There is a careful art to good journalism. It involves not only seeing and writing what happens but also understanding the reason why, and the precedent that came before it. Empathy, combined with a cunning understanding of one’s environment and ability to talk to people are crucial instruments for a reporter hoping to get the whole story — not just the headline a paper may seek. Joining host Chris Hedges is Lara Marlowe, journalist and author, to talk about how her former husband and colleague Robert Fisk encapsulated all of that in his years as a journalist and writer and how his work, specifically his book “The Great War for Civilization,” serves as one of the West’s great tools in understanding the modern Middle East.
Marlowe details how Fisk meticulously reported on major stories, such as the US carrier Vincennes shooting down an Iranian civilian airplane or the massacre at Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon. She highlights what it was like to be a fly on the wall, observing his reporting methods, including often finding ways of reporting a story when official lines of communication were down. While in Iran reporting on the shooting down of Iran Air Flight 655, Marlowe tells Hedges, “Robert started sweet talking the Telex operator… and…started writing his front page story directly onto the Telex machine, which amazed me, it really did.”
When Fisk was subject to an almost fatal beating by an Afghan mob, Marlowe explains that even then, he was still understanding and empathetic to the anger of the people. “[Fisk] said that he didn’t blame the people who’d beaten him, because he said if the Americans had just bombed my village and destroyed my house… and I saw a Westerner on a bus on the Afghan-Pakistan border, I’d want to kill him too,” Marlowe recounts.
It is this level of discernment and compassion that distinguished him from other reporters and what made him such an effective journalist. He would step where others wouldn’t and face controversy head on. One such instance involves Fisk’s reporting on the suicide bombing of a US Marine compound in Beirut in 1983, which killed 307 people, and how he interviewed parents and siblings of the bombers. Through this, Marlowe sums up his dedication to reporting: “He really made the effort to understand why they did it. And I think he came closer than anybody else in the West, any non-Muslim, to understanding.”
Producer:
Max Jones
Intro:
Diego Ramos
Crew:
Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges
Transcript:
Diego Ramos
Transcript
Chris Hedges
There are few reporters I admire more than Robert Fisk, who died in 2020, and who spent over four decades covering the Middle East. His book The Great War for Civilization is a masterpiece. It remains a vital book for understanding the modern Middle East. An Arabic speaker, his reporting spanned the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan – he was one of very few western reporters to interview Osama bin Laden – the civil war and Israeli occupation in 1982 of Lebanon, the Iran-Iraq war, the Islamic revolution in Iran, Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait and the U.S. invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. He was unsparing in his reporting on the apartheid state of Israel covering the first and second intifadas or uprisings by the Palestinians. He documented the brutal repression of the Islamic movement and civil war in Algeria, spent considerable time in Iran and Lebanon where he was based. Most important, he saw war up close and did not flinch from describing its senseless brutality, the bungling of Western governments, the despotic Arab regimes that have sold out their own people and the Palestinians, the lies told to mask war crimes and the suffering of those, including children, caught in the terrible maw of war. The power of the book is not simply his lyrical writing and dogged reporting, but his erudition — he had a PhD in political science from Trinity College Dublin. He was acutely aware that without historical context nothing that takes place in the Middle East can be understood. He distrusted all authority, a distrust no doubt spawned by being packed off as a young boy, as I was, to a boarding school, an experience we both loathed. He excoriated the sententious mandarins in the press who eat out of the hands of government and military sources and function as stenographers for power. He knew who he was writing for, those the world forgets, those whose voices are silenced, those who suffer, those who are reviled. And he had an unflagging commitment to the truth, even when it reflected badly on those, such as the Palestinians, he cared about.
“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,” he writes. “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 justice and occupation and murder on a mass scale. Terror, terror, terror, terror. It is a sonata, a symphony, an orchestra turned to every television and radio station and news agency, the soap-opera of the Devil, served up on prime-time or distilled in wearingly dull and mendacious form by 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 nationalized 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 Iman’s gown and ate yogurt in Teheran 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 kufiyyeh headdress and outdated Soviet-style military fatigues. His name was Yasser Arafat, and he was the master of world terror, and then a super-statesman, and then again, a master of terror, likened by his Israeli enemies to the terror-Meister of them all, the one who lived in the Afghan cave. Koining me to discuss Robert Fisk’s “The Great War for Civilization,” as well as her own memoir, “Love in a Time of War: My Years with Robert Fisk,” is the journalist Laura Marlowe, who was married to Robert and worked with him from 1987 to 2003. I think your book is a great companion to Robert’s book, because while it’s the story of your relationship, I mean, you certainly capture Robert, who I knew very well, but it also deals a lot with the mechanics of how you get stories, which Robert doesn’t do so much of in the book. And I’d like to begin with, as both of you do in your books, with the shooting down of the Iranian Airbus by the [USS] Vincennes, the American warship it. I believe in your book, you talk about it having a profound impact on you, and one of the things I want you to do is not only describe what happened, and this just typifies almost every story you and Robert covered the lies that are told to cover up the reality.
