The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  When a society is dispossessed, when the injustices thrust upon it appear insoluble, when the “enemy” is all-powerful, when one’s own people are bestialised as insects, cockroaches, “two-legged beasts,” then the mind moves beyond reason. It becomes fascinated in two senses: with the idea of an afterlife and with the possibility that this belief will somehow provide a weapon of more than nuclear potential. When the United States was turning Beirut into a NATO base in 1983, and using its firepower against Muslim guerrillas in the mountains to the east, Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Baalbek were promising that God would rid Lebanon of the American presence. I wrote at the time—not entirely with my tongue in my cheek—that this was likely to be a titanic battle: U.S. technology versus God. Who would win? Then on 23 October 1983 a lone suicide bomber drove a truckload of explosives into the U.S. Marine compound at Beirut airport and killed 241 American servicemen in six seconds. This, I am sure, was the suicide bomber to whom Nasrallah was referring, the one who drives into the military base “smiling and happy.” I later interviewed one of the few surviving American marines to have seen the bomber. “All I can remember,” he told me, “was that the guy was smiling.”

  I spent months studying the suiciders of Lebanon. They were mostly single men, occasionally women, often the victims of Israeli torture or the relatives of family members who had been killed in battle with Israel. They might receive their orders while at prayer in the masjid or mosque in their south Lebanese villages. The imam would be told to use a certain phrase in his sermon—a reference to roses or gardens or water or a kind of tree. The cleric would not understand the purpose of these words, but in his congregation a young man would know that his day of “martyrdom” had arrived.

  In Gaza, even before the Oslo agreement, I discovered an almost identical pattern. As in Lebanon, the would-be “martyr” would spend his last night reading the Koran. He would never say a formal goodbye to his parents. But he would embrace his mother and father and tell them not to cry if he were one day to die. Then he would set off to collect his explosives. Just as Mohamed Nasr had done in Qabatya.101

  Yet there is a terrible difference with the suicide bombers of Palestine. However terrifying, the Japanese kamikaze—“divine wind”—pilots of the Second World War attacked battleships and aircraft carriers, not hospitals. The Lebanese largely followed this priority: they usually went for military targets. I was puzzled why the Lebanese should have been queuing to watch Pearl Harbor when it opened in Beirut in July 2001—until I saw the young men studying the cinema stills of equally young Japanese pilots tying their “martyrdom” bandanas around their foreheads. In similar fashion, often with headbands containing a Koranic quotation, the Hizballah targeted the Israeli army and its militia allies. They blew up entire barracks and killed soldiers by the score. The Palestinians learned from all this. But more and more, their suicide bombers—including the women bombers who emerged in more recent years—have targeted Israeli civilians. A battleship or an Israeli tank is one thing; a three-year-old waiting for his young mother to cut his pizza for him quite another.102

  Amnesty International devoted a whole report to the targeting of civilians by Palestinian suicide bombers. Between September 2000 and July 2002, at least 350 civilians, most of them Israeli, had been killed in over 128 attacks by Palestinian armed groups or individuals. “Civilians should never be the focus of attacks, not in the name of security and not in the name of liberty,” Amnesty said. “We call on the leadership of all Palestinian armed groups to cease attacking civilians, immediately and unconditionally.” The oldest victim of a suicide attack, according to Amnesty, was Chanagh Rogan, killed in a Passover bombing at a Netanya hotel on 27 March 2002. She was ninety years old.103

  I called a Palestinian friend in Ramallah to ask about this, to ask how young Palestinians could rejoice in the streets at the pizzeria massacre. She expressed her abhorrence at what happened—she was genuine in this—but tried to explain that Palestinians had suffered so many civilian casualties since the first intifada began that they found joy in any suffering inflicted on their enemy. There was a feeling, she said, that “they should suffer too”; which, of course—and the principle applies, though not the historical parallel—is exactly how Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris’s area bombing of German civilians was explained in Britain. They should suffer too. And save for a few souls like the bishop of Chichester, blitzed Britons supported Harris all the way. But I go back to my own reaction when I reached the blitzed Sbarro pizza house. Unforgivable. I ask again: What did that eyeless, dead Israeli child ever do to the Palestinians? Could not the Palestinian bomber, in his last moments on earth, recognise this child as his daughter, his baby sister, his youngest cousin? Alas, no. He was too far down the road to his own death, too buried in his own people’s tragedy. His was not an act of “mindless terror,” the words Israeli spokesmen use as they try to deceive both the world and their own people. He was the logical product of a people who have been crushed, dispossessed, cheated, tortured and killed in terrible numbers. The pressure cooker of the West Bank was his sauna. And he passed through the door.104

