4th ESTATE London
Review by Brian Tanguay
During his long career as a foreign correspondent, Robert Fisk won the Orwell Prize, the Martha Gellhorn Prize, and was seven times named the British Press International Journalist of the Year. He was one of the first reporters to enter the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camp in 1982 after more than one thousand civilians were massacred, and filed gut-wrenching reports on what he witnessed. It wasn’t the last time Fisk confronted unspeakable atrocities. In the 1990s he covered the Algerian civil war and the war in the Balkans, the first Gulf War, the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, and the 2011 Arab uprisings in Egypt and Syria.
Fisk also had the distinction of interviewing Osama bin Laden three times.
His home base was Beirut where he lived in the same apartment building for nearly forty-five years, paying rent to the same landlord. I read Fisk’s monumental opus, The Great War for Civilisation, in 2006, and The Age of the Warrior, a collection of dispatches, a few years later. Until his death in October 2020 Fisk was working on the final chapters of Night of Power. The focus is narrower than that of the Great War for Civilisation, largely confined to events of the 21st century, but the historical depth and understanding that set Fisk apart from most of his colleagues is still present. As Patrick Cockburn notes in his Foreword, Fisk was a historian of the present steeped in the past; few Western journalists could match his ability to place events in a larger context and a longer time frame.
Reading Night of Power after the 2023 Hamas attack on Israeli civilians, and the ferocious Israeli response in Gaza and Lebanon, along with the sudden collapse of the Assad regime in Syria is both frustrating and heart-breaking. I was struck by the sheer repetitiveness of Fisk’s reporting, particularly in regards to Gaza and Lebanon, and by its biting critique of most Western media coverage of the Middle East. The two are closely related.
Sort through the justifications offered by Israel when it attacked the small, narrow and sealed Gaza strip in 2009, 2012, 2014, 2022 and after the Hamas attack in 2023, and what emerges is as depressingly similar as the unconditional military, economic, and diplomatic cover Israel receives from the United States. Time after time it’s the unvarying story of disproportionate force and deliberate targeting of civilians and the infrastructure upon which they depend to survive; utter contempt for the UN and international law, and disregard for innocent people with no safe haven to flee to.
And the language — laced with hypocrisy and doublespeak — is the same. Every aggression by Israel is justified as a defensive measure. When civilians are killed it’s their fault because they live in close proximity to Hamas fighters, because they’re terrorist collaborators or human shields. When Israel bombs hospitals, schools, and UN facilities it’s because they harbor terrorists or weapons. Proof is not necessary, Israel’s claims are accepted at face value. Civilian deaths are dismissed with standard denials and blame is invariably shifted to others: Hamas or Hezbollah or Iran. When the UN or the International Criminal Court accuses Israel of war crimes or violations of the Geneva Conventions, Israel slams its accusers with allegations of anti-Semitism. Writing about this time-worn pattern, repeated because it works to silence condemnation, Fisk noted: “If Israel is accused of war crimes, it is the accusers who must be punished — not the criminals.”
“In the Western context,” he goes on to observe, “power and the media is about words — and the use of words. It is about semantics. It is about the employment of phrases and clauses and their origins. And it is about the misuse of history; and about our ignorance of history. More and more today, we journalists have become prisoners of the language of power.”
Justice and accountability are rare in the Middle East. Fisk was driven by an almost manic determination to remind his readers of the victims, to name them and document where they lived and how they died, by whose hand or deadly ordnance. Perpetrators of atrocities and torture don’t care about their victims. Who but journalists can give the dead the minimal dignity of being identified? Decades of reporting from war zones exacted a toll on Fisk, as he recounts in the Preface. Despairing that none of the risks he took or the work he produced had made a difference, he wondered if he should have stayed so long in the Middle East:
“I had witnessed such bloodbaths and massacres, seen so many mass graves, described so many tortures and executions, written so many times of the West’s oppression of the Muslim world. Had it really been wise — or sane — to have spent so long here?”
Fisk likened watching history at close range to reading a great, tragic novel, the drama and violence of which is so powerful that it cannot be set aside. Night of Power is painful to read but hard to put down. By the end one wishes, as Fisk did, that Western powers and their armies and resource extractors and devious diplomats would leave the Middle East alone.
