topic by
ozzie
4/20/2002 (22:16) |
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Its a long post, but worth reading!
Robert Fisk
BY MATTHEW ROTHSCHILD
Robert Fisk is Britain’s most highly decorated foreign correspondent. He has received the British International Journalist of the Year award seven times, most recently in 1995 and 1996. His specialty is the Middle East, where he has spent the last twenty-three years. Currently the Beirut correspondent for the London Independent, Fisk has covered the Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, the Persian Gulf war, and the conflict in Algeria. He is the author of Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War (Atheneum, 1990), and his reporting from Lebanon has brought him international attention. He was the one who broke the story about the Israeli shelling of the U.N. compound in Qana, Lebanon, in 1996.
Fisk visited Madison, Wisconsin, in April to give two lectures on the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. He brought with him film footage of the Qana shelling, as well as footage of an Israeli bombing of a Lebanese ambulance carrying fourteen people. He showed a film he made about Palestinians who had lost their homes when Israel became a state. He also showed interviews with Jews who lost family members in Nazi concentration camps, and he went to Auschwitz to show where the Holocaust took place. In one of his lectures, he made a special point of taking on those who deny the truth of the Holocaust.
I spoke with Fisk on my radio show, Second Opinion, and later when I drove him to the airport and as we waited for his plane. He was off to meet his wife, Lara Marlowe, in Paris, before heading back to Beirut.
Q: How dangerous is it being a foreign correspondent in the Middle East?
Robert Fisk: You do see people die, and you realize how easy it is to be killed. You go through the risk and the danger. At the end of the day, either you get back to Beirut and file your story and go out to a French restaurant, or you end up in a fridge. I had two colleagues from CBS. They were Lebanese--Bahije Metni and Tafik Ghazawi. They were heading south to cover an Israeli raid in Lebanon in 1985. I was headed out to cover the same story. We saw each other, said “hi.” I was in a village that overlooked where the Israelis had a tank positioned. They were being attacked by Hezbollah guys who were trying to do suicide attacks on them. And the Israelis were firing tank shells into the villages. I was in a village overlooking it, and a shell fell in a field opposite me and I got blown physically off my feet by the shell blast through a door of a house next to a mosque.
Q: Were you injured?
Fisk: No, not at all. I was bruised but nothing terrible. The tank kept on firing through the fields into the next village and the next village. Tafik and Bahije had gotten out of their car and were talking to villagers in the back of a yard. A car had been hit in the front, and they went out to film it. And as they were filming it, an Israeli tank round landed, and they were literally blasted into bits of flesh around the houses. I went back down the next day and people were scraping them off the houses with pen knives. When I got to the Hamoud hospital, they were unrecognizable, pieces of meat, nothing, horrible.
Q: And those incidents don’t give you pause as to whether you should continue?
Fisk: It’s an odd situation. When you go off to a dangerous place, you’re full of foreboding. But if you decide you’re going to cover it and it’s worth doing, you must commit yourself to it and stop saying, “Should I do it?” You’ve got to turn the potential for panic into the concentration of the mind. But you never should be greedy. If you’re after something, you talk to witnesses at the scene, you report it, and get out. Don’t hang around. When I’m out of a dangerous situation and I’m back in Beirut, I go out with my beautiful wife to dinner and I sit down and I think, “Whew!” There’s always a feeling afterwards--you’ve got the story--it was worth it. Because you got back. But if you don’t get back, you won’t be in a position to say that.
Q: The first time I heard your name was in connection with your report in 1996 at the Qana refugee camp in Lebanon, which was bombed by the Israelis. Tell me what you saw there and how you pieced together the story.
Fisk: Well, I was actually by chance coming on a U.N. convoy. You recall, of course, that at this stage Israel was carrying out what it called “Operation Grapes of Wrath,” which was a bombardment of Lebanon with 22,000 shells and heaven knows how many thousand air raids.
Q: John Steinbeck must be rolling in his grave.
Fisk: John Steinbeck in one book of his which I have describes Arabs as “the dirtiest people in the world,” I noticed.
Q: So maybe it was appropriate for that.
