understand that the people of the Middle East have a life in the desert way of living, everyone has to secure the food and shelter for their own tribe even if it means at the expense of another tribe. To them, they cannot live in peace with each other because they are constantly competing with each other to survive. The second political tradition is the concentration of power in a certain elite group. This can be accredited to the tribalism, which believes in loyalties to the men who protect them from enemies. There is of course more then one type of authoritarianism; Friedman named one gentle authoritarianism and the other brutal authoritarianism. The third tradition is a tradition that was imposed by the Europeans and that is of a modern nation-state. As one can see it is relatively hard to have a tribal sense of tradition and also try to have a modern nation-state. What the concept of nation-states did to the Middle East is divide the people even more because now they dont just have the separation of tribes but the Europeans imposed land barriers that divided people by countries. That takes us back to the issue of who has a right to be on the holy land. Before the Europeans imposed land barriers every tribe had a piece of the land, however small. At the start of the book Friedman explains how Beirut is theater were everything is dramatic and people dont seem to grasp what is going on around them. A reason for this can be the culture and how the leaders of the conflict use this to manipulate the actual circumstances. A good example of how situation or games can be cultural is Arafat and how he played the conditions to his advantage. Friedman recalls the afternoon in 1979 where someone tried to kill a Christian leader with a car bomb that exploded to early. When Friedman visited him he noticed flowers from Arafat. The two of them were on opposite sides of the game but in Beirut it is all a game. The crisis is the Mid...
