The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  Moyne’s murder prompted Churchill to reflect that “if our dreams for Zionism should be dissolved in the smoke of the revolvers of assassins and if our efforts for its future should provoke a new wave of banditry worthy of the Nazi Germans, many persons like myself will have to reconsider the position that we have maintained so firmly for such a long time.” Yet in 1975 the two murderers, Eliyahu Hakim and Eliyahu Bet Zuri, were given a state funeral in Israel with a public lying-in-state attended by the prime minister and a military funeral attended by the deputy prime minister and two chief rabbis. Moyne’s son was to ask former Haganah officer David Hacohen: “Why then did your people murder my father? . . . In the end Palestine was partitioned and you are now consolidating your state on the basis of that partition, yet none of you has been assassinated for accepting this solution.”

  This question—of honouring one’s own murderers while condemning the other side’s killers as “terrorists”—is one that lies at the core of so many modern conflicts, yet one that both the Israelis and the Palestinians have failed to understand. Equally, the 1948 war threw up extraordinary portents of other, later, Middle East wars—of events that we regard as causes of present danger but which have clearly been a feature of conflict in the region for longer than we like to imagine.

  In 1997, a Palestinian humanitarian group in Scotland decided to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the UN Partition resolution, the end of the British Mandate, the Israeli war of independence and the Palestinian nakba by publishing a day-by-day account of events in Palestine throughout 1948, largely drawn from the pages of the Scotsman—a project that sometimes yielded devastating results. Here, for example, is a dispatch “from a Special Correspondent recently returned from the Middle East,” which appeared in the paper on 13 September 1948:

  A new danger to law and order is emerging in the Middle East. It comes from a loosely formed association of Arab terrorist gangs of hot-headed xenophobic young men who have sworn to rid their countries of all Westerners and of course particularly of British and Americans. Open threats have already been made to Europeans living in Damascus, Baghdad and Cairo—oil men mostly—that if they continue to have business relations with the Jews they will be killed . . . The backbone of this new terrorist organisation is provided by young Palestinian Arabs. They have seen their country overrun . . . and have lost everything they possessed—homes, property, money, jobs; they have nothing further to lose. They feel they have been let down by the British and the Americans, by the United Nations, and also, to some extent, by the other Arab countries. They now realise there is a grave danger that the present situation in Palestine, with the Jews in total possession of the best part of the country, will be generally recognised and legalised . . .

  Another disturbing light into the future was cast in an article by Patrick O’Donovan which had appeared in The Scotsman on 14 July 1948:

  The war [of independence] began as a simple war of survival—or so it seemed to the Jews. There was a set of figures that every little sunburnt child knew by heart—“700,000 Jews against 30 million Arabs plus the support of Britain.” It seemed a victory every time a Jewish settlement survived an attack . . . but the Arabs proved less effective. And the Jewish consent to the continuation of the truce was flouted. (It makes no difference that the consent was certainly given in the knowledge that the Arabs would first refuse.) The Jews have been freed from any obligation to hold their hand. If Count Bernadotte’s81 efforts fail, then the Jews will wage a war which frankly will aim at acquiring a maximum of Arab land, much of which will be retained because it will be empty of Arabs and occupied by Jews . . . In Haifa . . . they have opened a ghetto for the Arabs. Four of the meaner streets have been wired off and, just like the Jews in Medieval Cracow, Christian and Muslim Arabs must sleep and live here under guard. Business men can apply for passes if they wish to emerge during the day . . . it would be hard to visualise a more subdued and frightened population than the Arabs left in Israel . . .

  Although the extent of Palestinian dispossession often appears to be a newly discovered fact of Middle East history—at least until “new historians” like Benny Morris researched Israeli government archives of the time—the British press reported the nakba in graphic detail. On 25 October, for instance, The Times reported from Beersheba that:

