I got to know Robert Fisk when we were reporters in 1970s Belfast, and I encountered him several times in later years during my assignments abroad. He telephoned me in Moscow in 1988 to ask my advice on whether to leave the Middle East, where he had already spent several years, and move to Russia to witness the collapse of the Soviet Union.
I told him: “Don’t hesitate! History is on the move here.”
Thankfully he ignored my advice and decided instead to remain in the region of the world where history is forever on the move. He went on to establish his reputation as one of the great foreign correspondents of modern times, reporting through “danger and fear and loneliness and excitement and adventure and fury and incendiary anger”, and encouraged by an editor “who treated the Middle East dictators and Israel’s and America’s lobbyists with the contempt they deserved”.
Night of Power is a posthumous sequel to Fisk’s magisterial tome, The Great War for Civilisation, an epic work combining history and reporting during the decades leading up to the attacks on America in 2001. Here he chronicles the post-9/11 years during which US-occupied Iraq disintegrated in a paroxysm of violence, the Arab Spring of the early 2010s was brutally crushed in Egypt, Syria and other countries, and the Israel-Palestinian conflict descended into a swirling vortex of sectarian hatred.
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Fisk sets his reporting against the background of centuries of meddling by western powers. He writes of the deadly consequences of the “mendacious, deceitful, hypocritical” 1917 Declaration by Arthur Balfour, the British foreign secretary, which favoured the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in a land mostly populated by Palestinians, who were denied political freedom.
He travelled tirelessly, read voraciously, befriended writers, academics and players on all sides, and wrote vivid reports laced with graphic details of the impact of violence on individuals. It was important for him to establish the names of people whose lives and homes had been destroyed. After the 2013 massacre of 817 protestors by Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s police outside the Rabat mosque in Cairo, Fisk went to the mortuary, where the faces of the dead were concealed beneath the knots in the cellophane, and insisted on asking who they were. “Slowly the names brought the dead back to life. Until a few hours ago, these people had identities, ages, jobs.”
At the end of his reporting career, Fisk looked back with despair. He wondered whether he should have stayed so many decades in the Middle East where “I have 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…nothing I wrote seemed to have any effect.” The “normalisation” of warfare since 9/11, he reflected, dispensed with “the protection of civilians enshrined in international law in favour of a new and cruel mortality… my pessimism is even greater now”.
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How deep would be his despair at the murderous attack on Israeli citizens by Hamas, already “stained with crimes against humanity”, and the genocidal response of Israel. But he would not have been surprised. There are clues in his text of the horrors to come, examples of the growing distress, humiliation and killing of Palestinians under eternal occupation, and the hardening of Israeli’s colonial mindset to the point where a government minister, Avigdor Lieberman, could state in 2018 after the killing by Israel of 30 Palestinian protesters, “There are no innocent people in the Gaza Strip”.
Fisk includes many Jewish voices sympathetic to the Palestinians’ plight, including that of Uri Avnery, an Israeli political philosopher and liberal Zionist, whom he admired and who staked his reputation on the integrity and persistence of Palestinian demands.
Fisk reminds us that Hamas, which blocked food coming into Gaza to increase its own profits, had already embarked on “whole-scale massacres” before October 7th, 2023 - that of Palestinians loyal to Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas when seizing power in Gaza in 2007.
Fisk died on October 30th, 2020, having just become an Irish citizen. He was working on the final chapter, which is completed in the form of postscript by his widow, Nelofer, a writer and film-maker who often accompanied him on his travels. Here Fisk reflects on a favourite theme, the responsibilities of journalists in their choice of language. The careless use of “terrorism” - a “cancerous word” - for example allowed powerful states to “unleash atrocities on a mass scale”.
This is a masterly work by a unique and gifted “historian of the present”, who was unafraid to criticise authority while revealing the horrific realities of life and death on the ground.
Conor O’Clery is a former foreign correspondent of The Irish Times
