing a lot about Saudi Arabia post-9/11—and very critically—would I like to come and actually spend some time with real Saudis? I figured, why not?

So, a couple of days after the Bush column ran, I flew over to Riyadh. I traveled to the Empty Quarter of the desert with the minister of oil at the time; I sat with Saudi students; I met with doctors, nurses, and journalists and academics and even religious leaders. They were not easy conversations. I was very blunt about Saudi Arabia’s role in feeding the ideology that inspired 9/11.

After a week of these difficult conversations, Adel told me that I was invited for dinner by Crown Prince Abdullah, who was then the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia because his older half brother, King Fahd, was incapacitated. Abdullah invited me to his horse farm outside of Riyadh, along with my host, Adel. Around midnight, after a buffet dinner groaning with Arabic dishes and shared with lots of princes and businessmen, Abdullah invited Adel and me back to his study.

I began by urging Abdullah to consider my then-radical idea of getting the whole Arab League to offer Israel full peace for full withdrawal—to begin some healing after 9/11. He looked at me with mock astonishment and said, Have you broken into my desk?

No, I said, wondering what he was talking about.

The reason I ask, he explained, is that this is exactly the idea I had in mind—full withdrawal from all the occupied territories, in accord with U.N. resolutions, including in Jerusalem, for full normalization of relations. I have drafted a speech along those lines. My thinking was to deliver it before the Arab summit and try to mobilize the entire Arab world behind it. The speech is written, and it is in my desk. But I changed my mind about delivering it, he said, after a recent West Bank crackdown by Ariel Sharon.

Though I tell you, the crown prince added, if I were to pick up the phone now and ask someone to read you the speech, you will find it virtually identical to what you are talking about. I wanted to find a way to make clear to the Israeli people that the Arabs don’t reject or despise them. But the Arab people do reject what their leadership is now doing to the Palestinians, which is inhumane and oppressive. And I thought of this as a possible signal to the Israeli people.

He concluded: Let me say to you that the speech is written, and it is still in my drawer.

For the next three hours we talked about this idea, until about 3:00 a.m., when I got up and said something to the effect of, Your highness, you need to take this idea out of your desk and share it publicly. I begged him, Let me write up your proposal as an on-the-record interview.

With Adel translating, Abdullah responded: No, you just say that this is something I am thinking about.

I said, No, I think you should say it.

He said, No, you should say it.

I said, No, you should say it.

Eventually, he agreed to sleep on it.

Midmorning the next day, Adel called to say that I could put the crown prince’s words on the record.

So I called my editor at the time, Gail Collins, and asked her for a little extra space on Sunday, which she jumped at. We ran Abdullah’s words in my February 17, 2002, column, headlined An Intriguing Signal from the Saudi Crown Prince.

All hell broke loose in the Arab world and Israel after the column came out, and Arab leaders quickly decided that the proposal would be the subject of the next Arab League summit in Beirut in March.

On March 27, virtually all the Arab leaders gathered in the Lebanese capital, to adopt and embellish Abdullah’s basic proposal. They added conditions on the right of return of refugees, and on March 28 approved what became known as the Arab Peace Initiative—calling for normal relations between the Arab states and Israel in return for Israeli withdrawal from all the territories back to the lines of June 4, 1967. It was the first, and remains the only, comprehensive Arab peace overture to Israel approved by the Arab League, including even the ever-intransigent Syrian regime.

I honestly thought back then that this could be the beginning of the end of the conflict. But it never went anywhere. Neither the Israelis nor the Bush Administration seized the moment. How could Israel not have jumped right on it?

Well, a lot had to do with what happened in Israel on the evening of March 27, 2002, right after the opening of the Arab League summit. I’ll let CNN tell you what happened that night:

NETANYA, Israel (CNN)—A suicide bomber killed at least 19 people and injured 172 at a popular seaside hotel Wednesday, the start of the Jewish religious holiday of Passover. At least 48 of the injured were described as severely wounded.

