Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon

667 Pages·2002·14.26 MB·English

by  Robert Fisk

Pity the
Nation
THE ABDUCTION OF LEBANON
Robert Fisk
New American Edition
Pity the nation that is full of beliefs and empty of religion.
Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave, eats a bread it does not harvest, and
drinks a wine that flows not from its own wine-press.
Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero, and that deems the glittering conqueror
bountiful.
Pity the nation that despises a passion in its dream, yet submits in its awakening.
Pity the nation that raises not its voice save when it walks in a funeral, boasts not except
among its ruins, and will rebel not save when its neck is laid between the sword and the block.
Pity the nation whose statesman is a fox, whose philosopher is a juggler, and whose art is the
art of patching and mimicking.
Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpetings, and farewells him with hootings,
only to welcome another with trumpetings again.
Pity the nation whose sages are dumb with years and whose strong men are yet in the cradle.
Pity the nation divided into fragments, each fragment deeming itself a nation.
Khalil Gibran
The Garden of the Prophet
(London, Heinemann, 1934)

Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgements xv
Chronology of Events xvii
Principal Characters xx
Maps: The Divided City of Beirut
The Multinational Force in Beirut 1982-4 Lebanon
CHAPTER I Sepia Pictures on a Wall Szymon Darner and the ash pits of Auschwitz
CHAPTER 2 The Keys of Palestine The foundation of Israel and the Palestinian diaspora 12
CHAPTER 3 The Pied Piper of Damascus The rise and fall of the Lebanese state 48
CHAPTER 4 The Garden of Earthly Delights Syrians, Palestinians and Israelis in Lebanon 1976-8 92
CHAPTER 5 The Gentleman from Marjayoun The United Nations as a prisoner of Lebanon 134
CHAPTER 6 Let Them Come! The armies of Lebanon prepare for war 1980-2 160
CHAPTER 7 No White Flags Israel invades Lebanon June 1982 199
CHAPTER 8 The Gravedigger's Diary The Israeli siege of Beirut June-July 1982 243
CHAPTER 9 Surgical Precision The Israeli bombing of Beirut July-August 1982 282
CHAPTER IO Dawn at Midnight The PLO leaves and the Israelis enter west Beirut August-
September 1982 319
CHAPTER II Terrorists The massacre of Palestinians at Sabra and Chatila camps 16-18 September
1982 359
CHAPTER 12 Pandora's Box Reporting under siege 401
CHAPTER 13 The `Root' The return of the Multinational Force 443
CHAPTER 14 Beirut Addio The humiliation of the West in Beirut 493
CHAPTER 15 The Retreat The Israelis are forced out of southern Lebanon 1983-5 537
CHAPTER 16 Wait for Me `Islamic jihad' and the torment of Lebanon 584
CHAPTER 17 Freedom 628 The Israeli army retreats behind its borders
CHAPTER 18 The Massacre 669 Israeli's artillery slaughters 106 Lebanese at Qana
Bibliography 691
Index 695
Preface
In the spring of 1978, on Easter Sunday, on a winding little hill road outside the village of Qana
in southern Lebanon, I was interviewing two farmers in a tobacco field when an Israeli tank
suddenly drove over the nearest ridge and opened fire on us. As if in a movie - and first
experiences of such warfare tend to have a distinctly unreal air about them - we flung ourselves
into the undergrowth as a series of great orange flames bubbled around us, the sound of the
explosions so loud that the inside of my head hurt for hours afterwards.
Behind us, in a little forest of silver birch trees, Palestinian guerillas had been setting up a
makeshift mortar position, and we had driven blithely past them a few minutes earlier, unaware
that we were passing through their front line. The tank coming over the ridge at Qana was
Israelis front line and it was shooting at what its crew supposed to be `terrorists' - which meant
at the time that they were firing at any human that they could see in front of their vehicle. It was a
hot midmorning and on the tape-recording which I was making at the time, you can still hear the
cicadas hissing from the bushes seconds before the first shell comes whizzing down the road
towards our car.
