(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
It was always interesting to travel with Robert Fisk when something dramatic happened in the Middle East – like in Lebanon. He was a Sarepta's jar of stories and rarely let his mouth rest. Bob, as I called him, continued the conversation even though we were both terrified of dangerous situations. He even made limericks about the places we drove through. It helped with the fear.
Fisk dared to take many chances to be an eyewitness himself. It paid off. Another reason he got a lot of scoops was a tireless eagerness to check rumours. In February 1982, he revealed that Syrian government forces killed over 20 civilians in the city of Hama.
Sabra and Shatila
When six months later we entered the Palestinian refugee camps together Sabra and Shatila in Beirut, the city we lived in, Robert Fisk fell silent. We heard only the buzzing of flies as we counted in horror dozens of dead children, women and men, all massacred by Lebanese militia who were protected by Israeli soldiers around the camps.
Readers of the reports in The Independent would also later receive outrageous stories that made him Britain's most award-winning journalist.
After 44 years in the Middle East, Rober Fisk died in October 2020 of a stroke. The script to Night of Power was almost finished. He revealed the book title to me the last time we talked about our respective book projects. Night of Power plays on night number 27 of the fasting month of Ramadan, the night when religious Muslims believe the prophet Muhammad was first handed a part of the Koran by the angel Gabriel.
The book, with subtitle The Betrayal of the Middle East, is the sequel to The Great War for Civilization, The Conquest of the Middle East from 2006, an epic work leading up to the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001. In Night of Power Fisk depicts the time after the occupation of Iraq in 2003. Readers get detailed descriptions of a country in disintegration, with the United States in the lead role.
Many of the dead's faces were hidden under knots of cellophane. Fisk wanted to know who the victims were, and give them identities in the newspaper.
The chapter "Awakening" is about the winter that followed the so-called Arab Spring in 2011. When Egypt's new dictator, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, ordered the killing of over 800 protesters in Cairo in 2013, Fisk went to the morgue, where many of the dead's faces were hidden under knots of cellophane. Fisk wanted to know who the victims were, and give them identities in the newspaper. He did the same in reports from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Palestine. Those killed should not just be statistics.
First hand knowledge
With a doctorate in political science, Robert Fisk demonstrated i Night of Power once again how he avoided the traps that many academics fall into when they rely on second-hand sources in their analyses. Fish wanted first hand knowledge, but didn't just seek out today's theaters of war, he gained access to archives few other journalists and academics checked.
And once again the West's meddling in the Middle East, not least in Palestine, is revealed. Consequences of the "Lying, Deceitful and Hypocritical" 1917 Declaration by British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour – which favored the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people at the expense of the Palestinians – became an Israeli apartheid regime that was guilty of mass murder upon mass murder from 1948 to the present day.
After each of the book's 15 chapters, there are many and long footnotes. These are a book in themselves. The texts are as interesting as the rest, a great foreword by colleague Patrick cockburn and well-analyzed afterword by Robert's widow, author and filmmaker Nelofer Pazira-Fisk. It was she who ensured that the book was published posthumously. Pazira-Fisk is also included in the other texts, as the two often traveled together on missions.
Gaza Strip
There are several clues in the book that point towards the atrocities we are now seeing on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with direct and indirect Israeli killings of over 180 Palestinians, according to an estimate in the prestigious British medical journal Lancet this summer.
Fisk also deals with the attitude of the Israeli leaders towards the Palestinians during occupation. He quotes former foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, who said in 2018: "There are no innocent people in the Gaza Strip." Five years later, the echo rang out from other ministers, and from Israel's president, Isaac Herzog: "There's a whole nation out there who are guilty." Israel's 'apolitical' head of state thus gave a kind of blessing for the razing of the entire coastal strip. "We fight human animals and we act accordingly," became a mantra. The Palestinians were to be crushed as a national, ethnic and religious group.
In his book, Robert Fisk also reflects on the normalization of warfare and the Israelis' contempt for it international law. He further looks at his own role as a referent from bloodbaths and massacres, at his stories from mass graves, from torture and executions for almost half a century. And he asks: Should I have been reporting from the Middle East for so many decades? It didn't matter.
Having followed the Middle East over these years, I have no doubt that Robert Fisk has left a strong mark. Night of Power is, in my opinion, a very important work for anyone who wants a deeper insight into the region's many labyrinths and at the same time appreciates top-notch writing. I myself think almost daily about what Bob and I could have talked about, and not least what he would have written about the Israelis' plausible genocide in the Gaza Strip, as the UN and other international law experts state – or how he would have expressed himself about the US and parts of Europe's unworthy roles.