  The Arab villages are deserted, their miserable houses have been looted, and many are burnt. The inhabitants, estimated to be about 20,000— a number which has been swollen considerably by refugees from the north—have fled, and no one knows, or apparently cares, where they have gone. It is obvious that most have fled in panic, leaving behind their cloaks, sheepskins, and blankets so necessary if they are to survive the cold nights of the Hebron hills . . . in Beersheba itself, once a thriving centre for camel trading, a few inhabitants remain, and at present members of the Israeli Army are systematically looting those houses which survived the bombing. It is perhaps an ancient and tacitly accepted rule of war that troops should make themselves comfortable at the expense of the vanquished, but it is difficult to excuse the behaviour of some, who ridicule Islamic devotions in a desecrated mosque . . . holy books have been torn and strewn upon the floor . . . Such a scene is disappointing to those who had gratefully observed the care taken by the Israeli Army to guarantee the sanctity of Christian holy places elsewhere, and by those correspondents who today visited the Imperial war cemetery just outside the town. In spite of the difficulties under which they worked, the Arab caretakers to the last obviously attended the graves of the British and Australian soldiers who died here in 1917, and English flowers are still blooming in desert sands.

  Desecration and murder were not tools of one side in this war. When the Israelis captured East Jerusalem in 1967, they discovered that Jordanian troops had used Jewish gravestones for lavatory floors. Ambushes and killings cut down many Jewish civilians, although Israel’s advance into the Arab villages of Galilee was accompanied, as contemporary research in Israel has proved, by massacres and—sometimes—the rape of young Arab women. But if Israeli historians have proved the truth of this, Arab historians have remained largely silent about their own side’s iniquities in this and other wars.

  In my book on the Lebanon war, I have written at great length about the Palestinian dispossession of 1948, the subsequent history of those Palestinian homes that were vacated by their fearful inhabitants and the fate of the 750,000 Palestinian refugees and their millions of descendants today, many of whom rot in the squalor of camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and in the occupied West Bank and Syria.82 Following their travail, the task of reporting their hopeless political leadership, their victimisation—most cruelly demonstrated when they were turned into the aggressors by an all-powerful Israel and, later, an even more hegemonic United States—and their pathetic, brave and often callous attempts to seek the world’s sympathy has been one of the more depressing experiences in journalism. The more we wrote about the Palestinian dispossession, the less effect it seemed to have and the more we were abused as journalists.

  The 1956 Suez war, the 1967 Six Day War—and Nasser’s blind folly in taking on the might of the Israeli army—the 1973 Middle East conflict and the 1982 invasion of Lebanon all further crushed the Palestinians, indirectly and, usually, directly. In 1967 the West Bank and Gaza fell under Israeli occupation, so that Israel at last had the entire former British Mandate of Palestine under its control, the “Palestine” in which Balfour had promised support for a “national home” for the Jews—and Balfour, let us remember, made no mention of how much of Palestine an Israeli state could have. The Arab “friends” of Palestine turned out to be as woeful in their military as they were in their political ambitions. Fighting with numerically overwhelming odds on their side, the Arab armies were repeatedly mauled by the superior firepower, ruthless tactics and morale of the Israelis, an advantage reinforced by every Israeli’s understanding that he or she could never afford to lose a single war. The Egyptian army’s initial success in 1973—Arabs cou
ld not at first believe the newsreel film of captured Israeli soldiers on the Bar Lev line—was later lost to Egyptian military indecision. Only the Lebanese Hizballah, with its Iranian and Syrian support, proved that Israel could be beaten. Israel’s military retreat out of its occupation zone in Lebanon in 2000 and the dismantlement of its torture prison at Khiam remains one of the most significant military events in the Arab–Israeli war—although the Israelis, being the losers, have never chosen to regard it as such and the Americans, as their friends, refused to learn its lessons.

  For throughout these long years, there was one outstanding, virtually unchanging phenomenon which ensured that the Middle East balance of power remained unchanged: America’s unwavering, largely uncritical, often involuntary support for Israel. Israel’s “security”—or supposed lack thereof—became the yardstick for all negotiations, all military threats and all wars. The injustice done to the Palestinians, the dispossession, the massacres, not only the loss of that part of Palestine which became Israel—and is internationally recognised as such—but also the occupation of the remainder of the Mandate territory and the bloody suppression of any and all manifestation of Palestinian resistance: all this had to take second place to Israel’s security and the civilised values and democracy for which Israel was widely promoted. Her army, which often behaved with cruelty and undiscipline, was to be regarded as an exemplar of “purity of arms” and those of us who witnessed Israel’s killing of civilians were to be abused as liars, anti-Semites or friends of “terrorism.”