The bombing occurred in a crowded dining room at the Park Hotel, a coastal resort, during the traditional meal marking the start of Passover …

The Palestinian group Hamas, an Islamic fundamentalist group labeled a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department, claimed responsibility for the attack.

Yes, this is how Hamas welcomed the first pan-Arab peace initiative calling for full Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 lines and the creation of a Palestinian state next to Israel. Israel responded to the Hamas terrorist attack by besieging Yasir Arafat in his office in Ramallah, and everything just went downhill from there.

While I always understood that the Saudi peace effort was meant to divert attention from the role of Saudi citizens in 9/11, it was, nevertheless, the start of the country’s reorientation away from the fundamentalist turn it took in 1979, and this bolstered the Inclusion Network in the region.

But this network would get its second big boost another decade and a half later, as the center of gravity in the Arab world steadily shifted from Egypt, Syria, and Iraq to the Arabian Gulf. In Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in particular, a new generation of leaders began to build their legitimacy with their people not on the old formula of resistance—judge me based on how much I resist Israel, resist the Americans, resist the Sunnis, resist the Shiites, resist whomever—but instead on inclusion and resilience—judge me based on how much I connect us to the wider world and how much more resilient I make our society through better education, gender equality, infrastructure, skills, and even environmental protections.

The strongest advocate of this view was the UAE’s leader, Mohammed bin Zayed, who, with his ambassador in Washington, D.C., Yousef al-Otaiba, were the key Arab players in forging the Abraham Accords with Israel. At the initial announcement in August 2020, President Trump tweeted that it was a HUGE breakthrough, and for this one time I had to agree with him. By year’s end, the normalizing of Israel’s relations with the UAE, Morocco, Bahrain, and putatively Sudan was a giant leap forward for the forces of inclusion.

While the Saudis were not part of the deal, they informally blessed it by, for the first time, permitting Israeli and other countries’ civilian passenger jets to fly over the kingdom on their way from Israel to Bahrain and the UAE—and later to all of Asia. This meant a huge savings of time and jet fuel for Israel’s national carrier, El Al. The Abraham Accords were not a cold peace, like Camp David. Between October 2020, when commercial flights between Israel and the UAE were inaugurated, and March 2021, 130,000 Israelis visited the UAE. In 2023, the UAE government completed the Abrahamic Family House, consisting of an ornate mosque, a church, and a synagogue—and an educational center—on Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi, to promote religious tolerance, pluralism, and inclusion.

And then there was a third, totally unanticipated event boosting the Inclusion Network: the rise of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, also known as MBS. In 2015, Saudi Arabia’s then King Abdullah died and his brother Salman became king. Salman quickly appointed his favorite son, Mohammed, to several senior positions that eventually landed him as crown prince, and de facto ruler in the place of his ailing father.

I have interviewed MBS several times during his meteoric rise. Like all of these Middle Eastern leaders, he’s complicated. He is capable of acts of incredible evil and stupidity—his intelligence services brutally murdered and dismembered the reformist Saudi journalist and regime critic Jamal Khashoggi, for what amounted to nothing but mild criticism of a government that Khashoggi argued should be more open to outside inputs. In any truly decent society, he should have been embraced.

And yet, the same leader who took full responsibility for Khashoggi’s grisly death also assumed full responsibility for ordering up the most significant social and economic reform in the Arabian Gulf ever—a set of bold initiatives, long overdue, that MBS’s aged predecessors and cousins never had the guts to implement. I am talking about a set of reforms that has woken Saudi Arabia up from its long slumber since 1979, breaking the hold of the conservative clergy over the country’s social and religious affairs, and beginning to liberate the country’s women to not only drive but travel freely, get rid of lousy husbands, and, maybe most importantly, participate fully in the workplace. Considering Saudi Arabia’s vast oil wealth and central place in Islam, these reforms have had an impact on Muslim communities across the globe—including Iran, right next door.

After MBS announced that Saudi women could attend sporting events, Iran allowed women to attend a World Cup qualifying match. The October 10, 2019, AP story noted: Women have been banned from many sporting events in Iran since 1981, during the early years of the country’s Islamic Revolution. Iran is the world’s last nation to bar women from soccer matches. Saudi Arabia recently began letting women see games.

