The Hostage's Daughter

by Sulome Anderson

  It was a belief I clutched inside myself for so long, and still haven’t entirely let go of. People leave. But my mother used that conviction to fuel her stubborn independence, hold people at arm’s length and push them away when they failed her, even in small ways. In contrast, the lonely child inside me always thought that if I clung to the people I loved hard enough, if I pressed as close to them as possible, maybe this time they’d stay. Needless to say, it rarely worked out that way, and my mother had little patience for my neediness as I grew older. I think subconsciously she wanted me to rely completely on her for my identity, because I was all she had for so long, the center of her galaxy. She swirled around me in a cloud of anxious concern, overwhelming love, and constant, haranguing criticism.

  I need to be better, more like her. I’m weak, pathetic. I must be, because my iron-strong mother is so rarely happy with me as I am, and she’s always right.

  It was a thought that rooted itself in a dark, quiet corner of my mind after my dad came home, as Mama became ever sterner and sadder. It would grow longer, hungrier, wrapping its angry tendrils around my life—and when I would berate myself, almost tasting my own blood in my mouth as I raked deep mental furrows across the ugly, disfigured abomination I believed myself to be, I always did it in my mother’s voice.

  But the thought of her shivering, bereft of the man she let into her heart after turning so many others away out of fear—I can understand why she tried to bring her daughter up strong, fierce, and uncaring. She wanted to spare me the pain of losing someone. It wasn’t a realistic goal, and it certainly didn’t work, but I know she didn’t mean to scar me the way she did. Parents rarely do. In the moment when she found out what had happened to my dad, she was a woman alone in a world where people were shoved into cars at gunpoint and ripped out of their lives.

  “The men who kidnapped Terry weren’t amateurs,” Don told me seriously during our interview. “That big guy? He moved like a cat. They knew exactly what they were doing; they were frighteningly organized.”

  I know what happened next from Dad’s book. After my father was thrown unceremoniously into the back of that car, one of the men who took him leaned down and said something.

  “Don’t worry,” his kidnapper told him comfortingly. “It’s political.”

  In my parents’ world at the time—and to a certain extent, mine now—there has to be a kind of detachment from reality. You must put aside the very real possibility of your own death or you can’t do your job. We drink and laugh that possibility away, bury it under cynical humor and work, the work, always this story and the next. We spend so much time around death and suffering as journalists; when you consider it, there’s a deep strangeness to our habit of holding that one fatal story so far from our minds. We simply pretend to ourselves that they won’t kill the messengers, the neutral observers, that all of us will end our lives peacefully in bed at a dignified age. It’s a pretense that’s becoming much harder to keep up these days as our colleagues fall in ever-increasing numbers each year.

  “I think at the time, we felt we wouldn’t die,” Shazi tells me. “When we weren’t working—there was no Internet or cell phones, we had to go and talk to people, see the devastation ourselves—we were always in the Commodore Hotel or reading the wires. Anyway, it was fun. We had parties in the middle of mayhem; we used to dance a lot. We clung to each other, I think.”

  Robert Fisk, who used to be my dad’s best friend, is the man who embodies that generation of war correspondents for me, the reporter who brought Lebanon’s heartbreak to life for so many people in his book Pity the Nation. He’s still working as I write this, still making the news real for his readers. From what I understand, he remains the Independent’s crown jewel: the famous Robert Fisk, who has seen perhaps one too many wars.

  Now well into his sixties, he’s incredibly difficult to pin down, but he finally agrees to meet me for breakfast at Café Rawda on the Corniche, overlooking the crags and pools where poor Lebanese and Syrian boys dive and wade. The seawater is still blue, despite Beirut’s abundance of garbage, mounds of which carelessly litter the coast. Much like Lebanon itself, the shore is barely winning its struggle against the casual disrespect of the people who walk it.

  Fisk, whom I used to call Fisky as a child, is an imposing figure, with his upper-class British accent, acid-tinged intelligence, and air of not quite caring. But he looks weary, much older than I remember him. Older than he should look, perhaps. But then again, this is a man who’s witnessed more massacres than I even want to think about.