Fisk: Well, who knows. It might have come from the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” or the book of Deuteronomy. In any event, this operation was set off after Hezbollah men had fired rockets over the border into Israel. The Hezbollah were responding to the unexplained killing of a young teenager in a south Lebanese village by a booby-trap bomb, which the Hezbollah believed the Israelis set. The Hezbollah took revenge, as they said they would if there were any deaths of civilians. The Israelis said this was an unprovoked attack and launched its bombardment.
I was traveling in the U.N. convoy near Qana and we heard an Israeli gun battery inside southern Lebanon. It was part of the Israeli occupation force. Suddenly, fire rang over the top of our convoy into the village of Qana and we could hear this “boom, boom, whoosh,” the whiffling of a shell--“wham!”--as it hit into Qana. And within a few seconds we could hear the headquarters of the Fijian battalion of the United Nations saying, “Shells are falling on our compound. Help us, help us.” Shortly afterwards, we heard a Fijian very, very frightened come up on the radio again, “Help us, help us. The shells are falling.” And a Lebanese army liaison officer was saying, “I hear the voice of death.”
We had been by Qana that morning and had seen it crowded with 800 refugees. The people with their villages under fire had been taken by the U.N. armored vehicles into the U.N.’s own compound. This wasn’t a refugee camp. This was a battalion headquarters of the U.N. in Qana, where they would be safe. And we could even see that they actually brought their cattle with them and tethered their cows and goats to the barbed wire around the camp. They were going to be safe there.
When we got to Qana, much of it was on fire. As these proximity shells burst, they killed in all 106 people, including fifty-five children. Proximity shells burst seven to nine meters above the ground. They’re anti-personnel weapons; they’re intended to give amputation wounds. When we got there, these poor people without arms and legs had crawled and smashed down the back gate of the compound, and we drove into it. It was literally a river of blood, and it was overflowing our shoes. And we got inside, and it was just butchery. Babies were without arms and heads. Women torn apart. People eviscerated. There was half a body at the top of a burning tree. There was a young girl to my right when I came in holding in her arms this middle-aged man with his eyes open, but he had an arm missing and he was dead. And she was rocking this body back and forth, backwards and forwards, crying over and over, “My father, my father, my father.” So that’s what we found.
Q: How do you keep your composure? How can you report under such circumstances?
Fisk: It’s a journalist’s job to be a witness to history. We’re not there to worry about ourselves. We’re there to try and get as near as we can, in an imperfect world, to the truth and get the truth out. I always feel in those circumstances great compassion for innocent people who died. I also think that, though dead, they would probably want us as independent reporters to be there. Because they’d want the truth to be told about what happened to them. I know that sounds prissy and simple, but I do believe in it. I think journalism should be a vocation. So in answer to your question, I get on with my work. I have work to do; that’s the way I look at it. You can feel very angry about things like that. It was a great wickedness what happened at Qana. But it’s not our job to become overwhelmed by it.
Q: How hard was it to get back from Qana to Beirut?
Fisk: We’re coming out of Qana, and there’s this this gunboat firing, and we slow to a stop. It’s my wife, the driver Habibi, and me.
Q: Your wife was with you in Qana?
Fisk: Yes, she’s a correspondent, too. She’s American by the way, from L.A., Lara Marlowe. She was then reporting for Time magazine. We take the car and head up to Sidon, which was under fire. The Lebanese had blocked the road further north of us. The Israeli gunboat was rocketing this road with shells, shooting at every car it saw. We stopped. There were people backing out, frightened, turning back, women were crying. This horrible whiffle sound. And my friend Habibi said, “What should we do?” I watched the gunboat. I’ve seen them a lot of times, and I reckon if we’ve seen four rounds fired, four explosions, there’s usually a gap of thirty-two seconds. So I said, “Go, we’ve got to get this film to Beirut.” And we went down that road and were just across the bridge and--“whoosh”--one passed us and exploded on the bridge in a bubble of flame.