Because I covered Saudi Arabia’s radical right turn in 1979 after the Mecca mosque takeover, I appreciated MBS’s reforms, in a way that many other journalists and diplomats probably did not. Which was why, when he invited me for an interview in 2017, shortly after he had locked up a host of Saudi businesspeople and government officials in the Ritz-Carlton hotel to investigate them for corruption, I focused on something else in my November 23 column:

This anticorruption drive is only the second-most unusual and important initiative launched by M.B.S., I wrote at the time.

The first is to bring Saudi Islam back to its more open and modern orientation—whence it diverted in 1979. That is, back to what M.B.S. described to a recent global investment conference here as a moderate, balanced Islam that is open to the world and to all religions and all traditions and peoples. …

A lawyer by training, who rose up in his family’s education-social welfare foundation, M.B.S. is on a mission to bring Saudi Islam back to the center. He has not only curbed the authority of the once feared Saudi religious police to berate a woman for not covering every inch of her skin, he has also let women drive. And unlike any Saudi leader before him, he has taken the hard-liners on ideologically. As one U.S.-educated 28-year-old Saudi woman told me: M.B.S. uses a different language. He says, ‘We are going to destroy extremism.’ He’s not sugar-coating. That is reassuring to me that the change is real.

In that interview, MBS instructed me: Do not write that we are ‘reinterpreting’ Islam—we are ‘restoring’ Islam to its origins—and our biggest tools are the Prophet’s practices and [daily life in] Saudi Arabia before 1979. At the time of the Prophet Muhammad, he argued, there were musical theaters, there was mixing between men and women, there was respect for Christians and Jews in Arabia. The first commercial judge in Medina was a woman! So if the Prophet embraced all of this, MBS asked, Do you mean the Prophet was not a Muslim?

As one middle-aged Saudi banker said to me on that trip: My generation was held hostage by 1979. I know now that my kids will not be hostages. Added a twenty-eight-year-old Saudi woman social entrepreneur: Ten years ago when we talked about music in Riyadh it meant buying a CD—now it is about the concert next month and what ticket are you buying and which of your friends will go with you.

Seven years later, I have no hesitation saying that what is happening in Saudi Arabia around its women and youth and governance generally is the most important social-religious upheaval in the region. If you have not been to Saudi Arabia in the last couple of years, you have not been to Saudi Arabia. When I visited Riyadh at the end of 2017 to interview MBS, Saudi women were not permitted to drive or attend soccer games. When I returned in 2023, after Covid diminished, not only were women behind the wheel, but the first Saudi female astronaut, Rayyanah Barnawi, had just helped drive a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center up to the International Space Station. There was also a Saudi women’s professional soccer league.

A 2021 report by the Brookings Institution noted that in 2018, the share of Saudi women who had a job or were actively looking for one was 19.7 percent of the adult population of women with Saudi citizenship. It added, In the years before that, the rate was much lower. By 2022, in the wake of MBS’s reforms, it had grown to 37 percent—basically doubling in four years.

I found it quite symbolic that in 2021, MBS’s Islamic Affairs minister ordered all mosques to lower the volume on their loudspeakers, saying families had been complaining that competing speakers were keeping their children awake, as Reuters reported. Who’d have thought that would happen in 1979?

In the first week of June 2023, I traveled from Doha to Dubai to Tel Aviv to Amman, Jordan, to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Here is how I began my column on June 6, 2023:

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia—Your final destination is Tel Aviv?

I’ve been a reporter in the Middle East since 1979, and those are six words I’d never heard in the place where I was standing about the place where I was going.

I was checking in to fly from Doha, Qatar, to Tel Aviv, via Dubai. It was a once inconceivable connection, and now it tripped off the tongue of the FlyDubai agent at Doha International Airport with the same nonchalance as if she were asking if I was flying to Cairo via Riyadh.

My first instinct was to ask her: Could you please keep your voice down?