Lara Marlowe
I think we were on holiday in Ireland when we heard that the Americans had shot down a civilian airliner flying over the Persian Gulf, and we basically raced to the airport, got on the first flight to Dubai, and there were packs of journalists there, all trying to get to Iran to cover the tragedy, well actually Robert would dislike me calling it a tragedy. It was a war crime, really. The Iranian embassy wouldn’t give any visas, wouldn’t let anyone travel. And this went on for maybe two or three days, and we spent a whole night trying to get a boat across the Persian Gulf. And Robert at one point, saw all of his colleagues, all of his competition, sail away towards Iran without him, because they wouldn’t let me on the boat, because I had a US passport, and there was a separate, different regulation for Brits. And he said, do you know how much I love you? You know, I just saw my competition sail away without me. And he told me it was one of the hardest decisions he’d ever made in journalism. So we went back to our hotel, I think it was the International hotel in Dubai, very near the airport. And we were pretty exhausted. We’d been up all night, bedraggled, and somebody ran into the lobby of the hotel saying, the Iranians are sending a plane, the Iranians are sending a plane! So we raced to the airport, got on a civilian airliner, not unlike the one which the Americans had just shot down a few days before, flew to Bandar Abbas. The Iranians, took all the journalists who were on the plane, dozens and dozens of us, to a cold storage warehouse where the bodies of the, if my memory is correct, I think it was 263 people had been killed. And there were piles of well… they were lined up, the women in one row, the men in another area, and then the people who they weren’t able to put back together or didn’t have recognizable parts of, there were just parts, arms, legs, body organs piled up. It was pretty horrific, and it was starting to smell because several days had passed, and I remember two bodies in particular. One of the Revolutionary Guards said to me, you’re a woman, so you’re allowed to look at her, because they wouldn’t let men look at an Iranian woman, even dead. And they opened, they were all sort of wrapped up in like plastic sheeting, and they unwrapped the plastic around her, there was a really beautiful woman with chestnut colored hair, and she looked quite peaceful. I’d say she was in her late 30s, maybe early 40s. I can still remember her face, and it’s been… that was 1988, how many years is that? 46 years? Something like that. And then the other one I remember really well was a three year old girl called Leila Behbahani. I even remember her name, who had been on her way to a wedding, and she was wearing a pale blue dress and little black patent leather shoes and tiny earrings, and her face was all screwed up. She was crying, so she obviously realized something was wrong when she died. And so after showing us this carnage, the Iranians took us to the former Intercontinental Hotel in Bandar Abbas, and they prepared this big feast of, I think it was roast lamb. And I don’t need to tell you how sick I felt to the stomach, having just been looking at all these dead bodies and smelling dead bodies which smell a bit like lamb. And so Robert and I were pretty horrified at this big feast they’d put on for us. And most of the journalists went in and sat down and ate lunch. And Robert, and this is one example of his incredible inventiveness as a journalist, started chatting to the receptionist in the hotel, and he said, you must have a telex machine. And they said, Yes. And he said, Oh, could I just say hello to the Telex operator? And we went behind the reception desk, and Robert started sweet talking the Telex operator, who spoke English, and he asked permission, sat down at the Telex machine and started writing his front page story directly onto the Telex machine, which amazed me, it really did. And then, sure enough, the hotel pulled the plug on the Telex after a few minutes, but he must have got 200-300 words out anyway. And then they took us back to the airport to fly back to Dubai, and Robert found a coin telephone machine. I remember when we had pay telephones, and he managed to get Iranian coins from someone. And the figures, of course, are the same in Farsi as in Arabic. They’re Arabic numerals. So he he wrote down the phone number, which was on the machine called the switchboard of, he was still with the Times then in London, and said, Call me back on this number. They called him back, and he started dictating the rest of his story to London. The Iranians had given none of us access to any kind of communication whatsoever, and Robert’s colleagues were furious that he had a front page story when they did not. We then flew back to Dubai in the middle of the night. I was shattered, because we’d had two nights without sleep, and most of the journalists were just kind of, you know, lying back in their seats trying to recover their senses. Robert crept into the cockpit and interviewed the pilot of the first Iranian aircraft to make the exact same journey from Bandar Abbas to Dubai, since the Americans, since the USS Vincennes, had shot down the Airbus. And so we got another second brilliant story out of it. The next day, the Times of London had been bought by Rupert Murdoch, who, as you know, is very conservative, also owns the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, I don’t need to say more by way of explanation. Robert’s foreign editor said, apparently it was a suicide airliner. And Robert said, that’s utter bullshit. It was a civilian airliner. I’ve seen the dead civilians who died on it. And the pilot he just interviewed, knew the pilot of the Iranian Airbus. And he said, you know he was he had also found some expert in Dubai who told him that the, well the pilot had also told him, that the military transponder on the USS Vincennes could not communicate with a civilian airliner. They were on different frequencies. They could not hear each other because the Americans kept saying, We warned them. We warned them. We warned them, and they didn’t respond to our warnings, therefore, they shot them down.
