Pity the Nation – A Review

Originally written Monday, January 17, 2005

A few days ago, I finally finished Pity the Nation, an absolutely superb book by one of my favourite journalists, Robert Fisk. This book is a huge chronicle of 26 years in Lebanon, where Fisk witnessed and reported the horrific events there, including Israeli invasion and occupation, the car-bombing of the US Marines in Beirut and the vicious and deadly civil wars that gripped the country.

At 689 pages of densely-packed type, this book would seem hard to get through. And in parts, it is – but not because it is boring or tedious. Instead, because of the first-hand accounts of bloodshed so appalling the images have stuck with me for days.

One of the most gruesome accounts is when Fisk arrives at the refugee camp of Chatila after the massacre of Palestinian refugees there. Chatila and Sabra were two major refugee camps for Palestinians who fled when the state of Israel was created from their homeland Palestine. Hundreds of Palestinians were murdered in the camps starting September 16, 1982 by a militia known as the Phalange.

The Phalange were supplied and controlled by the Israeli military. The Israelis circled the camps, blocking all of the exits. They had observation posts on the roofs of nearby tall buildings. The Israelis then sent in the Phalange, who entered the camps and murdered the inhabitants.

Fisk’s story of entering the camp after the massacre is horrifying. At one point, he is climbing a soft earth embankment recently created by bulldozers when he slips. He grabs a reddish rock that is protruding from the embankment to catch his balance. It comes away in his hand and he sees to his horror that it is not a rock at all, it is a human elbow. He then realizes that the entire embankment is full of bodies:

… Each time I took a step, the earth moved up towards me. The whole embankment of muck shifted and vibrated with my weight in a dreadful, springy way and, when I looked down again, I saw that the sand was only a light covering over more limbs and faces. A large stone turned out to be a stomach. I could see a man’s head, a woman’s naked breast, the feet of a child. I was walking on dozens of corpses which were moving beneath my feet.

His history of a war now some years over still has great relevance for today. For example, the leader of the Israeli army units who surrounded the refugee camps and sent in the Phalange to murder the “terrorists” therein was Ariel Sharon, the current prime minister of Israel. Ariel Sharon was later found by a (deeply flawed) Israeli commission to be “indirectly responsible” for the massacres, and he was dismissed from his post as Defense Minister, which didn’t stop him from capturing the highest office in the country years later.

*** Terrorists

Fisk talks a lot about the use of the term “terrorists” to describe one’s enemies:

Terrorists, terrorists, terrorists. The word was ubiquitous, obsessive, cancerous in its own special way. Terrorists were animals. Animals had to be put down. The PLO was a terrorist organization. Terrorists, terrorists, terrorists. Israel radio used the word in every broadcast, almost every sentence.

He examines how the word is used by Israel and by the Western powers and media to describe groups who are opposed to Israeli or Western interests, but not applied to groups who just as easily qualify for the word who are working for Israeli or Western interests. For example, PLO gunmen were called terrorists but gunmen from the same right-wing Christian militias that murdered Palestinians in Sabra and Chatila were not. He tells the story of getting shelled by an Israeli gunboat as he drove up a highway in Lebanon (the book has many harrowing accounts of great personal risk and danger) and then reading the paper the next day to see a report filed by a colleague of his in Tel Aviv that the Israeli navy had shelled “terrorist targets” on the road in Lebanon, presumably referring to him!

He calls the increasing use of the word terrorism “so all-pervasive, so ominous and dangerous”:

In one sense, it was the most frightening aspect of the war. For who were the terrorists in Beirut? The Palestinian guerilla fighters who had slaughtered their Christian opponents in the civil war? The Phalangist gunmen who had slaughtered so many Palestinian civilians and who were now allied to the Israelis? The Israeli soldiers and pilots who killed thousands of innocent people while pursuing the ghost of ‘international terrorism’?

*** The Israeli Invasion

The Israeli invasion of Lebanon forms the centerpiece of the book, I think. Here is an excerpt:

Then, just after four-thirty in the afternoon, a series of jets which we had seen twisting around the sky above west Beirut suddenly power-dived across the city, sweeping in a crescendo of sound over the rooftops of apartment blocks, scattering phosphorus balloons to protect themselves from heat-seeking missiles. From Fakhani, there now rose an even larger tower of smoke than we had seen from the hillside on our way back from the Bekaa. A pink flickering passed across the underside of this smoke, followed by five tremendous explosions so powerful that streets and buildings three miles away literally shook with the blast. For one extraordinary moment, the sky was filled with sharply outlined, bright green fire as the PLO’s anti-aircraft shells burst vainly behind the retreating planes. The Israelis were no demolishing whole apartment blocks in their raids, their bombs exploding deep inside the buildings around Fakhani and pancaking thousands of tons of concrete floors, balconies and stairways onto their inhabitants.

Fisk talks about the tactics of the PLO as well. He recounts how the PLO would place artillery and anti-aircraft weapons next to hospitals and schools, or even on their roofs, putting civilians in great jeopardy. This invasion was extremely hard on the Lebanese. Israel invaded Lebanon to get the Palestinians, and the Palestinians fought back. Little concern was shown to the Lebanese by either side.