After all, many of us based in Beirut as reporters in the late 1970s didn’t even use the word Israel. We referred to it only as Dixie—the region south of Lebanon. Now the airport codes DIA, DXB and TLV were fused together on my luggage for all to see.

A few days later, I hopscotched to three more cities that suddenly seemed closer than ever: early breakfast in Tel Aviv; lunch in Amman, Jordan; and late dinner in the Saudi Arabian capital, Riyadh.

This journey was unlike anything I’d ever experienced in a region that has long been my second home, and it allowed me to grasp something quite remarkable: how onetime enemies and rivals across the Middle East are on the cusp of becoming so much more interconnected and interdependent than ever before. It’s creating previously unthinkable partnerships, as well as huge internal stresses, as people in the neighborhood are trying to figure out just how modern, secular, open, entwined and democratic they want to be.

Of course, the promise of Arab–Israeli normalization, the Gulf’s dynamism, and Saudi reform has coincided with and competed with other developments. The struggle between the networks of inclusion and resistance is nourished by a number of other huge historical events that have taken place in the region since I first wrote this book: not only the U.S. invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan following 9/11, the failed Arab Spring of 2010–2011, the two Palestinian intifadas in the West Bank, and the war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006, but also an event that was less visible, yet widely recognized in intellectual circles: the publication in 2002 of the U.N. Arab Human Development Report that argued the Arab world was suffering from intertwined deficits of political freedom, knowledge acquisition, and women’s empowerment—deficits that still remain considerable, even with the progress in recent years.

The Iraq and Afghanistan wars, as painful as they were for both countries, did plant seeds of democracy, pluralism, and women’s empowerment, giving rise to hopes that both countries one day might join the Inclusion Network. Unfortunately, with the Taliban’s tenacity and the unilateral U.S. withdrawal in 2021 under President Biden, Afghanistan slipped back under the control of the fundamentalists, who are making sure that the past will, for now at least, bury the future. Iraq continues to have regular elections, and democratic processes have definitely taken root, but so, too, have endemic corruption and the dead hand of Iranian influence over Iraqi politics. The Arab Spring came and went, and its wake left either disorder—Libya; or deeper tyranny plus disorder—Syria; or deeper autocracy—Egypt. It never produced a new consensual politics. In short: the Arab Spring happened, and the monarchies of the Gulf as well as Jordan and Morocco won. They actually have proven to be the most durable systems in the Arab world.

Complicating everything is the fact that when I arrived in Jerusalem from Beirut in 1984, there were roughly 40,000 Israeli settlers in the Israeli-occupied West Bank—not including those living in Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem.

As of the writing of this preface in early 2024, there are roughly 360,000 Israelis living inside the so-called West Bank settlement blocs most adjacent to Israel and expected to remain part of Israel in any two-state solution. There are another 240,000 living in Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem, and there are another 115,000 residing in seventy-eight scattered non-bloc settlements—in the heart of Palestinian-populated areas—plus 20,000 more in dozens of small wildcat illegal outposts. How any of this gets unwound for a two-state solution is beyond my imagination. Something will have to give.

The yin and the yang of all of these developments can be captured in a single month. On June 2, 2014, I was the commencement speaker at the American University of Iraq in Sulaymaniyah, Kurdistan. On June 3, I published a column about it in The New York Times that began like this:

SULAIMANI, Iraq—I am a sucker for commencements, but this one filled me with many different emotions.

As Dina Dara took the stage—the student speaker and valedictorian of the 2014 graduating class of the American University of Iraq, in Sulaimani, Kurdistan—the sun was just setting, turning Azmar Mountain in the background into a reddish-brown curtain. The class was about 70 percent Kurds, with the rest coming from every corner, religion and tribe of Iraq. Parents bursting with pride, cellphone cameras in one hand and bouquets in the other, had driven up from Basra and Baghdad, dressed in their finest to see their kids get their American-style college degrees. Three Kurdish TV stations carried the ceremony live.