Chris Hedges
And they also said the plane was descending towards the ship.
Lara Marlowe
Yeah, they made it up. They completely made it up. And so Robert was, I witnessed this argument in our hotel room in Dubai. He was yelling at his foreign editor and saying, this is utter bullshit, I forbid you to publish this. And this eventually led to his resignation from the London Times and to his employment by the London Independent for the last two or three decades of his life, just this argument over the USS Vincennes and it all, you know, the subsequent investigations showed that Robert was absolutely right. It was a civilian airliner. It was not descending. And what had happened was Captain Will Rogers III was in the toilet when his men saw this aircraft on their radar screens, and they didn’t know what to do. And they were sort of, I think they were yelling at him through the toilet door. There’s a plane coming at us. What do we do? What do we do? Fire on it, you know? And they did, and they killed 263 people in cold blood. And what was really, really scandalous is that the crew of the USS Vincennes were decorated. They received medals of valor for having shot down a civilian airliner.
Chris Hedges
Yeah, and I believe the captain was promoted.
Lara Marlowe
He was. Years later, there was, I think it was his wife’s car in San Diego, California had a bomb placed in it. I don’t think she was hurt, but that also showed the sort of the long arm of Iran and its allies in the Middle East.
Chris Hedges
So the reason I wanted to begin with that story is because it illustrates several points that come out in the book. First, how flagrantly those in authority everywhere lie. Israel lies like it breathes, but so does the United States. Second of all, it illustrates. he has a quote in the book. He’s quoting somebody about how you need a little literary ability and rat-like cunning, which is so true.
Lara Marlowe
Nicholas Tomalin, a British correspondent who was killed in the, I believe, the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, yes. And Robert always said, especially rat-like cunning.
Chris Hedges
Well, especially rat like cunning is correct. When I covered the Ceausescu Revolution, same thing, you couldn’t get a phone line for some weird reason in Ceausescu’s Romania. Kent cigarettes were used as currency. So I went down to the hotel operators, gave them all cartons of Kent, and then again, they used Deutsche Mark, not dollars, and said that, I know how hard they worked, and they weren’t being paid very well. I can see Robert doing exactly this and they had to call the international phone exchange to get an open line, which could take a very long time. And I said, look, every time you get an open line, call my room, and if I use it, I’ll give you 10 Deutsche Mark. So every international call that came into the hotel, and all the bottom windows have been shot out by the Securitate, went to my room. I never had any problem filing my stories, but when I went down to the dining room, all the foreign correspondents were enraged because they were waiting hours for an open line. This is a classic example of rat-like cunning and why you need it. And of course, Robert exhibited this in spades. And then also, the other part of this story that’s important is Robert’s commitment to the truth. And let’s be clear, I mean, you know as well as I do, probably the majority of our colleagues are just consummate careerists. Their commitment is not to the truth, they’re very cynical. It’s to their own advancement. And one of the reasons, I admired Robert for many reasons, but one of the reasons I admired him is his deep compassion, his deep empathy, but finally, his refusal to compromise, his refusal to allow any publication that he worked for to lie, which, of course, left him leaving the paper. You write in your own book, which is wonderful book, but you write, I think early on, when you’re with Robert, that your competition was not another woman, but Beirut, the city of Beirut. And of course, I love it at the beginning, which shows you how naive you were. He promises that he’ll stop war reporting and move to Paris. And I love that passage, because having done it, I knew Robert wasn’t going to last in Paris at all, no matter how much he loved you, it didn’t make any difference. And of course, next thing you’re back in Beirut, trying not to get kidnapped. And you and I were in the same room in Syria when Terry Anderson was released, who was, what, held for seven years, the former AP bureau chief. But let’s talk a little bit about Lebanon, especially, of course, the tragedy of what’s happening. Robert was maybe the first, certainly one of the very first reporters, to get to Sabra and Shatila. This is where the Falangist Israeli-armed backed militias massacred, what’s the exact number? 1,000? I don’t know the exact number.
Lara Marlowe
Never knew the exact number. It’s certainly at least 1,000.
