The real moving force in "The Great War for Civilisation" is history. It is history -- made by men -- that ushered in the Middle East's nightmares. For the people of the Middle East, Fisk notes, history has never gone away -- they live it, and die it, every day. The book's ironic title derives from a medal Fisk's father was awarded for his service in World War I -- the first of those "great wars for civilization," of which the latest is being enacted in Fallujah and Ramadi today. World War I plays a key and recurring role in Fisk's book in two ways. It provides the frame for an exploration of his problematic father Bill's life, in particular an enigmatic incident in which Fisk the elder refused to command a firing squad to execute a condemned man -- the one moment when Fisk felt his father acted in accord with the humanistic principles the younger man embraced. And, more important, it was the Great War, and the betrayals of Western promises made to the Arabs that followed it, that created the modern Middle East.

"My father, the old soldier of 1918, read my account of the Lebanon war but would not live to see this book," Fisk writes. "Yet he would always look into the past to understand the present. If only the world had not gone to war in 1914; if only we had not been so selfish in concluding the peace. We victors promised independence to the Arabs and support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Promises are meant to be kept. And so those promises -- the Jews naturally thought that their homeland would be in all of Palestine -- were betrayed, and the millions of Arabs and Jews of the Middle East are now condemned to live with the results."

Fisk writes that "I have witnessed events that, over the years, can only be called 'an arrogance of power.' The Iranians used to call the United States 'the center of world arrogance,' and I would laugh at this, but I have begun to understand what it means. After the Allied victory of 1918, at the end of my father's war, the victors divided up the lands of their former enemies. In the space of just seventeen months, they created the borders of Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia and most of the Middle East. And I have spent my entire career -- in Belfast and Sarajevo, in Beirut and Baghdad -- watching the people within those borders burn."

The most crucial and incendiary borders are those that mark out the state of Israel. As Fisk observes, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict "is an epic tragedy whose effects have spread around the world and continue to poison the lives of not only the participants but of our entire Western political and military policies towards the Middle East and the Muslim lands." Yet this crucial conflict is a subject very few Americans, including journalists, want to bring up. (It is much less taboo in Europe and, ironically, in Israel itself.) Passions run too high, and it is too interminable and complicated; better to say nothing and accept the status quo. As anyone who has spoken out on this subject knows, there is little reward for doing so.

"The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East"

By Robert Fisk

Alfred A. Knopf

1,107 pages

Nonfiction

Buy this book

Fisk has been accused of being obsessed with Israeli injustices against the Palestinians. If he is, the terrible events he witnessed in 1982 go a long way to explaining his obsession. At the heart of his book about the Lebanese war, "Pity the Nation," is a long and nightmarish account of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, in which hundreds or perhaps thousands of unarmed Palestinian refugees -- men, women and children -- were slaughtered by the Lebanese Phalangist allies of the invading Israeli army. Fisk, who was one of the first journalists on the scene, reported, and an official Israeli investigation confirmed, that Israeli troops knew about the massacre but made no real efforts to stop it. This episode is seared into Fisk's mind. In "The Great War for Civilisation," Fisk describes his repeated and vain attempts to draw the world's attention to the massacre, and to the Palestinian plight in general. "[F]ollowing [the Palestinians'] travail, the task of reporting their hopeless political leadership, their victimisation -- most cruelly demonstrated when they were turned into the aggressors by an all-powerful Israel and, later, an even more hegemonic United States -- and their pathetic, brave, and often callous attempts to seek the world's sympathy has been one of the most depressing experiences in journalism," he writes. "The more we wrote about the Palestinian dispossession, the less effect it seemed to have and the more we were abused as journalists." Fisk's passion on the subject cannot be understood without considering both what he saw, and what he has not been able to communicate.

In his new book, Fisk is clearly trying to be heard by those who come to the subject from an opposite perspective. He tells the strange story of Haji Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the first Palestinian leader, whose desperate search for allies led him to travel to Nazi Germany and embrace Hitler -- an act often cited by supporters of Israel, and one that Fisk condemns. As in "Pity the Nation," Fisk writes eloquently not just about the Palestinians who were driven or fled from their homes in 1948, but also about the Jews who took over those homes -- Jews who in many cases survived the Holocaust.

But if he is sympathetic to those on both sides, he refuses to ignore the historic injustice visited on 750,000 innocent Palestinians, whose lives were shattered by a chain of events set in motion by a letter written by a British statesman in 1917. Like Edward Said, Fisk asks why the Palestinians should have had to answer first for Britain's fateful colonial decision, and then for Germany's sins. "Why did the Palestinians have to bear the fate of Britain's First World War promise to a people whose ancestors lived on their land two thousand years before? Why did this new flood of Muslim refugees have to pay this price, then -- like the Armenians -- be told that they were the aggressors, and those who dispossessed them the victims? For in the decades to come, the Palestinians would be the 'terrorists' and those who took their lands would be the innocent, the representatives of a Phoenix rising from the ashes of Auschwitz. In the eyes of the world -- especially in 1948, in a world grown weary of war and familiar with the millions of refugees who had washed across Europe -- what was the lot of 750,000 Palestinian refugees when measured against the murder of six million Jews?"

Fisk offers a depressing account of the incompetent Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who agreed to the fatally flawed Oslo "peace process" -- which Western pundits stridently insisted would resolve the conflict. In fact, as Fisk and many others have noted, Oslo never had a chance because it postponed the critical issues, and because during the Oslo years Israeli expansion in the occupied territories was greatly accelerated. "More than any other event, this huge colonial expansion proved to Palestinians that Oslo was a sham, a lie, a trick to entangle Arafat and the PLO into the abandonment of all that they had sought and struggled for for over a quarter of a century, a method of creating false hope in order to emasculate the aspiration of statehood." For Fisk, the key difference between the two sides boils down to this: "The Arabs wanted their land back and then they wanted peace with Israel. The Israelis wanted peace but wanted to keep some of the Arab land." This was a recipe for the deadlock that exists to this day.

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