It has been quite a journey, Dara, who’s going on to graduate school at Tufts, told her classmates. (Since the university opened in 2007, all the valedictorians have been Iraqi women.) We went through a whole different experience living in the dorms. This evening … we are armed with two things: first, the highly valued American education that makes us as competent and qualified as the rest of the students in the world. And, second, the empowerment of a liberal arts education. As we exercise critical thinking techniques that have been the core of our education here, and as we try to move beyond the traditional conventions, beyond what others suggest, we may struggle. But isn’t this how nations are built?

I left northern Iraq filled with hope that first week in June. A little over a week later, a heretofore unknown group named ISIS launched an offensive on the Iraqi cities of Mosul and Tikrit and then headed north toward Kurdistan, hoping to wipe out the likes of the American University and many other targets. It would fail to get that far, but the offensive was successful enough that on June 29, ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared the formation of a caliphate stretching from Aleppo in Syria to Diyala in Iraq. It was called the Islamic State.

Thinking about that month, I am always reminded of the Arabic proverb: One day honey, the next day onions.

Meanwhile, Mother Nature began rearing her head much more aggressively. She, too, has created pressures that strengthen the forces of both resistance and inclusion. The pressures from population growth, climate change, and environmental degradation made the failed and failing states so much worse—spawning lots of easy recruits for the Resistance Network and the disorder in which it flourishes—while at the same time amplifying the importance of collaboration by the Inclusion Network. I did not understand any of this in 1979, but today it is impossible to ignore.

For instance, on May 22, 2018, I wrote a column from Israel about how repeated Hamas rocket attacks had led Israel to blockade the transport of building supplies and infrastructure materials into Gaza, to prevent Hamas using them to build weaponry or dig tunnels. Unfortunately, though, Mother Nature does not respect borders or blockades, and the critical shortage of spare parts in Gaza led to the breakdown of its sewage treatment equipment. As a result, Gazans at that time began dumping about 100 million liters of raw sewage into the Mediterranean daily, according to Gidon Bromberg, cofounder of EcoPeace Middle East, a regional environmental organization of Jordanians, Palestinians, and Israelis striving to forge shared solutions to sustain one of the most water-stressed regions on the planet.

Of course, people dump garbage into the ocean all the time. Due to the prevailing current in the Mediterranean, however, most of Gaza’s sewage flowed northward to the Israeli beach town of Ashkelon, the site of Israel’s second-biggest desalination plant. Roughly 80 percent of Israel’s drinking water comes from desalination, with 15 percent of it coming from the Ashkelon plant alone. And now the plant had to be shut down to clean Gaza’s waste out of its filters. So this idea that we can just get out of Gaza, throw away the key, and forget about it, Bromberg remarked to me, is a total illusion. That might work on a political map, but not on Mother Nature’s map, which has no lines.

Everything is intertwined. Therefore, when your neighbor wants to be in the Resistance Network but you want to be in the Inclusion Network, it’s not so simple. The renewable extraction rate for Gaza’s underground aquifer is about 60 million cubic meters of rainwater annually, noted Bromberg, but Gazans have been drawing about 200 million cubic meters a year for over a decade, so the aquifer has gotten drained and seawater has seeped into it, and many people are now drinking water that is both salty and polluted with sewage.

In large part, these kinds of pressures have pushed the Inclusion Network to become more inclusive, and they are going to make the failed and failing states of the Resistance Network fail even faster. Because the motto of the Resistance Network is: Me and my brother against my cousin. Me, my brother, and my cousin against the outsider—so we rise and they fall. The motto of the Inclusion Network is: "Me, my brother, my cousin—and the outsider—all collaborating naturally so we rise together, not fall together." Because in today’s interdependent world, whatever we do now, we’re doing it together.

As I write this in 2024, I ask myself: Can Israelis, Arab states, and the Palestinians one day come together to convert their unhealthy interdependency into a healthy interdependency? When I update this book again in ten years, I will tell you. But even today I know that the pressures coming from Mother Nature on all of them to do so will steadily increase.