We got to Beirut, and I said to Lara, “Tonight, we’re not going to eat or drink. I’m just going to sit on the phone and you’ll sit on the other phone and we’ll just do live broadcasting all evening. We were there, we saw it.” And we did until 3:00 a.m. Then Lara made dinner and I opened a bottle of wine. We sat on the balcony and looked out and the moon came out, and there--way across the balcony--was an Israeli gunboat watching Beirut. And we’re like, “Should we move off the balcony? Forget it! Let’s have a glass of wine.”
Q: Your reporting at Qana got you in a controversy because the pundits in the U.S. like Abe Rosenthal of The New York Times said why in the world would the Israelis bomb a refugee camp.
Fisk: I didn’t get myself in a controversy, I cleared the contro-versy up. What happened was, even with the bodies still lying rank in Qana, some of the survivors and some of the U.N. soldiers were saying there was an Israeli pilotless aircraft drone that had been flying over the camp before and during the massacre.
Q: And what’s the importance of that?
Fisk: The purpose of the drone is to give artillery men a siting of an artillery target in what is called dead ground. Dead ground is what you can’t see. In other words, you’re firing over a hill so you don’t know what you’re hitting. But the drone is flying over and you can see on the television screen where your shells are flying. A lot of people had said they’d seen this drone. Then, later on, I’d heard that a U.N. soldier quite by chance a mile away in a neighboring position, a Norwegian soldier, was taking an amateur video of the shelling of Qana and actually filmed the drone. Then I was told the film had been taken by the U.N.’s investigator general to New York, but no one else was going to be allowed to see it, that there probably would be no written report by the U.N. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, I was told, was informed by the Clinton Administration that if he wanted to have any chance of another run as Secretary General there wouldn’t be a written report. So, of course, the film was very important. If the film existed and if it showed the drone, it placed a very heavy burden of responsibility upon Israel.
Q: It would prove that the Israeli military knew what they were bombing?
Fisk: It would be very difficult to deny that they were doing it by chance. It would have to be a military error of such monumental proportions we would have to think of Israel as an incompetent army. And I don’t think that’s how Israel regards itself. When I got back to Beirut, I was pretty depressed. I wanted the story. I was chasing that tape. I was at home the next day in Beirut and my mobile phone rang and a voice just gave me a map reference in southern Lebanon, and he said, “1300 hours.” I’ve never driven to southern Lebanon so fast in my life. When I got there, a U.N. jeep pulled up behind me and a U.N. soldier got out. And he walked up to me and he said, “The drone is on the film. I’ve seen it, and I’ve copied it before the U.N. took it.” He said, “I have two children at home the same age as the children I carried dead in my arms at Qana, and this is for them.” And he pulled a cassette out of his battle dress and threw it on the passenger seat of my car.
I took it back to Beirut, and sure enough, right in the middle of the shelling, the camera zips up and there is a drone flying over. In the background you can hear the Irish U.N. radio operators saying, “Qana is under fire! The shelling is going on!” You can hear the shelling. You can see the drone. So, I got it back to Beirut, and we broke the story. My paper ran three pages on it and carried an editorial saying that the people responsible for this should be brought to justice, which of course they were not. We had lots of copies of the tape, and we gave them to all the TV stations, including the Americans, who hardly used it. CNN used a bit of it. And we gave it to Israeli TV, which showed more of it than the American television did. The U.N. was forced to publish a report and acknowledge the film. Boutros Boutros-Ghali did indeed lose his job. Not just because of that, but partly.
Q: You also have done a lot of reporting on an Israeli attack on a Lebanese ambulance full of people. What was that story?
Fisk: It was the thirteenth of April, 1996. Abbas Jiha was a farmer and a volunteer ambulance driver for the village of Mansouri in southern Lebanon. On this day, he’d taken two trips to Sidon--first with a wounded man, then with a wounded baby. When Abbas returned to Mansouri, there was panic, shells were falling all around. People were saying, “Take us to Sidon, take us to Sidon.” He put four of his children in the vehicle, he put another family in, and another guy, a window cleaner--in all there were fourteen people in the ambulance. He’d gotten up to the U.N. Post 123 on the main coast road. He was one-third of the way to safety in Sidon. So he goes through the checkpoint, and Reuters photographer Najla Abujahjah is standing there and sees the car go through and sees two helicopters. One of them comes down and starts chasing the car up the road. When helicopters start flying at vehicles, you know you’re in trouble. They’re coming up behind to fire a missile into the back of the vehicle. That’s the way they do it.
