Pity the Nation
Robert Fisk
662 pages, including index and notes
published in 1990

Wholly undeservedly, Robert Fisk has become something of a joke online, after socalled "warbloggers" back in 2001 picked on a single incident in his long reporter career to ridicule him as an out of touch wet, even racist liberal. And this by people whose closest contact with the Middle East had been their local kebab shop. From there we got the nasty term fisking, which refers to any sort of unfair argument in which an article is not criticised on the merits of the whole, but rather is taken apart and attacked line by line, usually by putdown rather than logical argument.

But all this did cloud the issue of Robert Fisk's very real merits as a journalist and war reporter and I'm ashamed to say that I was taken in for a while as well. However, after reading several articles of him, I realised he was actually a quite good writer and reporter. Reading Pity the Nation confirmed this.

Pity the Nation is Fisk's personal history of Lebanon from 1976 until 1990, during its series of civil wars and invasions by Syria, Israel and various western powers. Fisk was a personal witness to many of the events he describes in this book; throughout the period he lived and worked in Beirut. This, as well as Fisk's background as a reporter makes Pity the Nation something different from a conventional history. Rather, it is more of an eyewitness account, of history being recorded as it is happening. At times this means that the story Fisk is trying to tell is overwhelmed by his own memories of events. However, this also gives Pity the Nation an immediacy that conventional history books lack. What Fisk does is using his own experiences in Lebanon as a narrative thread to help guide you through the complex and confusing twists and turns of the civil war, without neglecting the context in which those experiences took place.

That context is set up by Fisk in the first chapters, by setting up the two groups that would determine Lebanon's fate: the Israelis and the Palestinians. Fisk actually starts the book far away from Lebanon, in Auschwitz, as the background of the Holocaust determines most of Israel's actions and Israeli though, unsurprisingly. However the Holocaust has given the state Israel, as the one true representative of the Jewish people, a moral immunity for its crimes against the Palestinians and against Lebanon.

Fisk then goes into what brought the Palestinians to Lebanon: the war of 1948, "al Nakba", the Catastrophe, when the Palestinians were driven from their lands by Israeli terror and into banishment in the surounding countries, still hoping to return one day. As disgusted Fisk is with the Israeli leadership he is also with the PLO, who at every step seem to lead its people away from Palestine, into conflict with those whom should've been its ally.

It is the Israel-Palestine conflict that drives much of the disaster that visited Lebanon from 1976. The PLO was kicked out of Jordan after an unsuccesful attempt to take over the country and was soon drawn into the complex conflicts between the various Lebanese powergroups: the Druze, Maronites, Sh'ite and Sunni Muslims, the Phalangists, few of which wanted the Palestinians there. For Israel, the presence of the PLO in Lebanon was a reasion to udnertake ever increasing military action against Lebanon, culminating in the 1982 invasion.

Lebanon at that point had already had one foreign power in its borders, Syria, invited in 1976 as an Arab peacekeeping force at the end of the civil war. At first Syria was welcomed by most of the population, but relationships quickly soured, with the Syrians getting involved in Lebanese politics, acting for their own gain rather than the Lebanese. With the Israeli invasion, Lebanon now became the battleground of not just the Lebanese factions, but also the Israeli army, the PLO and Syrian army. Fisk has little time for any of the factions; his sympathies lie with the Lebanese people.

The heart of the book is formed by the Sabra and Shatila massacres. Fisk was one of the first journalists at the scene of the massacre, only hours after the murderers had gone and his descriptions do not spare the reader. It is impossible to read his account without becoming angry at those who set up the massacre. Fisk is especially scathing when it comes to Sharon, under whose responsibility the massacre took place and who was never punished for it. The Sabra and Shatila massacres were the ultimate results of Sharon's and Israel's policies. Not in anyway comparable to the Holocaust perhaps, but in their own way just as bad.

The march of folly doesn't end with Israel though; Fisk is also skeptical, with reason, about the various western attempts to bring peace to Lebanon, especially of the multinational force led by the US which went into Beirut after the Israeli invasion had lost steam. Fisk makes it clear none of the states involved had much idea of what was going on in Lebanon or any idea what to achieve and how to achieve it...

For somebody who grew up in the eighties, when the violence in Lebanon was a constant item on the news, seemingly endless and random, Pity the Nation is a revelation, an excellent, readable overview of a very complicated situation.