In February 2024, I spoke with Nadim Koteich, a Lebanese-Emirati political analyst and general manager of Sky News Arabia, who helped me see the contrast between these two networks struggling to shape the Middle East. Summarizing where we are now, he said that the Resistance Network is orchestrated by Iran, Islamists, and jihadists in a process they refer to as the unity of battlefields. This network, he noted, seeks to bridge militias, rejectionists, religious sects, and sectarian leaders, creating an anti-Israel, anti-American, anti-Western axis that can pressure Israel simultaneously in Gaza, in the West Bank, and on the Lebanon border—as well as America in the Red Sea, in Syria, and in Iraq and Saudi Arabia from all directions.

In stark contrast, Koteich added, stands the Inclusion Network, one that is focused on weaving together global and regional markets—instead of battlefronts—business conferences, news organizations, elites, hedge funds, tech incubators, and major trade routes. This inclusion network, he added, transcends traditional boundaries, creating a web of economic and technological interdependence that has the potential to redefine power structures and create new paradigms of regional stability.

For these reasons, this is a moment of great peril—but also great opportunity—for both Lebanon and Israel. Lebanon, sadly, is deteriorating into a failed state—the victim of self-inflicted gunshot wounds by too many venal politicians and a breakdown in the power-sharing arrangement—No victor, no vanquished—that had always enabled Lebanon to recover from civil wars. That motto has been replaced by the motto It’s our turn to eat—practiced by the Shiite militia, Hezbollah, and its Iranian patron. Their view is, We are the victors in Lebanon now, and everyone else is the vanquished—permanently.

In Israel, too, the sense of limits that kept the place together is also under severe stress. After being reelected in 2022, Benjamin Netanyahu put together the most far-right government in Israel’s history; its first priority was an attempted judicial coup to neuter the ability of the Israeli Supreme Court to check its aspirations to annex the West Bank and to further empower and enrich Israel’s ultra-Orthodox religious communities.

This yin-yang struggle over the future of the region was epitomized by the Hamas onslaught against Israel on October 7—wherein we saw the Resistance Network of Iran and its proxies Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Shiite militias in Iraq rise up against the Inclusion Network—now bolstered by a Saudi Arabia ready to have normal relations with Israel, provided that it moves toward a two-state solution with the Palestinians. As of this writing, the obstacles to Israel–Arab reconciliation are as high as they have been in some time. Even so, if you add it all up, the region has never been more hostile and simultaneously more hospitable to a Jewish state; and it has never been more threatening and simultaneously more promising for the survivability of the Lebanese state.

If Israel could one day agree to a long-term process with peace-supporting Palestinians to build two states for two people, it could decisively tip the balance between the Resistance Network and the Inclusion Network. The Resistance Network would have nothing to justify the wasteful wars it fights and the arms it amasses in places like Lebanon—supposedly to defeat Israel and America but actually to keep its own people down and itself in power. Meanwhile, the Inclusion Network would only find it that much easier to widen, to cohere, and to exercise influence. These trends would hold huge promise for my friends from Beirut to Jerusalem, but they know better than I do that there are stubborn resisters.

Oh, and One Last Thing …

Part of the subtext of this book was always the story of a Minnesota boy who goes to Beirut: Walter Mondale meets Thomas Hobbes. A young man who grew up at a time of great economic equality in America and in a state known for moderate politics and political compromise—where he never once heard a gun fired—goes off to Beirut in the middle of a civil war and is introduced to the heart of darkness. It was all true. And in the years since, as I went back and forth to the Middle East several times a year, in my head that region was always still over there, and coming home to America and back to Minnesota always felt like coming back to my safe, stable home over here. I used to say that Minnesota was the 180-degree opposite of Beirut and its never-ending political and sectarian divisions.

Well, so much for all that …

Over here has started to feel uncomfortably close to over there now, as America has been fractured by political sectarianism. What I saw in Lebanon, and now increasingly see in Israel and America, is what happens when people stop trusting each other, and when the concepts of the citizen and public institutions either disappear or get totally gutted—because collaboration and compromise become dirty words. We forget that in properly functioning democracies, elections are never supposed to be that important, because there is always a next one and it is never our turn to eat for any one party or the