Q: There’d be no denying that the helicopter wanted to hit this ambulance?
Fisk: Oh, absolutely not. They intended to hit it, they absolutely did. They fired two missiles. One didn’t explode, the other did. It exploded through the back door, engulfing the vehicle in fire and smoke and hurling it twenty meters through the air. Abbas Jiha stood in the road beside one of his dead daughters, weeping and shrieking, “God is Great.” He held up his fists to the sky and cried out, “My God, my God, my family has gone.” He saw his two-month-old baby, Mariam, lying outside the ambulance, her body riddled with holes and her head full of metal. His five-year-old, Hanin, “was cut through with holes like a mosquito net,” he told me. The Reuters photographer saw her collapse on the broken window frame, her blood running in streams down the outside of the vehicle. Abbas Jiha also lost his nine-year-old daughter, Zeinab, and his wife, Mona. “She was so terribly wounded, I couldn’t recognize her face,” he told me. Two other passengers died, a sixty-year-old woman and her eleven-year-old niece.
The Israeli government admitted it had targeted the ambulance but made two claims: that the ambulance was owned by the Hezbollah, and that it was carrying a Hezbollah guerrilla. Both of which were totally untrue. Jiha has no connection with the Hezbollah at all. Just before 1996 he returned from Germany where he and his wife and children sought political asylum because it was so dangerous in Lebanon. Even if the vehicle had been owned by the Hezbollah, the idea that it’s all right to kill women and children because you don’t like the owner of the vehicle is an entirely new view of the rules of war.
Q: Why didn’t we hear more about this in the United States?
Fisk: The New York Times’s reporter, Serge Schmemann, ran a report the next day. It was six paragraphs before he came to the ambulance incident. He began by explaining how Israel’s forces were tightening their hold on Lebanon. And then, paragraph six, he managed to have the courage to mention, “In the bloodiest incident of the day, an Israeli helicopter fired a missile into the back of an ambulance.” I mean, absolutely incredible.
Q: It wasn’t the lead in any other stories?
Fisk: It certainly was the lead in my story, on the front page, and it was the lead in every other European paper. It wasn’t the lead in The New York Times, and let’s just look at two things. When you go to journalism school, which we don’t in Britain, but I know you do here, you put the main part of the story in the first paragraph. It wasn’t there. Now let’s ask another question: If a Syrian helicopter fired a missile into the back of an Israeli ambulance and killed four kids and two women--heaven spare us, let it never happen, but if it did happen--I believe it would have been in the first paragraph. And that is one of the problems with Middle East reporting. It is not fair. It is biased.
Q: Why is it biased?
Fisk: One is because U.S. journalists I don’t think are very courageous. They tend to go along with the government’s policy domestically and internationally. To question is seen as being unpatriotic, or potentially subversive. America’s great ally is Israel. When you’re given ten seconds to try and explain why you might be critical of an American ally, whoever it might be, it becomes a very odd and weird experience.
American journalists go for safe stories. They don’t like controversy. They don’t like to say, “I was a witness. I saw this. This is true. This is what happened.” You have this constant business where journalists can never be the source; there has to be this anonymous diplomat.
The conformity of American journalism is going to be one of the nails in its coffin. All American journalists write in the same style, and there is a kind of sickness among a lot of Western correspondents in that they have this dreadful reliance on their own governments, their own embassies. I can remember many, many times when an American journalist arrives in town and they go to the U.S. embassy, the French embassy, the British embassy. They get their accreditation from the ministry of information and maybe ask for a couple of interviews. And then you get the report like the one reprinted in the International Herald Tribune Paris edition I was reading the other day. It was, in all, twelve paragraphs, and unnamed diplomatic sources were quoted ten times.
I don’t go near embassies. I won’t do it. I can go where I want and don’t have to worry about what other people think. Why would I want to go to an embassy? I don’t think I have much to learn from embassies. If I want to go to an embassy, I could live in Washington or London--I don’t need to live in Beirut.
