An instinctive, protective solidarity seems to bind men – even John Howard and Hilaly – and prevents them from admitting this obvious truth. We never hear from them about the threat posed by men. Instead, Howard tells us that our peace-loving civilisation has to be defended against terrorists and rogue states. Freeing women is even cited as a justification for the invasion of Muslim countries, where throwing off the veil is claimed to symbolise the benefits of the liberating Western presence. So the fact that women in Iraq and Afghanistan are still wearing it, and its use is spreading, must suggest the converse: that these wars have not necessarily gone to our advantage, nor to theirs.

Meanwhile, Muslim women in Australia too, according to Manning, are angry at ‘constantly being patronised and denied their dignity’. What must also make Muslim women angry is that they have moved from one male-dominated society to another that they find is only somewhat less so. Australian sexism differs from the Middle East versions only in degree. If we are to reform other civilisations, we should begin at home.

At home, in Cronulla, is where Manning, a former television and radio journalist, ends his narrative. He links Howard’s talk about Australian values to a violent altercation between two groups at the beach, and to Alan Jones’s allegations about Lebanese gangs. Jones told his listeners, ‘Australians old and new shouldn’t have to put up with this scum’. Anglo kids, he said, don’t rape girls in the western suburbs. Back came the cries, ‘No more Lebs in Sutherland Shire’, and ‘We’re just defending our women’; then the riots and the revenge attacks. Manning, a Bondi boy, while deploring all this, observes on his travels that only in Tel Aviv do women join men at the beach.

Manning makes his ‘brief touchdown’ in 2005 in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian territories. In Israel, he is shocked to learn that Palestinian women cannot get treatment for breast cancer because the only hospital that can dispense it is in Jerusalem and Israeli authorities will not issue them with permits to go there. The wife of his Palestinian host cannot visit her dying mother, thwarted by a combination of Israeli road blocks and curfew. This is not sexism, but worse: what Manning comes to see as a gradual, deliberate process (‘the appalling imprisonment, occupation, psychological torture and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people – done in the name of a Jewish state’).

Manning’s main purpose was not to study Middle Eastern gender issues, politically divisive as they are. Many others can do that with the local knowledge and language that Manning admits he lacks. Arriving in Lebanon, he says wonderingly: ‘I should have been prepared for the hijabs and the minarets.’ That, surely, you think, is what the best guidebooks are for, as well as to spare you from reading about the expertise of taxi drivers and the details of meals eaten, prices paid and souvenirs bought. Yet even the previously well-travelled Manning, after studying the region for five years, is moved upon arrival to write, ‘Lebanon, Lebanon. Only a week of impressions in search of understanding. Yet so important.’ Visiting a family in Syria, he records that ‘between gesticulation, school French, bits of English and Arabic, our pocket dictionary and a whole lot of laughter, there was much warmth’. At which point you reach for your Lonely Planet: how to get there and away. The moment of decision arrives: whether to go on reading the book as travelogue, memoir, polemic, history or theory. For guidance, you flip back to Manning’s statement of his purpose: ‘to understand the Lebanese, to experience the heart of Arab culture in Syria, to witness first-hand the agony of the Palestinians and, more than anything else, to work out why Orientalism holds such sway over the Western imagination.’

Big tasks. As for the last, surely the late Edward Said and his many followers have comprehensively cleared that up: since Orientalism was, and is, fundamentally about power and dominance (that’s why the Orient was cast as feminine), do we need a new case study to prove it? And if we are going to do theory, why neglect Samuel Huntington, whose The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order (1996) becomes more relevant by the day?

Polemic it could be. Manning chillingly concludes that an Israeli one-state solution is on its way, with the creation of new Jewish settlements, which ‘simply makes of the new Palestinian state a series of jails’. Bethlehem is ‘heading towards being a prison of Muslims surrounded by Jews with a Christian museum in the middle’. But why not interview some pro-government Israelis, or some victims of suicide bombings? Why miss the opportunity – when discussing Mordecai Vanunu – to ask about the chances, and consequences, of an Israeli nuclear attack on Iran? Why not question the cause of Arafat’s death or reports of his wealth in France?      As history, it is interesting, linking places visited to reminders of dates and events, particularly the growing map of Israel and the dramatic shrinkage of Palestinian land. Sound bites can’t tell the whole story, but why leave out the fascinating history of the American Colony Hotel, where Manning stayed, or the Jordanian monarchy’s involvement with Jerusalem? Even if he didn’t like Amman, why only go to Petra for history, not Jerash, Wadi Rum or Pella?

As mini-memoir, it works by allowing Manning to trace his career, his growing rapport with Indonesians, Arabs and other Muslims, his insider’s abiding interest in how the media report and distort events, and his journey with a delightful companion. But it is as a historico-political travelogue that the book seduces you to keep reading and to pass it on to friends. Following Said, Manning chronicles the West’s bad behaviour in the region since 1798, beginning with Napoleon, moving to Britain (neither Italy nor Germany is mentioned) and finally the United States. He intercuts that account with conversations, descriptions of place, and sensory experiences so delightful as to make him ask, in cosmopolitan Aleppo, why leave? He asks the same when he reaches Damascus, the city of damask, in Jazeera – the land between the Tigris and Euphrates, the cradle of Arab nationalism that in the 1920s ‘launched empires and defeated invaders’. He doesn’t analyse the present régime, concentrating instead on atmospheric old Damascus. Straight Street is still there, the main road through the old city, marking St Paul’s much earlier Damascene experience.

Most haunting is Manning’s conclusion that Arab and Muslim people, especially those in Israel, are the world’s new Jews. His book should be read together with Alexander Downer’s boast during Israel’s recent onslaught on Lebanon that Australia would not agree with the ninety-eight per cent of countries calling for it to end.