Chris Hedges
At least 1,000 Palestinian civilians. And Robert got in there while the fighting was still going on. And that affected him deeply, and he, in a way, so much of his four decades, while the rest of the world was willing to forget the Palestinians, he wouldn’t. Of course, another reason that, however unpopular it was, however much he was attacked, which he was, repeatedly, for being an antisemite, all of this kind of stuff. And I think that is another mark of a great journalist, in a way, because that is the story. The editors may not recognize, it’s the story. The public may not recognize, it’s the story. But you know, it’s the story. Can you talk about that.
Lara Marlowe
About Beirut or the Palestinians or Sabra and Shatila? I mean…
Chris Hedges
About all of it, about Sabra and Shatila, how it affected him, and just Robert’s determination to tell the story of the Palestinians, I mean, frankly, when not a lot of other people were telling that story.
Lara Marlowe
Yeah, well, Sabra and Shatila, I think, marked him more than any other story. It’s the only thing that I ever knew to give him nightmares, he would wake up, sometimes say, dreaming that he was buried under earth because the Falangist had bulldozed the bodies of the victims of Sabra and Shatila into these sort of big earthen banks. And Robert was actually climbing over one of these earthen banks, not realizing that they were bodies. When he looked down and saw a human face under his foot and he screamed and jumped off. But it was something that really haunted him, and he went back, he was in the habit of taking visitors to Beirut, including some of his editors to Sabra and Shatila. He didn’t want it to be forgotten. In fact, I worked for Time Magazine then, and they, at one point, were going to bring the Time Magazine news tour, which was, they put the 80 richest men in America on a plane and flew them around the world, and they were going to stop in Beirut. And with Robert’s help, I organized a visit to Sabra and Shatila, which never happened because the Clinton White House told them not to go to Beirut, but I had found eight or 10 families and and written up the history of each family, where they came from in Palestine and so on and so forth. And they would have, thanks to Robert, would have seen Sabra and Shatila many years later, but they would have seen what had happened there. And actually, the camps hadn’t changed all that much. You still had these shanties and the open sewers and the poverty, the dirt roads. You could still see the Kuwaiti embassy, where the Israeli army was ensconced, and from which they watched the massacre being carried out. So yeah, Sabra and Shatila really I think changed Robert and reinforced his belief that the Palestinian question was the linchpin of the whole Middle East problem. And he believed very strongly that as long as there was not some kind of justice for the Palestinians, as long as they didn’t have a state, there could never be peace in the Middle East. And I think we’re seeing that proven very sadly, yet again now in 2024. He was absolutely right, and even when everyone else would forget about the Palestinians, Robert never did. When the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, Robert said, immediately, this isn’t going to work, and the Palestinians will get blamed for it. And that’s exactly what happened. It didn’t work, and the Palestinians got blamed for it. And he said the Israelis had, I think it was 250 lawyers or something, working on the agreement, and the Palestinians were, it was Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas, pretty much all alone, all by themselves. And Robert felt that they’d been hoodwinked. And I think that what happened subsequently showed that he was right about that as well. Yes, he felt very, very strongly about the truth and that one should tell it. Actually the Irish Nobel laureate who Robert and I both knew, Seamus Heaney, said once that there is such a thing is truth, and it can be told. And I always remember that quote, and I think it really sums up what Robert was all about.
Chris Hedges
One of the things I just want to touch on before we go on, he schooled me on Oslo. I was a bit naive about Oslo, and I remember him laying out and him being, of course, as he almost always, was, completely correct as to why it wouldn’t work. But one of the things, it comes through more in your book, actually, than in his, is the importance of literacy in terms of being a great writer. Both you and he… You quote a lot of poetry. You both loved poetry. He wrote poems to you. I used to write poetry, but I’m a good enough writer to know I’m a bad poet. But I read not just he had a voracious appetite for history, as you point out in your book, especially World War II and but you can’t understand what’s happening around you unless you understand the roots, unless you understand the context, unless you understand the history. And that’s what makes his book such an amazing work, and I would argue, probably the most important work. I can’t think of another book that’s more important for understanding the modern Middle East, and he has, posthumously, has a new book. What’s it called? I haven’t read it yet.
Lara Marlowe
It’s called “Night of Power.” Which is the night when Allah dictated the Quran to Muhammad.
Chris Hedges
It’s very special day for Muslims, yes.
Lara Marlowe
Exactly. And the subtitle of it is: “The West’s Betrayal of the Arabs,” I think.