Q: What other constraints are there when it comes to coverage of Israel?
Fisk: There is a very powerful Israeli lobby in this country. It’s a fact. People who dare to criticize Israel are often made to regret it. I can give you an example of a journalist from a northwestern daily American newspaper.
I said, “How are things?”
He said, “We have problems reporting the Middle East stories, as usual.”
“What?”
“Well, for example, I had been referring to Netanyahu’s new government as ‘the rightwing Israeli government.’ But now I just call it ‘the government.’”
“Why did that happen?”
“Oh, some of the readers of the newspaper who are members of the Jewish community object to the phrase ‘rightwing.’ So I don’t use it anymore.”
That’s how the distortion starts. In these circumstances, you have a press that is very loath to rock the boat.
American journalists, whether they be on television or in the press, are very frightened of writing a report which is going to make Israel--or, more important, Israel’s supporters in the United States--unhappy. If you dare to criticize Israel’s policies or their actions--and, of course, you should also criticize the Arabs, let’s not get romantic about this--but if you dare to criticize Israel, you will inevitably get the claim that you must be racist, anti-Semitic, and that is intended to shut you up. And in many cases in this country, I’m afraid it’s successful.
Q: Do you get called anti-Semitic a lot?
Fisk: In the past in Britain, letters have been published that suggest this, but if it happens again, I’ll take legal action. Because in Britain to be called a racist is grounds for slander. And I won’t accept that by anyone because it is a lie. However, there are ways of implying it without saying it. You’ll get a comment that goes, “Mr. Fisk, you are writing from the dark side of journalism.” So that must mean subversive, bad, terrorist, racist, etc. Listen, if criticizing Israel is anti-Semitic, which is bullshit, what is criticizing Mr. Blair? Is it anti-Anglo Saxon? I mean, that is a ridiculous situation, immature, and I don’t think that kind of argument is going to work. Well, it might be sustained here in the States for all kinds of reasons. But it’s not going to work elsewhere for much longer, I think. It’s not acceptable.
Q: You’ve written, “There are no good guys in the Middle East.” What do you mean by that?
Fisk: There are the dead and the innocent civilians, but that’s about it. I haven’t come across many people in authority in the Middle East who are good guys. But there’s a few people. Hanan Ashrawi is one. I think she’s a decent woman, untainted by the PLO’s corruption. She’s an educated, civilized, compassionate person. No stain of wrongdoing has ever been attached to her name. There’s some nice guys in the Israeli Labor Party. And there are a lot of Palestinian intellectuals who despaired of Arafat at the time of the Oslo agreement.
So there are people of integrity. But when I say there are no good guys, what I’m trying to get at is this American journalistic habit of wanting to decide who are the good guys and who are the bad guys, and then you can say what’s happening. There’s no honor in the fighting in the Middle East. There’s no honor of war out there.
Q: In one of your lectures, you made a point of taking on the Holocaust deniers in parts of the Arab world. What’s behind the popularity of this view?
Fisk: It’s becoming ever more credible in the eyes of Arabs. They’re beginning to believe it, there’s no doubt about that. First of all, there’s a good deal of sheer racism. There’s a lot of racism against Arabs inside Israel, and there’s a lot of racism by Arabs against Israeli Jews. The Arabs are not--and this is extremely important--they are not accepting the truth of the history of their opponents. And as long as you can’t do that, or won’t do that, you won’t have a peace. Now it can also be said that the Israelis have to start accepting what they did to the Palestinians in 1948. They’ve got to start acknowledging it: the destruction of Arab villages, the massacre of Palestinians at that time, the total dispossession of 700,000 Palestinians.
Now, we’re not comparing the dispossession of three quarters of a million Palestinians with the evil of the massacre of six million Jews in the Holocaust in Europe. But history works both ways, and denial can work both ways. People are saying, “How can you solve the Middle East?” I have not the slightest idea. But unless all sides acknowledge the sins
which they have committed, all of them, then you will not have a real peace.
Q: You’ve written about the political usage of the Holocaust.