  If only—how often we use that phrase about the Middle East—if only the United States administration had seriously addressed the Arab–Israeli dispute in 2001, instead of wasting its energies in the creation of another war in the region, how much might have been gained, how much suffering alleviated, how much the pain of future history might have been spared us. In February 2001, Palestinians and Israelis were fighting a civil war. And what did the United States do? It bombed Iraq. What did the new secretary of state Colin Powell do? He arrived in the Middle East not to confront the furnace of the war in Israel and “Palestine,” but to “re-energise” sanctions against Iraq and reforge the anti-Iraqi Arab coalition that ceased to exist more than a decade before. There’s a story—probably apocryphal—that as the Red Army stormed into Berlin in 1945, German civil servants were still trying to calculate the Third Reich’s paperclip ration for 1946. Powell was now the paperclip man.

  Already he had sent instructions to U.S. embassies in the region that they were no longer to refer to the occupied Palestinian territories as “occupied.” They were henceforth to be referred to as “disputed.” And immediately the American media—and quite a number of British newspapers—fell into line. I recall a phone interview with the BBC World Service in early 2001—they had called me on my mobile while I was sitting in a traffic jam in East Beirut—in which I was “twinned” with an Israeli government spokesman in Jerusalem. And the moment I referred to the “Israeli-occupied territories,” an Israeli voice boomed back: “But Mr. Fisk, the territories are not occupied by Israel!” I waited for a second. Aha, I countered, so you mean that the soldiers who stopped me on the road between Ramallah and Jenin last week were Swiss! Or were they Burmese? But this was no laughing matter. An occupied territory might generate violent resistance which could demand international legitimacy. But violence used over a “dispute”—a real estate problem, something that might be settled in the courts—was obviously illegitimate, criminal, mindless; indeed, it could be portrayed as the product of that well-worn libel, “mindless violence.” Powell—and the Israelis, of course—wanted to delegitimise the intifada.

  All of this, however, obscured a momentous change within Arab society: the one great transition I have witnessed in almost thirty years reporting the Middle East. When I first visited the West Bank scarcely nine years after the 1967 war, there was in the occupied territories an Israeli-controlled Palestinian police militia, an army of collaborators—they even wore black berets—who “controlled” a supine and humiliated Palestinian people. North of the Israeli border, a Lebanese population lived in fear of Israeli military invasion. Israeli troops had only to cross the frontier to send a quarter of a million Lebanese civilians fleeing in panic to Beirut. To the east, millions of Iraqis lived in grovelling obedience to the Baath party.

  Today, the Arabs are no longer afraid. The regimes ar
e as timid as ever, loyal and supposedly “moderate” allies obeying Washington’s orders, taking their massive subventions from the United States, holding their preposterous elections, shaking in fear lest their people at last decide that “regime change”—from within their societies, not the Western version imposed by invasion—is overdue. It is the Arabs as a people—brutalised and crushed for decades by corrupt dictators—who are no longer running away. The Lebanese in Beirut, under siege by Israel, learned to refuse to obey the invader’s orders. The Hizballah proved that the mighty Israeli army could be humbled. The two Palestinian intifadas showed that Israel could no longer impose its will on an occupied land without paying a terrible price. The Iraqis first rose up against Saddam and then, after the Anglo-American invasion, against the occupation armies. No longer did the Arabs run away. The old Sharon policy into which the American neo-conservatives so fatally bought before the 2003 invasion of Iraq—of beating the Arabs till they come to heel or until they “behave” or until an Arab leader can be found “to control his own people”—is now as bankrupt as the Arab regimes that continue to work for the world’s only superpower.

  This is not to recommend the social and military “people’s” revolutions which have occurred in the Middle East. But in Lebanon, “Palestine” and Iraq, the suicide bomber has become the symbol of this new fearlessness. Once an occupied people have lost their fear of death, the occupier is doomed. Once a man or woman stops being afraid, he or she cannot be made to fear again. Fear is not a product that can be re-injected into a population through re-invasion or harsher treatment or air attacks or walls or torture.