Chris Hedges
Well, I think what’s so important about his book is that by the time you finish, and it’s long, but it’s beautifully written, is that you just see betrayal after betrayal after betrayal. These betrayals are forgotten by us, but they’re not forgotten by Palestinians or Iraqis or Iranians or everyone else, and that’s what makes the book so important. The other thing that Robert understood is Israel. He understood the Israelis. He understood how they thought and why they did what they did. I’m just going to read this little passage, this is from Robert’s book: “Netanyahu’s most damaging flaw, his failure to regard the Palestinians as fellow humans. His conviction that they are no more than a subject people. This characteristic comes across equally clearly in his book, ‘A Peace Among Nations,’ which might have been written by a colonial governor. Clinton got it right. He understood the psychological defect that lay at the heart not just of Netanyahu’s policy, but of the whole Netanyahu government. Yet, within just a few days,” He’s talking about Netanyahu, “he was presiding over yet another peace accord at Wye, which effectively placed the Palestinians in the role of supplicants. The main section in the Wye Agreement was not about withdrawals, but about security. And this was liberally laced with references to terrorists, terrorist cells and terrorist organizations involving, of course, only Palestinian violence. There was not a single reference to killers who had come from the Jewish settler community. Arafat’s torture was exquisite. Each new accord with Israel involved a subtle rewriting of previous agreements. Madrid, with all its safeguards for the Palestinians, turned into Oslo, no safeguards at all, and a system of Israeli withdrawal that was so constructed that deadlines no longer had to be met. This turned into the 1997 Hebron Accord, which allowed Jewish colonists to stay in the town and made an Israeli withdrawal contingent upon an end to anti-Israeli violence. In 1998 the Wye Agreement even dropped the land for peace logo. It was now billed as the land for security agreement. Peace being at least temporarily unobtainable. Peace means respect, mutual trust, cooperation. Security means no violence, but it also means prison, hatred, and as we already knew, torture. In return, the Palestinians could have 40% of their territory under their control, as opposed to 90% they expected under Oslo and the CIA, the most trustworthy and moral of institutions would be in the West Bank to ensure that Arafat arrested the usual suspects.” He totally captured this process by which Israel makes an agreement which was always open ended, always done in stages, and then rolls it backward, rolls it backward, rolls it backward, which, of course, we’re now witnessing with the areas A, B and C in the West Bank, which have been violated. I think the Palestinians, I may have a figure wrong, are allowed to control on their own, about 19% of the West Bank. But now you have the settlers making incursions into Ramallah. And it wasn’t just his deep understanding of history I love. He went after Tony Blair, remember, as what do you call him, after Kut, the British disaster in World War I, where they all got wiped out. What did he call him, Tony Blair, of…
Lara Marlowe
Of Kut al-Amara, something…
Chris Hedges
Of Kut al-Amara. Yeah, because the again, the British and the Americans go into Iraq, quote, unquote, as liberators, and they almost replicate word for word, Townsend’s occupation of Iraq in World War I, and it was a disaster then. I mean he understands the cyclical patterns of history when you don’t understand history and you don’t learn from it. But he also understood the psychology of groups such as such as the Israelis.
Lara Marlowe
Absolutely, I think it’s in “The Great War for Civilization,” he wrote that history is not only in the past, it projects itself into the future. And he saw history as a continuum. I think that’s one reason that his work was so admired. Continues to be admired throughout the Middle East by Arabs and Iranians, because Robert knew their history. And you know, I’m very struck today as the world remembers the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7, that there’s a lot of commentary in the newspapers and on the radio, but all of the commentary that I have heard from Israelis and Israeli citizens, and some of them have suffered very greatly, obviously. But it’s as if the whole conflict started on October 7, 2023. There is no mention ever of the context and the history of it. And I remember that when the Secretary General of the UN Antonio Guterres, said shortly after it happened that one must also consider the context and the history, the Israelis were outraged. They were absolutely outraged, and I think that’s part of what bothered them about Robert, was that he knew that. And he would always remind people of what happened the last time, and of Baruch Goldstein, massacring Palestinians at worship in Hebron, of the Israelis driving out 750,000 Palestinians from their homes in the Nakba, in the catastrophe and so on. So you’re right, he had an incredible grasp of history. He also predicted that the Oslo Accords would turn the Palestinians into the Israeli’s policemen, and that’s exactly what happened.
Chris Hedges
That’s exactly what the PA is and which is why Abbas and the PA is reviled.
Lara Marlowe
Yeah, I’m afraid you’re right.
Chris Hedges
I covered the Hebron massacre. I had to go interview all the survivors for the New York Times. And to that point, I want to read another passage from his book, because he, for all the reasons you said, he grasped where things came from. And I used to think there were only two types of reporters. There were those reporters who didn’t know what tomorrow’s story was, and those that did. Robert always knew what tomorrow’s story was. And when I was around other reporters who were too obtuse to not know what tomorrow’s story was, I never worried, because I knew they’d be in the wrong place, covering the wrong thing, which is why, to be completely honest, whenever I found myself in the same city, which happened several times, including in Bosnia with Robert it scared the hell out of me. Because I knew he’d be in exactly the right place. He knew what tomorrow’s story was. He writes, “When a society is dispossessed, when the injustice is thrust upon and appear insoluble, when the enemy is all powerful, when one’s own people are bestialized as insects, cockroaches and 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 US technology versus God, who would win? Then, on the 23rd of October, 1983 a lone suicide bomber drove a truckload of explosives into the US 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 the 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 Quran. He would never say a formal goodbye to his parents, but he would embrace his mother and father, tell them not to cry if he were one day to die, then he would set off to collect his explosives.” It’s chilling, isn’t it? Yeah, but that’s it. That’s it. I know, I interviewed these people too.
