Geography is destiny

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Charles Glass, an American reporter for many years based in Lebanon, in 1987 set off to portray what used to be called the Levant, starting in Iskenderun in what is now Turkey and ending in Aqaba in what is now Jordan. This project, which sought to tell the political story of the Middle East through its cramped topography, was disrupted when Glass was kidnapped by Hezbollah in Beirut. He wrote a book out of it called Tribes with Flags (1990). It was another 14 years, and that ominous September of 2001, before Glass picked up the thread of his interrupted journey.

Great changes had taken place, all for the worse. Chief among them were the Oslo Accords of 1993 which granted the Palestinians statehood without halting the building of Israeli settlements on Palestinian land, the second uprising or intifadha (‘tremor’) of 2000 in the Palestinian towns of the West Bank of the Jordan and the Gaza Strip, the Arab attacks on US territory on 11 September  2001, and the US retaliation in Afghanistan later that year and in Iraq in 2003.

Glass is one of very few Americans  in the Middle East to listen to what  is said to him. The book proceeds through a set of leisurely biographical interviews, conducted in a part of the world where even the Jews have time on their hands.

We travel to Aqaba, Petra and Amman, suffer the indignities of the Israeli borders, live in the old quarters of Jerusalem, swelter in Gaza, admire the old town of Jaffa and the cafés of Tel Aviv, travel on to Damascus and Beirut. We meet soda-pop sellers and prime ministers in Jordan, Syrian nuns and Armenian patriots in Jerusalem, Palestinian terrorists and Israeli settlers in Gaza, Druzes in Haifa and the Lebanese mountains, anthroposophists in Beersheba.