Pity the Nation Review
I read Pity the Nation by Robert Fisk some time back in 2015-2017. A few months after I finished reading it, I wrote the following brief review, which I will re-post here now, 10 years later.
This book was about the Lebanese Civil War. The only other book by Fisk I had read was The Great War for Civilization, and like that one, this was also a very sizeable book.
The Lebanese Civil War was a long and complicated conflict that lasted from about 1975 to 1990 and had many factions representing the immensely diverse social and religious diaspora in Lebanon fighting and allying with each other in turn. The Civil War was devastating, resulting in about a third of the population leaving the country, and about 5% of the population dying in war. Robert Fisk, a British journalist, covered the war from its beginning to its end. He was based primarily in Beirut, and mostly covered the battles that occurred in Beirut and the southern part of Lebanon. Unfortunately, he was not able to cover much north of Beirut, as it was rather dangerous for journalists to go there, given the very strong anti-Western sentiment in Tripoli and other northern cities. I will admit that I read this book hoping to get a better picture of the war in Tripoli, given that that was my father’s war, and so in that regard I was disappointed. That having been said, I was still absolutely blown away by what an interesting and informative book it was.
The book is not terribly useful as a textbook of the chronology of the war and the exact nature of the battles fought, but Fisk still gives enough information to build a cohesive picture of how the war was fought, and the history of Lebanon and the various factions fighting each other and how it all came to result in such a brutal war. But what the book does most strongly is talk about the people living in the country and the way the brutality of the conflict affected them. From the various villagers living in the Lebanese countryside attacked and slaughtered by militias of opposing factions, to the people in the cities under siege and occupation by the Israelis and Syrians in turn, to the journalists living in Lebanon trying to report the war as it becomes increasingly dangerous for them, Fisk manages to humanize everyone involved and affected by the war. Given how informative it was with details of the war itself, the human stories of people involved from all factions, and his own superb writing ability, this book was an absolutely incredible read, second only to Fisk’s follow-up book, The Great War for Civilization.
The story of Lebanon is at its core, a tragic one. From the time that it was the home of the prosperous ancient Phoenician states, to when they were trampled by the Persians, and they in turn by the Greeks, and then Romans, and then the various Arab Empires and occasionally the Crusaders, and then the Ottoman Empire, before it would finally become a French colony. When they finally receive their independence from the French in 1943, they are left as a country with arbitrary borders and a French constitution that attempts and fails to try to integrate the cultural and religious diversity within Lebanon into a functioning government. The French would leave the Christians with disproportionately greater power than the Shias or Sunnis or Druze. As the Christians wanted to become closer to the West and Israel, and the majority of other factions in Lebanon did not, this would lead to increased tensions within the government that would spiral into open combat between the Druze and Christians (along with tensions with Palestinians), sparking the Lebanese Civil War. Throughout the course of the Civil War, Lebanon would see itself become a proxy battleground between Iran, Syria, and Lebanese Shia on one side, and the Sunni Arab Nations and Lebanese Sunnis on another side, the Israeli-backed and West-backed Christians on one side, the Druze on another side, and the displaced Palestinians on another. All of these factions would fight each other throughout the war at some point, with unspeakable atrocities being committed by all. Throughout the course of the war, the Northern half of Lebanon would face a Syrian occupation to contest Israeli occupation of the southern half of Lebanon. Both of these occupations would remain until a decade or more after the war officially ended in 1990.
Like many conflicts in the Middle East, it was a complicated and bloody conflict whose importance would extend far beyond what it appeared on the surface. We would see history repeat itself with the nature of this conflict being a proxy war being seen again in Syria, Yemen, Libya, Iraq, and the Iran-Iraq war in the decades that followed. This was the war that saw the end of a united and organized Palestinian resistance against Israel based outside of the borders of Palestine, the creation of Hezbollah who would pick up the banner in the fight against Israel, the legitimization of Iran as the cornerstone of Shiite influence in the Middle East to contest Sunni influence, and the spread of Islamism as an ideology for the fight against the imperialism of the West and Israel.