As we drove frantically away in our hatch-back - clinging to the farmers who had flung
themselves onto the tailboard - my microphone was pressed against my chest. Today, listening to
the tape of our hysterical shouting and the sound of the detonations, I can still clearly hear the
pumping of my own heart - a sort of unsteady drum-beat that increases in tempo by the
millisecond - as Bob Dear, the Associated Press photographer in the car, screams at his
Armenian colleague Zaven Vartan: `Zigzag, zigzag.' It is impossible to recreate the sort of panic
we felt then or the circumstances in which we experienced our fear. Today, the recording sounds
almost comical, my voice rising to a lunatic tenor as I blurt out meaningless descriptions of the
shells, of our car turning the corner of the roadway with its tyres shrieking on the hot surface.
It was in fact ten years before I did relive the experience, not with a cassette player but with a
page from the thousands of notes, memoranda and reports that I kept in Lebanon from 1976 to the
present. Arriving back at the AP Bureau in west Beirut, I had fired off a single computer
message to the foreign desk of The Times, exhorting them to use my dispatch and beginning the
note to my paper with the melodramatic announcement: `I almost got killed today.'
But why should a newspaper reporter put his life in jeopardy? For the satisfaction of writing a
news report, a `story' as we journalists inaccurately call it, for the preposterous concept of a
`scoop' which few of one's colleagues would anyway wish to share? Certainly not for any search
for excitement. Indeed, the report I eventually filed over the AP's wire to The Times was
ultimately pushed onto an inside page by news from Washington that the United States had
arranged a ceasefire which brought the war in southern Lebanon to a temporary halt.
I think I was in Lebanon because I believed, in a somewhat undefined way, that I was
witnessing history - that I would see with my own eyes a small part of the epic events that have
shaped the Middle East since the Second World War. At best, journalists sit at the edge of
history as vulcanologists might clamber to the lip of a smoking crater, trying to see over the rim,
craning their necks to peer over the crumbling edge through the smoke and ash at what happens
within. Governments make sure it stays that way. I suspect that is what journalism is about - or at
least what it should be about: watching and witnessing history and then, despite the dangers and
constraints and our human imperfections, recording it as honestly as we can.
Academic historians see their role differently. They go to the primary sources, to the
documents of opposing sides in a conflict, to the minutes of Cabinet meetings and committees
and military field signals. I can understand the pleasure of that particular search for truth; my last
book, a history of Ireland during the Second World War, required years of research in British
and Irish archives and included 56 pages of references, two appendices and a four-page
bibliography. But no such documentary evidence is forthcoming in the Middle East just now. In
Israel, scholars can research the early years of the Jewish state, but there are no contemporary
documents available for those who wish to study Israel's catastrophic involvement in Lebanon
over the past quarter century. When they left Beirut in 1982, the PLO took some of their files
with them on the evacuation boats to Tunisia and Yemen. A few fell into Israeli hands. Most
were destroyed in Beirut before the Israelis entered the city. Syrian records on Lebanon should
in theory be housed behind the imposing facade of the new state archives building at the end of
Kuwatly Street in Damascus, an edifice of titanic proportions in front of which sits a statue of
Hafez el-Assad, the president who wished his state to be the vanguard of the Arab world. These
files, needless to say, are not available for public inspection.