Fisk: The extermination camps in Europe have an enormous, powerful effect. And they should. Outside of Auschwitz there are these ash pits where you can actually put your hand, and there are the ashes of cities of people in your hands.
Nonetheless, it seems the Holocaust is being used not just as a memorial but to market the current Israeli policy, whatever it may be. And effectively to smother any criticism of Israel’s current policy, including the extensions of settlements on occupied Arab land in contradiction of U.N. Security Council resolutions and the Oslo peace agreement.
Q: Do you have any hope that the Oslo peace agreement is ever going to be implemented? What are we in for here?
Fisk: No hope. It’s buried. I’m afraid there’s going to be an explosion in the Middle East. I fear very much that there’s going to be a great deal of violence in the coming months, years, and I can’t see at the moment that there’s any determination on the part of the people involved or the U.S. government to prevent it.
Oslo never lived. Oslo was a piece of arrogant Norwegian peacemaking. It was based solely on the idea that if you could get Mr. Arafat and Mr. Peres to be nice to each other, this would build up this extraordinary, cosmic affection from which everything would follow. It involved no international guarantees, no U.N. guarantees, so if either side reneged on the agreement, no one would hold it.
You’re dealing with something that doesn’t work. You can go on about “putting it back on track”--all these old clichés the American press goes along with. When it was clearly not working, we were told “it was encountering difficulties.” When it was dying, we were told “there was a hitch.” Now it’s dead, we’re told “it’s deadlocked.” But it’s finished.
Q: And who in your mind is most responsible for this?
Fisk: The Norwegians have a lot to answer for. The Norwegians were way, way out of their depth. They took no account of the volatility of the Middle East: People could lose their jobs over elections, the prime minister could get assassinated, the politician could fall sick. International agreements with nations that have been fighting hard against each other need a lot of guarantees, a lot of paperwork, and a lot of intelligence. Creating a scene that these people will start walking out, arm in arm, is ridiculous.
It is said that Oslo was based on U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 but in fact it wasn’t. U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 calls for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from all land occupied in the 1967 war in return for the security of all states in the area, including Israel. What Oslo did was to allow the Israelis to renegotiate 242. It allowed them to say, “OK, instead of talking withdrawal, we’ll withdraw from this bit and we’ll let you keep this bit, and we’ll negotiate this later.” That is no way to make a peace. That is a way to make a war.
Q: How critical was the assassination of Rabin?
Fisk: Not very critical. Oslo couldn’t work.
Q: If Shimon Peres had won the election, would that have made a difference?
Fisk: Even if Peres had won the election, he wouldn’t have had sufficient power to follow through Oslo.
Q: What about Netanyahu?
Fisk: Well, Netanyahu is a man who is against Oslo. He’s always said he doesn’t like Oslo. And I think there’s no doubt in my mind he wants to destroy Oslo. They are building more Jewish settlements on occupied land in total contradiction of U.N. Security Council Resolution 242.
Q: How do you assess the U.S. role?
Fisk: Clearly, there is not the will to deal with the problem, because to deal with the problem means bringing pressure upon Israel. That would cost Clinton, Gore, and the Democrats. American prestige in the Middle East is collapsing, collapsing principally because the United States refuses to risk endangering its relationship with the Israelis. Clinton will not stand up and say, “Mr. Netanyahu is acting against international law and U.N. Security Council resolutions and the Oslo agreement when he builds more settlements.”
Q: Where does this leave Arafat?
Fisk: Arafat is now a sick old man. He must realize at some point in his darkest moments that it was a terrible mistake to have gone along with Oslo. He should have done much better than that.
By the time he found himself ruined in exile in Tunisia, the PLO was a very corrupt organization. He came from outside without any understanding at all of what the situation was on the West Bank. He was agreeing to the continuation of settlement existence in parts of the West Bank and Gaza, but he’d never seen a Jewish settlement in his life because he’d never been there. He had no experience in dealing with high politics, and he had no one to advise him. So he said, “Yes, I will accept this! We will have peace with our Israeli brothers.”