Fisk recounts finding over 100 bodies in the basement of a school in Beirut. As it turns out, a Palestinian guerilla had parked an anti-aircraft gun next to the school:

… a PLO guerilla had driven that anti-aircraft gun here and fired at the Israeli planes that were roaming the dark skies above the city. He may have been unaware that the school contained more than 100 refugees, although this is highly unlikely. His disregard was criminal, like that of the Israeli who killed him. For an Israeli pilot had presumably seen the gun flashes and decided to bomb the artillery. The Israeli could not have seen what he was aiming at; he could have had no idea how many civilians were in the area. Nor could he have cared. For if the Israelis were really worried about civilian casualties, they would never have dropped ordnance at night into a densely populated city. But the pilot was fighting ‘terrorists’.

He also interviews Yasser Arafat, in an interview that must be about 25 years old now. Once again, it retains its relevance. He presses Arafat on the deaths of Israeli civilians as a result of Palestinian attacks in Israel:

Arafat started muttering about “rumours”. He wanted to say lies but the word kept coming out as “rumours”.

Would he not agree that Israeli civilians were killed?

“Rumours.”

But children had been killed in a recent Palestinian attack.

“Another big rumour!” Arafat was shouting. Labadi began to lean forward across the table in case his carefully arranged interview got out of hand.

Did the Palestinians not have difficulty in justifying certain attacks?

“Always they [the Israelis] are preparing communiqués about small children and old women.”

But such attacks did happen, did they not?

“It doesn’t! They don’t! Definite!” Arafat’s eyes were running round the room…

*** The Qana Massacre

Fisk sticks to the truth in his accounts, and that is what I think is most important. He writes passionately but he does not let his passion influence his account of events. So though he writes the truth about Palestinians in Lebanon, he also writes the truth about the Israelis. And it turns out that what the Israelis committed there is far worse.

He writes of arriving at the UN base in Qana shortly after it was shelled by the Israeli military. As it turns out, he was very close to the base when the shells started falling and arrived only moments after the attack:

They were the gates of hell. Blood poured through them, in streams, in torrents. I could smell it. It washed over our shoes and stuck to them like glue, a viscous mass that turned from crimson to brown to black. The tarmac of the UN compound was slippery with blood, with pieces of flesh and entrails. There were legs and arms, babies without heads, old men’s heads without bodies, lying in the smouldering wreckage of a canteen. On the top of a burning tree hung two parts of a man’s body. They were on fire. In front of me, on the steps of the barracks, a girl sat holding a man with grey hair, her arm round his shoulder, rocking the corpse back and forth in her arms. His eyes were staring at her. She was keening and weeping and crying, over and over: ‘My father, my father.’

This is the beginning of Fisk’s chapter on the Qana Massacre, where Israeli troops shelled a United Nations compound in Lebanon that was full of refugees, a horrifying chapter whose information I have confirmed with online sources. He writes a damning account of the incident, recounting how the Israelis had used helicopter reconnaissance before the shelling as well as a pilotless reconnaissance aircraft called an MK. He tells the first-hand witness accounts of the people who saw the aircraft surveying the area before and during the shelling. Witnesses also claimed that the weight of fire, which was not directly on the compound, shifted halfway through the bombardment to more directly target the UN compound.

Of course, the Israelis denied that they had done this on purpose. They said it was an accident, and they denied that they had a reconnaissance aircraft in the area before or during the incident, a crucial point when deciding culpability. But Fisk is resourceful. He had heard that a UN soldier had videotape of the incident that had been sealed by the United Nations, and he sought to get his hands on it. A courageous soldier then contacts him and arranges to meet, giving him a copy of the tape that he had made before it was sealed.

The tape clearly shows the reconnaissance aircraft flying over the compound during the bombardment. In other words, the Israelis knew full well what they were doing. But, of course, they changed their story. After the pictures were splashed over newspaper pages, they claimed that yes, they had a plane their, but it was on “another mission”.

*** Summary

Pity the Nation is not all gruesome. There are moments of beauty, from descriptions of the mountains to the sea to the great cedars of Lebanon. There are many moments of suspense and tension as well, as Fisk recounts his narrow escapes from Israeli shellfire, an incredible kidnap attempt in the streets of Beirut that had him driving like a madman to avoid the clutches of a shadowy group not unlike Zarqawi’s group of beheaders in Iraq, and other moments of courage and great fear.

He also talks about his profession and his, and other journalists’, responsibility to tell the truth and to inform the readers. He criticizes the journalists in Beirut who only reported from the hotels they stayed in for fear of getting kidnapped or killed, getting their information from outside sources and the Lebanese who worked in the hotel, yet never letting on to their readers that they were not actually roaming the country. (He criticizes reporters in Iraq today for the same thing). He talks about bias in the media and about the charge of anti-Semitism so often leveled at people who criticize the state of Israel.

There’s no doubt that reading this book is a bit of a project, but I can whole-heartedly recommend it. It’s interesting, passionate, disturbing, informative, horrifying, exciting and tragic. Most of all, it’s a heartfelt account of the pain and suffering so many people went through there, a terrible cost that we are so unacquainted with. We ought to remember what happened in Lebanon, because it teaches us about what is happening today, and what will continue to happen if we keep on letting it.