So this is not an academic book. Nor is it in any formal sense a history of the war in Lebanon,
nor of Israel's involvement in that conflict. Readers who are looking for a chronological account
of these events should turn to The Tragedy ofLebanon by Jonathan Randal of the Washington
Post, or to what is perhaps the most comprehensive work on the 1982 invasion of Lebanon,
Israel's Lebanon War by the Israeli writers Ze'ev Schiff and Ehud Ya'ari.* The most powerful
analysis of the period is contained in Noam Chomsky's The Fateful Triangle: The United States,
Israel and the Palestinians, a book of great detail and even greater anger which concludes that
`as long as the United States remains committed to an Israeli Sparta as a strategic asset ... the
prospects are for further tragedy: repression, terrorism, war, and possibly even a conflict that
will engage the superpowers ... 't
Mikhail Gorbachev's ascendancy in Moscow suggested that this last grim prognosis might be
exaggerated. But since these books were published, the political crisis in the Levant has grown
even darker. The Palestinian uprising in the Israeli-occupied West Bank must finally have
convinced those Israelis who wanted to destroy the PLO in Lebanon of the futility of the 1982
invasion; and the Islamic revolution unleashed in Lebanon by Israel's catastrophic adventure
created a climate so ferocious that no Westerner could go on living in the country without fear of
assassination or abduction. One of my best friends, a man who gave me more encouragement
than anyone else to write this book - Terry Anderson, the bureau chief of the AP in Beirut - was
taken hostage not far from my home on 16 March 1985, and endured more than four years of
captivity, chained to the walls of basements and under constant threat of execution. There were
days in 1986 when I was myself so frightened of being kidnapped that I would drive to work in
west Beirut at up to 90 mph or stay closeted at home for fear that I too would be taken to join my
friend in his torment.
Through all these 26 years, however, I had exercised a journalist's magpie-like instinct to
hoard; not just the dispatches which I sent to The Times - sometimes three reports daily - but
every computer message, memorandum and personal note which I wrote, even those scribbled
on old copy paper and envelopes. The detritus of a journalist's life - the angry telex demands for
confirmation that reports have arrived safely at The Times, the infuriating requests from London
for clarification of place names in the midst of battle, my own urgent pleas for advance expenses
- were stuffed into unused laundry sacks and duty-free bags from Beirut airport. I kept mountains
of notebooks and newspaper cuttings, of readers' letters - both kind and insulting - of press
statements and photographs.
Rummaging through them all, I found small brown and pink slips of paper printed in Arabic
ordering the menfolk of Beirut to take their families and flee their homes if they valued the lives
of their wives and children - the very leaflets that the Israeli jets dropped from the skies over the
Lebanese capital in 1982. There were anonymous broadsheets from the fledgeling Lebanese
resistance movement in southern Lebanon warning informers of their imminent execution, even -
in once battered shopping bag - a severed set of plastic and steel handcuffs that Israeli troops
had used to bind the hands of a blindfolded prisoner in Tyre. I had kept pieces of Israeli and
Syrian shells, parts of an Israeli cluster bomb, a massive hunk of shrapnel from a shell fired into
the Chouf mountains by the USS New Jersey, the Second World War battleship and the most
powerful naval vessel the government which sent it there.
Many of the files cover the Iranian revolution, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iran-
Iraq war, school exercise books in which I had laboriously written out my dispatches in
fountain-pen. But most of the papers are from Lebanon, recording its destruction as a nation and
as a people over more than a decade. These are the archives upon which I have principally
drawn to write this book, which is why it is the work of a reporter rather than of a historian.
A complete list of those who have helped me can be found in the acknowledgements. It would
probably never have been written but for Terry Anderson, who frequently appears himself in
these pages. While I wrote it, he lay in despair in the underground prisons of west Beirut,
weeping with frustration that he could not see his wife or hold the baby daughter whom he had
seen only in photographs, taking comfort from the Bible, learning to read French from two old
and torn newspapers. Sometimes he was held less than a mile from my own home. He had raged
to his colleagues at the use of the word `terrorist', claiming that it was a pejorative expression
that should either be applied to all sides in Lebanon or not at all. It was he who first pointed out
to me how often the Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin, referred during the 1982 Lebanon
invasion to the Second World War and to the Holocaust; which is why, while Terry was suffering
in his dungeon, I was looking at the crematoria and ash pits of Auschwitz extermination camp.
I also owe a special debt of gratitude to Charles Douglas-Hume, who was foreign editor and
then editor of The Times during the Lebanon War until he died of cancer in October 1985. He
stood by me most loyally when I was in danger and always printed my reports without changing
them - even though they invariably conflicted with the increasingly right-wing editorials that
appeared in The Times. After Terry's kidnap, Charlie took a very pragmatic view of my presence