Turning Back the Clock in Lebanon

Categories: In the News , History , Staff Picks , Nonfiction

The conflict between Israel, the Palestinians, and now Lebanon has accelerated with terrible speed since June 10, when Hamas ended the current truce after blasts allegedly from Israeli artillery killed and injured Palestinian families on a Gaza beach. Hamas retaliated with the June 25 killing of two Israeli soldiers and the capture of a third. In a surprise move of solidarity, Hezbollah followed suit on July 12, crossing the border from Lebanon to kill three Israeli soldiers and capture two others.

Hezbollah’s entry into the conflict prompted Israeli Army Chief of Staff Lieutenant-General Dan Halutz to threaten that the Israeli military would “turn back the clock in Lebanon by 20 years” if the soldiers were not returned. In addition to the daily news reports, a vision of what that would mean can be gained through Robert Fisk’s 1990 bestseller, Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon.

Fisk, a British journalist with more awards than any other war correspondent, has made Beirut his home for nearly three decades, covering the Middle East first for The Times and now for the London-based Independent. In 2005, he painted a broader history of the region’s twentieth-century struggles in The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East, which begins with accounts of his 1990s interviews with Osama bin Laden. 

In both books, Fisk’s erudition, insights, and personal experiences expose the engineering behind this long chain reaction, devised out of conflicting claims and promises. A passage from Pity the Nation traces the initial blueprints: 

“…the Balfour Declaration of 1917…gave Britain’s support to a Jewish homeland providing that ‘nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’. The equally earnest Anglo-French Declaration of 1918 promising the Arabs of former Ottoman colonies their independence if they supported the Allies against the Turks fell into much the same category, although it was not a promise that was intended to be kept. As Balfour himself said the following year, ‘in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country'.” 

Although the British favored the Zionist objectives for political reasons, Jews also suffered from the vertiginous rolling of the colonial ship of state: 

“One of the men who had to walk down this precarious companion-way was Malcolm MacDonald, the British dominions secretary in 1938, still vainly attempting to reconcile the desperate promises of the First World War before the outbreak of the Second, trying to preserve order in the British mandate of Palestine by restricting Jewish immigration…. Forty years later, I sat in the drawing room of his home at Sevenoaks in Kent, watching him shake his head vigorously from side to side as he contemplated the ruins of his own efforts to resolve the Palestinian problem. The ghosts were more substantial now.” 

Fisk’s passion for his subject and his profession made him one of only four Western reporters to remain in Lebanon during the assassinations and kidnappings of the 1980s. That passion is grounded in his commitment to the value of human life over any goals achieved by terrorist bombs, whether improvised in the third world or manufactured in the first. He stated his creed indirectly during a recent interview on the New York-based radio and television news program Democracy Now:

“I call them roarers, you know. Nasrallah [Secretary General of Hezbollah] and Ehud Olmert [Prime Minister of Israel] are now trying to outdo each other in all kinds of terror language…. And, of course, the worst thing is that they say this so that the Western press will pick it up. And heaven spare us all, the Western journalists do pick it up and use it. You know, they’re looking for a good line, as if this is a football game or a hockey match, instead of a tragic war which is taking the lives of people like that little girl in the field.”

You can follow Fisk’s reports through his Independent column or his frequent interviews on Democracy Now. Many of his speeches and interviews are available in transcript, audio, or video at the unofficial site robert-fisk.com.