Lara Marlowe
He understood. He really made the effort to understand why they did it. And I think he came closer than anybody else in the West, any non-Muslim to understanding. And he went and interviewed their families, their parents, their siblings. And one thing that often surprised me is that people well, for example, Hassan Nasrallah, who was just assassinated by Israel lost his eldest son, who was fighting the Israelis. He was killed by the Israelis, and he said he was honored, and he wished that all of his sons would be killed fighting the Israelis. And I think that no matter how many aircraft carriers and fighter jets and artillery shells and drones and no matter what the technology and the quantity of the weapons at your disposal, it’s very hard to defeat an enemy who is willing to die. And I think that’s one advantage that the Americans and the Israelis simply don’t have. They want to live. Their soldiers want to live. And I don’t think they’ve ever understood this, this willingness to die on on the part of Hezbollah and Hamas and their other enemies in the Middle East.
Chris Hedges
That’s how the Taliban drove the Americans out of Afghanistan, and to that point, he writes, “Today, the Arabs are no longer afraid. The regimes are 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, at least their people at least decide the regime change from within their societies, not the Western version, imposed by invasion, is overdue. It is the Arabs as a people brutalized and crushed for decades by corrupt dictators who are no longer running away. The Lebanese and Beirut under siege by Israel, learn to refuse to obey the invaders’ orders. The Hezbollah 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 neoconservatives so fatally bought before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, of beating the Arabs till they came to heal, 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.” And of course, we’ve seen that with the genocide in Gaza, whether it’s Sisi’s Egypt, King Abdullah’s Jordan, Saudi Arabia, they have all been complicit in the genocide and I’ve spent several weeks in the Arab world since October 7, while the rage on the street is directed not only at the Israelis for mass slaughter, but at their regimes for its complicity.
Lara Marlowe
Yes, but I think that this fighting spirit, this anger, which Robert referred to, it doesn’t mean that the downtrodden and persecuted are always going to win. On the contrary, I think what we’re witnessing now in Israel-Palestine, I fear, is the final ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. I think especially if Donald Trump wins the election on November 5, that he will give Netanyahu carte blanche to do whatever he wants, and not just Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich. And they will drive the Palestinians of Gaza into Egypt. And they will drive the Palestinians of the West Bank into Jordan. And they will say the Palestinian problem has been solved. And I remember very much an interview Robert and I did with a philosopher called Leibowitz in Jerusalem.
Chris Hedges
Yes, Yeshayahu Leibowitz. No, and I do agree with you about certainly the intent of Israel, having just made two trips to Egypt, the Egyptian military has been quite categorical with Sisi that no Palestinians will be allowed to come into the Sinai. Whether that continues, I don’t know.
Lara Marlowe
Exactly, exactly. I think it was around the time of the First Intifada, if my memory is correct. And he said something I never forgot. He said, there is no necessity in history. It’s not because we thirst for justice. It’s not because the Palestinians have been dispossessed. It’s not because Arabs have been betrayed through history, that this will be righted and I think he that Leibowitz was was right, and Robert knew that, but it didn’t stop him chronicling what was happening and fighting for justice in his way, through his writing. How big is Egypt’s debt, though? How many billion?
Chris Hedges
160 billion. And the point is, Sisi is corrupt and certainly would be willing to be bought off. My understanding is the military high command has told him absolutely not. But things can change. We both know the intent of Israel, as you pointed out, is to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians. Of course, the Jordanian military has moved up to the border of the West Bank because they fear precisely what you said, ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. And I mean, Israel has already made it clear that they are going to, in essence, annex northern Gaza and then and create this already have created, but even let this humanitarian catastrophe fester in the south in the hopes that it does put enough pressure. But yes, I think that that is, and I think it was the end of your book, you talk about how Robert falls into a kind of despair, because after over four decades, things are worse. And I believe he even tells you, in your book, or you quote him in your book, he thinks it wasn’t worth it. Was that a correct quote, or something like that?