  As the wreckage of the Oslo agreement rusted away, the once viable alternatives were also being slowly dismissed. For years, critics of the Oslo agreement pointed to the vital, undeniable UN Security Council Resolution 242. But now even this alternative is losing its appeal. More and more among Palestinians I hear the words that so frighten Israelis: that they must have “all” of Palestine, not just the lands taken by Israel in 1967. In Gaza in the autumn of 2000, I actually encountered this transition in progress. A Palestinian computer trainee began by telling me that UN Resolution 242 was the only path to real compromise and peace. But by the end of his increasingly bitter peroration, he began talking about Haifa and Acre and Ashkelon, cities which are in Israel, not in the nation of “Palestine” that Arafat was prepared to accept.

  And all the while, reading back through my own reports as I write this book, I come across frightening little portents. “Do the Americans realise the catastrophe that is about to overwhelm the region?” I find myself asking in a feature filed to The Independent on 25 February 2001. “Have they any idea of the elemental forces that may be unleashed in the coming months?” Again, I ask myself why I wrote these words. Less than six and a half months before those elemental forces did explode, what did I expect? And I remember that friend of mine in Ramallah, the one who tried to explain the Palestinian reaction to suicide bombers by saying that Palestinians felt that their enemies “should suffer too.”

  And so, as I pull my files from the shelves, my notebooks from Beirut and Israel and “Palestine,” I hear the clock ticking towards 11 September 2001, the calendar spitting out the dates. I have a hard copy of a long report filed from Jerusalem on 28 August 2001. There are just two weeks left to go.

  THERE ISN’T A SCRAP OF INAS Abu Zeid left. She was only seven and the “martyrs” posters already going up around Khan Younis show her to have been a delicate-featured girl. But there isn’t a trace of her amid the fragments of corrugated iron and plastic, nor in the soft brown Gaza sand. Inas had been atomised, turned to dust in a millisecond. “I will show you where the missile came from,” a boy tells me, pointing far across the sand to where a few miserable concrete huts, with rag windows and flapping, sand-caked washing, stand near the horizon. “The Israelis fired from behind those houses. It was a tank.”

  Was it so? I say this to myself, not as a question but as another of those remarks you find yourself making in Gaza. Lie? Truth? They matter when a war has grown so brutal, so cruel as this. Inas’s father, Sulieman, died with her. So did his six-year-old son, also named Sulieman. I don’t think I’ve come across a war in which children are killed so quickly. If it’s not an Israeli baby in a Palestinian sniper’s crosshairs, it’s two pesky Palestinian kids stupid enough to stand outside a Hamas office when the Israelis have chosen to blow the place away, or schoolkids who decide to take an early afternoon pizza, or Inas and Sulieman junior who got in the way or—if Hamas was lying and the Israelis are telling the truth—were turned to wet dust by their father’s bomb.

  The Palestinian Authority has made a clean sweep of the Abu Zeids’ backyard. If he was making a bomb, it has disappeared, like Inas. I poke around amid the desert trash. How could an Israeli missile fly over the other huts, turn the corner outside the Abu Zeids’ backyard, pass over the yard walls and then dip below the plastic roof to blast the family apart? But who would make a bomb with his two tiny children standing next to him? Or maybe there was a bomb hidden at the back of the yard and Inas or Sulieman Junior touched it.

  A crowd has gathered around us, unsmiling, suspicious. It’s not so easy now to investigate these deaths. “I’m Norwegian but Palestinians have started to look at me in the street and talk about me as if I’m an American,” a smiling aid worker says to me. “They blame the Americans for what the Israelis do. And now they blame the Europeans because we do nothing to help them.” Which is exactly what happened in Lebanon. The Norwegian lady is right. I was watched as I walked through the street in Gaza City, scrutinised by youths in Rafah. At Kalandia—just outside Jerusalem, on the road to Ramallah—a Palestinian boy of perhaps twelve looks at my car’s Israeli registration plates, picks up an iron bar and smashes it as hard as he can onto the back mudguard. Two men in a truck—we are all waiting at one of Israel’s humiliating checkpoints—jeer at me.