  Report the wanton use of violence by Palestinians—aircraft hijackings, attacks on illegal Jewish settlements and then, inevitably, suicide bombings on the innocent, the executioner with explosives strapped to his or her body—and that was “terror” pure and simple, dangerously present but comfortably isolated from reason, cause or history. As long as they were accused of crimes that had been committed because they hated Israel or hated Jews or were brought up as anti-Semites (despite being Semites themselves), or paid to carry out “terror,” or because they hated “democracy” or represented “evil”—most of these explanations would later be adopted by the Americans about their Arab enemies—then Palestinians were outside the boundaries of reason. They couldn’t be talked to, could not be negotiated with. You cannot “negotiate with terrorists.”

  “Terrorism” is a word that has become a plague on our vocabulary, the excuse and reason and moral permit for state-sponsored violence— our violence—which is now used on the innocent of the Middle East ever more outrageously and promiscuously. Terrorism, terrorism, terrorism. It has become a full stop, a punctuation mark, a phrase, a speech, a sermon, the be-all and end-all of everything that we must hate in order to ignore injustice and occupation and murder on a mass scale. Terror, terror, terror, terror. It is a sonata, a symphony, an orchestra tuned to every television and radio station and news agency report, the soap-opera of the Devil, served up on prime-time or distilled in wearyingly dull and mendacious form by the right-wing “commentators” of the American east coast or the Jerusalem Post or the intellectuals of Europe. Strike against Terror. Victory over Terror. War on Terror. Everlasting War on Terror. Rarely in history have soldiers and journalists and presidents and kings aligned themselves in such thoughtless, unquestioning ranks. In August 1914, the soldiers thought they would be home by Christmas. Today, we are fighting for ever. The war is eternal. The enemy is eternal, his face changing on our screens. Once he lived in Cairo and sported a moustache and nationalised the Suez Canal. Then he lived in Tripoli and wore a ridiculous military uniform and helped the IRA and bombed American bars in Berlin. Then he wore a Muslim imam’s gown and ate yoghurt in Tehran and planned Islamic revolution. Then he wore a white gown and lived in a cave in Afghanistan and then he wore another silly moustache and resided in a series of palaces around Baghdad. Terror, terror, terror. Finally, he wore a kuffiah headdress and outdated Soviet-style military fatigues, his name was Yassir Arafat, and he was the master of world terror and then a super-statesman and then, again, a master of terror, linked by his Israeli enemies to the terror-Meister of them all, the one who lived in the Afghan cave.

  Here, personified, was everything loyal and everything miserable about the Palestinian dream. I have a tape recording of Arafat, sitting with me on a cold, dark mountainside outside the northern Lebanese port of Tripoli in 1983, where the old man—he was always called the old man, long before he was elderly—was under siege by the Syrian army, another of the Arab “brothers” who wanted to lead the Palestinian cause and ended up fighting Palestinians rather than Israelis. Even worse, the Syrians had suborned some of “their” Palestinians to join them in the siege. Just a year before, Arafat and his PLO had withstood an eighty-eight-day siege in the Lebanese capital of Beirut by the Israeli army, led by Defence Minister Ariel Sharon. Now Arafat’s fortunes have crumbled again. The tape hisses and occasionally, far away, shells thump into a hillside. I play it again, listening to the wind cracking past the microphone:

  ARAFAT: I will not be away from my freedom fighters while they are facing death and dangers from death . . . It is my duty to be beside my freedom fighters and my officers and my soldiers.

  FISK: A year ago, you and I talked in west Beirut. Here we are on a windy hilltop outside Tripoli, fifty miles further away from the border of Israel, or the border of Palestine, and people within Fatah are rebelling.

  ARAFAT: You see, I give you another proof that we are a nut that is not easy to be cracked. I hope that you still remember what Sharon had mentioned in the beginning of his invasion. He was dreaming that within three or five days he would liquidate or smash the PLO, our people, our freedom fighters—and here we are. The siege of Beirut, the battles of the south of Lebanon, this miracle, eighty-eight days, the longest Arab–Israeli war— and after that we have this war of attrition against the Israeli army, not only the Palestinians—definitely—we and our allies—our allies, the Lebanese—are participating in this war of attrition and we are proud— I am proud—that I have this brave alliance.