Lara Marlowe
No, he said that he feared that nothing he had written had made any difference, which isn’t exactly the same as saying it’s not worth it. I think that he’s made a tremendous difference. I think that since October 7, 2023 and the killing of 42,000 Palestinians in Gaza, and now with a killing of thousands of Lebanese going on, I think that public opinion in the West is starting to shift, not among the leaders who are pretty gutless, but among the people, and especially young people, and that’s why we’ve seen these mass demonstrations in many European countries. In the United States, we’ve seen the student occupations of university campuses, and it has become possible to criticize Israel in a way that was not possible before, even in mainstream media now, in newspapers like the New York Times, you have editorialists saying very strident things against Netanyahu and against the slaughter of Palestinians and Lebanese. So it’s not changing as much as it should, or as fast as it should, or probably in the way that Robert would have liked it to change, but it is making a difference, and I think he did more than anyone else, to prepare the ground for that change. I was very struck. There’s a young Irish novelist called Sally Rooney who’s written several enormous bestsellers about young people in Ireland. And in one of her novels, one of the students at Trinity College Dublin is reading Robert Fisk, and it’s true that young people do read him a lot, and he used to tell me that young people would come in droves to his lectures, and he got a lot of satisfaction out of that, despite his feelings of despair over the unchanging nature of the Middle East and the continued betrayal of the Arabs.
Chris Hedges
There was a moment where he is attacked by a mob of Afghans and very severely beaten, I mean, and rescued finally by an Afghan and probably might have been killed if that stranger hadn’t intervened, and I thought his response to that attack explained a lot about who he was. Can you tell us that story?
Lara Marlowe
I know that he went back to the shop that was very near to the place where he was dragged off the bus and beaten with rocks. I saw him, our marriage was in difficulty then, but I went to Ireland to be with him a few weeks after that happened, and he still had, he probably seen the photographs of him with his forehead sort of split open and bleeding, and he still had the scab on his forehead. And he was very upset. And I think any of us would be to have an angry mob trying to stone us to death, which is what happened. And they were holding rocks in their hands and hitting him with a rocks. He was very upset. He also thought it was very fishy, because the only thing that they stole was his contacts book. He had a beautiful burgundy-colored leather like a filofax, which I had given him as a gift, which had all of his contacts. I mean all of the contacts, for example, which had led him to bin Laden. And it was all written in this tiny little scrawl of Robert’s, which was very difficult to read, but that was gone. That was missing. Nothing else. They didn’t take his passport or his money. Nothing else. He wondered, if there was some intelligence service behind it, if somebody sold that contacts book. He also told me that Daniel Pearl and his wife, I believe her name is, Marianne, took him in and took care of him when he got out of hospital after that horrible beating. And of course, Daniel Pearl was later beheaded in Pakistan, which was also extremely upsetting to Robert. He did, I know it was controversial, he said that he didn’t blame the people who’d beaten him, because he said if the Americans had just bombed my village and destroyed my house and I saw, which is pretty much what had happened in Afghanistan, and I saw a Westerner on a bus on the Afghan-Pakistani border, I’d want to kill him too. And I think a lot of his colleagues thought that was a very stupid thing to say. Fisk forgives the people who nearly killed him, but that was his attitude, and that was Robert. He always wanted to understand. He wanted to know the other person’s point of view. And he would often tell me, if I’d had rows with editors, that sort of thing, he’d say, put yourself in their place, or if I sent a ratty message on the Telex or by email, he’d say, “Now, how would it feel if you received that message Lara?” And he had an infinite capacity to do that. And I think that shows his humanity and the breadth of his spirit that he did that.
Chris Hedges
Well, the ability to step into the shoes of others. I mean, he had that. That’s what has made his reporting so tremendous. I’m going to disagree about foreign editors. I covered the war in El Salvador and with all these old guys who’d cover the war in Vietnam, and one of them said to me about foreign editors, never forget they’re the enemy. I think was Dial Torgerson, actually.
Lara Marlowe
Well, Robert had his rows too, with the London Times so, but he fought. He always fought the good fight, and he stood up for himself. By God, he stood up for himself. And I wouldn’t have wanted to have been on the receiving end of a Fisk tirade, because you couldn’t defeat him in an argument ever?
Chris Hedges
Yeah, I had a few of those tirades, copy editors mangling your story. So there’s a kind of funny subtext to his book. I want to ask you about. And that’s his father, Bill Fisk. He dedicates… he had a very contentious relationship with his father. He dedicates the book. He dedicates “Pity the Nation,” to you. He dedicates the book to his mother and father. His father had served in World War I and he talks in the book about how, when his father’s dying, I think to his regret, he does not go say goodbye to his father. As a boy, his father takes him in summers off to World War I battlefields, but his father comes up repeatedly in the book, which I find fascinating, given the relationship that he had with his father. And I just wondered if you could talk about that.