  Everywhere, you notice the signs of collapse, of incipient anarchy. The Gaza wall murals used to depict Yassir Arafat’s beaming, ugly mug and pictures of the Al-Aqsa mosque. Now they are filled with exploding buses and dead children and Israeli soldiers on their backs with blood squirting from their heads. “They don’t even talk about Arafat any more,” a Palestinian café owner says to me as three horse-drawn water carts clop lazily past us. “There’s only one joke going the rounds about him. Arafat is at Camp David and the Israelis are demanding that he ‘ends the violence.’ And Arafat replies: ‘I can’t end the violence until I can stop my lips from trembling.’ ” Arafat’s growing senility is a source of deepening concern. Not far from Hebron, I meet a prominent Palestinian figure, important enough to require anonymity, who shakes his head in despair. “What can Arafat do now? His marriage is in bits—he’s only seen his wife for three minutes in the past ten months. His child needs a father and he’s not there. And he’s allowing the whole place to tribalise and disintegrate. There is complete disintegration here.”

  It’s true. On the road south of Nablus, a yellow Palestinian taxi is hit by a stone—apparently thrown by an Israeli driver in an oncoming car, or that’s what the Israeli cops thought—and careers off the road. Its driver, Kemal Mosalem, is killed outright. But when his body arrives at the Rafidiyeh hospital, his family believe he has been killed by a rival Palestinian clan led by Ali Frej. The Frej family then ambush the grieving Mosalems with Kalashnikov rifles. Among the four Palestinian dead is Ali Frej and a Fatah official who had been part of Jibril Rajoub’s local “preventive security” unit. Six others are wounded. These are Arafat’s people. They are killing each other. And Arafat remains silent.

  Yet here’s the thing. Ariel Sharon keeps saying that Arafat is a murderer, a super-terrorist, the leader of “international terror,” linked to Osama bin Laden, a man who gives orders for the murder of kids in pizza parlours. And the Israeli public are buying this, their journalists front-paging it, their people repeating it, over and over. Talking to Israelis—in taxis, on aeroplane
s, in cafés—I keep hearing the same stuff. Terror, murder, filth. Like a cassette. Where have I heard this before?

  In Gaza, I cannot fail to remember Beirut in 1982. Gaza now is a miniature Beirut. Under Israeli siege, struck by F-16s and tank fire and gunboats, starved and often powerless—there are now six-hour electricity cuts every day in Gaza—it’s as if Arafat and Sharon are replaying their bloody days in Lebanon. Sharon used to call Arafat a mass murderer back then. It’s important not to become obsessed during wars. But Sharon’s words were like an old, miserable film I had seen before. Every morning in Jerusalem, I pick up the Jerusalem Post. And there on the front page, as usual, will be another Sharon diatribe. PLO murderers. Palestinian Authority terror. Murderous terrorists.

  Each day I travel to the scene of new Israeli incursions. The Israelis bomb Palestinian police stations, Palestinian security annexes, Palestinian police checkpoints. Why the police? I drive round the Gaza Strip with an old friend from the Beirut war, a European aid worker who still bears the webbed scar of a Lebanese bullet in his arm and stomach—the round punctured his spleen and liver. “Now if you look to your right, Bob, there’s the police station that the Israelis bombed two weeks ago,” he says. There’s a mass of burned-out rooms and a crumpled office. “And just round the corner here is the police post the Israelis hit last week.” More trashed buildings. “And down that road you can just see the Palestinian offices that were hit in July.” After the early raids, the Palestinians would do a quick rebuilding and repainting job. Now they no longer bother. But how can Arafat “arrest the murderers” if the Israelis are going to destroy all his police stations?

  There was a story told to me by one of the men investigating Sharon’s responsibility for the Sabra and Chatila massacre, and the story is that the then Israeli defence minister, before he sent his Phalangist allies into the camps, announced that it was Palestinian “terrorists” who had murdered their newly assassinated leader, president-elect Bashir Gemayel. Sharon was to say later that he never dreamed the Phalange would massacre the Palestinians. But how could he say that if he claimed earlier that the Palestinians killed the leader of the Phalange? In reality, no Palestinians were involved in Gemayel’s death. It might seem odd in this new war to be dwelling about that earlier atrocity. I am fascinated by the language. Murderers, terrorists. That’s what Sharon said then, and it’s what he says now. Did he really make that statement in 1982? I begin to work the phone from Jerusalem, calling up Associated Press bureaus that might still have their files from nineteen years ago. He would have made that speech—if indeed he used those words— some time on 15 September 1982.