The reason he made peace and the reason King Hussein did is that they were weak enough to make peace. Why does no American journalist ask the obvious question? Why is it that the only two Middle East leaders to embrace Saddam Hussein after the invasion by the Iraqis of Kuwait are the only two Middle East leaders to have made peace with Israel? Because after the mistake of supporting Saddam, they were so politically and financially weakened they had to make peace with Israel.
Then there’s the corruption of the PLO and the brutality: Fourteen Palestinians have died in the custody of the Palestinian Authority since 1993. All tortured, all beaten, or not getting medical treatment. Arafat now has thirteen or fourteen different intelligence operations working for him.
Q: The CIA’s working with him now, too.
Fisk: Absolutely the CIA’s working with him. He’s become a kind of sandbag for Israel in the West Bank and Gaza.
Q: What do you mean “sandbag”?
Fisk: He effectively buffers them against any violence from their enemies.
Q: So he’s the gendarme of the Israelis?
Fisk: He’s the gendarme for the Palestinians working for the Israelis.
Q: What do you see happening next?
Fisk: Well, look, my crystal glass is broken. But the reality is, because Oslo is dead, there are no restraints on the parties other than force. The great restraint on Arafat is the Israelis could go smashing their way to the West Bank and surround Gaza and destroy the Palestinian Authority. And the Palestinian Authority people, they have money, cars, prestige--they don’t want to lose it. The restraint on the Israelis is that if you push too hard, you’ll get hit back. Physical force and physical fear are the only restraints on the parties. That means it’s not going to last. Because that’s not the way you make peace. You don’t love your neighbor by threatening them with bigger and bigger bombs, airplanes, tanks, bullets, hatchets, whatever.
At some point, my fear is that through provocation and despair, another Palestinian is going to blow himself up and kill innocent Israelis. And in their current vexatious mood, the Israeli cabinet will take action against the Palestinian Authority. If that happens, however, there’s going to be resistance from the Palestinians, and it’s not going to be with stones this time. The problem here for the Israelis is now Palestinian policemen are armed. The Palestinians will resist if the Israelis go in. Everybody will resist. I’m sure it’s the case that Palestinians would take the war into Israel if such an appalling scenario developed. So we could be seeing the beginning of an awful lot of chaos in the Palestine/Israel area.
And if there is violence in the West Bank, there will be violence in southern Lebanon. And there is a considerable momentum in Israel, if there is violence, to try to bomb the Syrians into peace. That means, of course, bombing the Syrians in Lebanon. So now we have the possibility of the spreading of violence if it starts in the West Bank, southern Lebanon, and further north.
Q: Tell me how you got so interested in the Middle East, and why you’ve spent some twenty-three years there.
Fisk: I was the Portugal correspondent covering the aftermath of the Portuguese revolution, 1975-1976, and was sitting on a beach. My foreign editor--Louis Harron at the London Times, for which I then worked--called me up and said, “The civil war seems to have taken hold in Lebanon, the newspaper’s correspondent has just got married, his wife wants to leave, would you like to be the Middle East correspondent?” I was twenty-nine, and that seemed to me like a very dramatic story to cover and a dramatic job to have, so I flew to Beirut, and originally it was a three-year posting. But unlike in America, where your correspondents only do three years and move on, we don’t have that tradition in Britain. We believe that if a correspondent is doing his job and gets to know the story, he’s more qualified the longer he’s there.
Q: Is there a problem with U.S. journalism posting people for two or three years, and then shipping them out?
Fisk: Oh, yes, absolutely.
Q: There’s a saying among U.S. editors that they don’t want people to “go native.”
Fisk: Yeah, well, I’ve heard this comment. This is usually used about journalists when they start to understand the story and tell the truth. The real problem is that it takes at least three years to even start to understand a complex story like Russia, the Pacific Rim, or the Middle East. And the moment when the reporter is beginning to get a grasp, “bingo,” he’s off to Moscow or Latin America.
Q: How long do you see yourself doing this? What keeps you going?
Fisk: Well, I’m fifty-one, and I don’t intend to spend the rest of my life in Lebanon. But I’m more than happy to stay on. I can break good stories. The paper wants me to stay there. Why should I go? I mean, I don’t want to become an executive and have a car and a swimming pool. I’m happy in Beirut.
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