ABSTRACT
The scholar and public intellectual Fouad Ajami, who was born in Lebanon and died in 2014 at the age of sixty-eight, specialized in explaining to Westerners the complex and traumatic encounter of the Arab peoples with modernity. Fouad's native village, Arnoun in southern Lebanon, stands less than five miles from Metullah, the northernmost point in Israel. The story of his discovery of Israel surely begins with this searchlight, beaming and beckoning across an impenetrable border. Among American Jews, Fouad found the kind of free-wheeling, serious intellectual camaraderie that the Arab-American community, then and simply couldn't sustain. Fouad paid his first visit in 1980, crossing from Jordan over the Allenby Bridge. From then on, he began to pay fairly regular visits, and to fly directly. Fouad taught himself more about Israel than any Arab intellectual of his generation. The Arabs could have learned from this experiment, but they drew back in horror.