Lara Marlowe
Sure, sure, I knew his mother and father. His father died at the age of 93. He was from the northwest of England. I think he was from Liverpool or Manchester. My memory is failing me, but his father’s father had been the first mate on the Cutty Sark, which Robert was very proud of. But Bill, his father, had been married a first time to a woman who apparently had just this incredible fear of sex, and I don’t think they’d ever had sex, and she died, and Robert actually came upon her grave in the local cemetery in Maidstone Kent, and went home and asked his father about it. And his father said, What did you hear about that, boy? She was called Winifred Fisk. Anyway, and then his father married Robert’s mother, who was more than 20 years younger than him, Peggy, who was a wonderful woman. She was very sunny disposition, very cheerful, always optimistic and I know that Robert got his his optimism from Peggy, but his father always said, he called him fella, which Robert thought was ironic since fella came from fellahin, Arabic for a peasant. He said, We’ve got to make a man out of you, fella. And he sent him off to British public school at the age of nine. So Robert went from having been this very spoiled only child whose mother used to bring him tea and toast in bed every morning to a British public school where they were woken up at five in the morning and had cold showers in the morning and were bullied and made to run and be cadets and military cadets and so on and so forth. And he hated it. He absolutely hated it. And the first time he was allowed to go home for a weekend, he cried and cried and cried and cried. And he said, Please don’t send me back that. I hate it. I want to live at home with you. And his mother said, Please, Bill. And his father said, No, we’ve got to make a man out of you. And he hated his father. He really, really hated him. And it was only in the last years of his life that he relented. He admitted that his father had taught him to love books and taught him to love history, and he gave him credit for that, and he came to some kind of reconciliation. I think there was a very strong Oedipal thing in there, where Robert would probably hate me saying this, but he and his father were both in love with his mother, and I think they were competing for her love, and they were jealous of each other and Robert’s hatred of authority, I believe, came from that relationship with his father. Oh, he never trusted American or British authorities, be they civil or military governments. He was always extremely cynical and skeptical, and that that all goes back to his relationship with Bill Fisk.
Chris Hedges
Well, it goes back to, it goes back to boarding school. I went to boarding school at 10, very similar. And that’s where I learned to totally hate all authority. Yeah. So those, if you have a strong will, their goal is to break you, and they break most people. They didn’t break him, obviously. We have to mention the fact that, and he does in his book that his father is detailed to carry out an execution of a deserter and refuses and destroys his own career in the Army because of it.
Lara Marlowe
Yes, and Robert did recognize that as a heroic act. And he said it was the one thing that he really loved about his father. And it was kind of a love, hate relationship. When his mother died, his father died before his mother about five years before, we went to clear out his parents’ house, and Robert spent, I think we spent about three weeks there, because they had never, like all the Second World War generation, they had never thrown anything away. And Robert spent the whole three weeks in his father’s library, going through the books and choosing the ones he wanted to keep. And he very much appreciated his father’s love of books, and mostly history books. So I think you were talking earlier about Robert’s literary bent, his skill as a writer, he could recite Shakespeare… when he went to interview Bin Laden that time in Afghanistan near Jalalabad, he was reading Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.” And I think in “Great War for Civilization,” he talks about lying on the bed in this awful hotel with the air conditioning leaking on him, reading “War and Peace.” So you have this funny back and forth between bin Laden and al Qaeda and the Napoleonic Wars and Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. But that was Robert, this incredible juxtaposition, always, of literature and history and the news and present day.
Chris Hedges
Which is very rare, but that literature is extremely important, not only if you’re a writer, but also if you want to understand human nature, human psychology and how it works. And I know you quote Proust in your book, I’m a huge… I’ve read “In Search of Lost Time,” three times, although not in French, unlike you. What?
Lara Marlowe
I only read it once, not three times.
Chris Hedges
The first time I read it was in the war in Bosnia. That’s the other thing people don’t know. You have a lot of dead time in war. You’re sitting around trying to wait to get to places.
Lara Marlowe
Robert always told a story about his friend, Ed Cody of The Washington Post.
Chris Hedges
I knew Ed. Ed and I covered the war in Salvador together.
Lara Marlowe
Yeah, Ed’s a great guy. He speaks very good Arabic, I dare say, better than Robert, but he would always, when he encountered an obstreperous militia man who didn’t want to let him through a checkpoint, he would just pull a volume of Verlaine out of his pocket and sit down by the road and start reading poetry. And he always had a little volume of something with him for those occasions, and Robert enjoyed telling that story about Ed. He knew patience, which Robert wasn’t always quite so patient, but he would, he knew how to charm people into letting him through, or not shooting him, or whatever.
Chris Hedges
Well, he was one of, you know, probably the greatest reporter in the Middle East of our generation. That was Lara Marlowe on her book, “Love in a Time of War.” And then we, of course, have been discussing Robert Fisk’s masterpiece, “The Great War for Civilization.” I think Lara, you probably agree that if you want to understand the modern Middle East, I don’t think there’s probably a better book.
Lara Marlowe
Absolutely.
Chris Hedges
I want to thank Diego [Ramos], Thomas [Hedges] Max [Jones] and Sofia [Menemenlis], who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com.