  FISK: Fifty miles further from Palestine!

  ARAFAT: What is the difference to be fifty miles or to be fifty thousand miles? One metre outside the border of Palestine, I am far away. FISK: But I think it was Mr. Sartawi83 who once said that if you keep having

  victories like last year’s victory in Beirut, you’ll hold your next year’s meeting of the Palestine National Council in Fiji . . .

  ARAFAT: Please! Please! Don’t give me this example! He is one of our brave martyrs, a brave martyr. But he was nervous [sic], he was not giving exact expression . . .

  Arafat was a dreamer, which was a popular characteristic for Palestinians who had only dreams to give them hope. If compromise was required of him, he could talk to Israelis, even hint at acceptance of the partition of Palestine. “I will accept even one square inch of my land,” he would say; geographic proportion was not his strong point. But if one of the PLO’s more outlandish satellites embarrassed the Palestinians—and the world—by murdering an innocent, Arafat would step in to prevent further tragedy, thus acquiring prestige from the crimes of his own organisation. Nowhere was this better illustrated than in the 1985 voyage of the Achille Lauro, an Italian cruise liner from which four teenage members of the “Palestine Liberation Front,” a PLO splinter outfit run by Mohamed Zeidan (Abul Abbas), intended to storm ashore at Haifa when the vessel called at the Israeli port, seize Israeli hostages and demand the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.

  Discovered by crew members before reaching Israel, the gunmen took over the ship, holding its 476 passengers and 80 crew at their mercy and then coldly murdering a sixty-nine-year-old crippled Jewish pensioner, Leon Klinghoffer, whose body was unceremoniously tipped over the side—still in his wheelchair—off the Syrian coast. Unaware of the murder, Arafat flew to Cairo to assume his usual pose of humanitarian leader. He ordered the hijackers to bring the Achille Lauro to Egypt and the first newspaper reports from Port Said—
including my own for the London Times—spoke of how Arafat had played “a major part in bringing about a peaceful conclusion to a crisis which had involved the United States, Syria and Egypt.” By the time the ship, lit up like a Christmas tree under the half-moon, steamed pompously into the Suez Canal before dawn, we all knew what had happened.

  Nicholas Veliotes, the American ambassador in Cairo, was emotionally talking to his diplomats about “those sons of bitches” who had murdered Klinghoffer as dawn revealed the big ship following a tiny pilot boat to take station off the colonial stucco offices of the Suez Canal Authority. When other foreign ambassadors emerged from the vessel after visiting their nationals among the passengers, the full story was revealed. “This American man was on the deck,” the Austrian ambassador, Franz Bogan, told us. “I don’t know why he was there. He was in a wheelchair. It was night. The captain told me that when he heard the shots, he leaned over the side of the bridge and saw one of the terrorists with blood on his clothes.”

  Then the sun rose across the canal and revealed a dark slick of what appeared to be paint down the side of the superstructure just below “A” deck: it was Leon Klinghoffer’s blood, sprayed across the side of the ship as the murdered old man was pushed overboard. Egypt put the hijackers, along with Abul Abbas, aboard an Egyptair Boeing and flew them out of a military base near Cairo en route to Tunis, where the PLO maintained its headquarters. But the Americans in turn hijacked the plane—“air piracy,” President Mubarak of Egypt angrily called what turned out to be another of Colonel Oliver North’s doomed adventures—and forced it to land at a NATO airfield in Italy. Here armed Italian troops at gunpoint prevented U.S. forces seizing the Palestinians; Abul Abbas was passed on to Yugoslavia. His later story was as intriguing as it was deadly. Ritually forgiven by the Israelis, he was allowed into Gaza after the 1993 Oslo agreement as a mini-statesman to vote in Palestinian elections but—ten years later—was living in Baghdad, where he was seized by U.S. troops who claimed, of course, that they had arrested “a major terrorist leader.” Months later, the Americans would admit, without any apology, that he had “died of natural causes” in their custody in Iraq.