  “During the civil war, you had enormous freedom to move around,” Fisk tells me. “Another journalist once said to me, ‘There are no good guys in this war, Robert. You’d better know that. And the only way to cover it is to go out, every day, and have an adventure.’ And that’s what I did, and you could do it then. The checkpoints respected you everywhere. They were cynical about what you wrote if they didn’t like it, but you could go and be shot at by Syrian tanks from the Palestinian trenches or you could go to southern Lebanon and see the Israelis rearming what was then called the Free Lebanon Army . . . I had the house here, and I would meet with the others at the Commodore . . . There was great friendship in that; when somebody was in trouble, you’d immediately try to help them out.”

  Because I grew up around these Commodore stories, it’s a time I’m as nostalgic for as any of my parents’ friends, despite the fact that I was an embryo at the time. It was a different era of journalism, in some ways a more courageous, cleaner time, before Twitter, Facebook, and our hyperactive news cycle that churns out a tragedy each minute, only to discard it for another the next. These days, it seems as though massacres, refugee crises, episodes of human indignity and suffering are forgotten almost as soon as they’re reported. Yes, it’s harder for despotic regimes and militants to commit atrocities in secret, since practically everyone has a cell-phone camera and a social media account. Most of the time, we see the violence they inflict on the innocent. We see, but do we really notice? Or are we too busy clicking on the next horror show, the next bloodletting, the next listicle, gif, or meme, the next, the next, the next?

  “The funny thing about Lebanon is that it’s a tiny country,” Fisk tells me from the lost place and time he’s remembering. “If you spend all your time here, you understand the politics very well. But because it’s got this huge mountain chain and Roman ruins in the Beqaa, it gives it a depth and height that is quite misleading. It was like this was the center of the world for us. You know, for the Crusaders, it was Jerusalem. When you came here during the war, it was Beirut.”

  Fisk shares one of the worst things he saw in that war of terrible things people did to each other: the massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, an event that still haunts Lebanon’s collective memory. The sickening gift my grandfather’s friends, with the blessing and patronage of the Israelis, gave hundreds of Palestinian civilians living in those camps that September of 1982. The atrocity was executed by the Phalange, a Maronite Catholic political party/militia I’m told my jido (grandfather), Adib Bassil, helped found. An Israeli governmental investigation, the Kahan Commission, was formed after it was all over, in response to widespread international outrage.

  The Kahan Commission found that Israel was “indirectly responsible” for the Sabra and Shatila massacres and Ariel Sharon, then the Israeli defense minister, bore “personal responsibility” for the violence. But a 2012 New York Times piece reveals declassified U.S. documents detailing the depth of Israel’s complicity in the affair and how officials in the Israeli government manipulated and intimidated U.S. officials into inaction on behalf of Palestinian civilians in the camps.

  “If you don’t want the Lebanese to kill them, we will kill them,” Sharon is quoted in the documents as telling Morris Draper, the American envoy to the Middle East. “When it comes to our security, we have never asked. We will never ask. When it comes to existence and security, it is our own responsibility and we will nev
er give it to anybody to decide for us.”

  The declassified material exposes “how Israel’s refusal to relinquish areas under its control, and its delays in coordinating with the Lebanese National Army, which the Americans wanted to step in, prolonged the slaughter.” In short, the Israeli government appears to have been more than indirectly responsible for what happened at Sabra and Shatila, despite the fact that Phalange militiamen were the ones getting their hands bloody.

  My grandfather’s position in the Phalange is a legacy I don’t much care for. Composed exclusively of wealthy Christians, the Phalange leadership seemed to be easily the foulest people in Lebanon, which was not known for the sweetness of its politicians and militiamen back then; still isn’t. However, the Israelis seemed to decide the Phalange made promising allies in their strategy to rid themselves of the Palestinians once and for all.

  The Gemayel family headed up that pack of murderers, rapists, and bigots, and from what I’m told, they made the Sopranos look like adorable babies playing with toy guns. A story I’ve heard multiple times while reporting this book involves Pierre Gemayel attending Hitler’s Berlin Olympics and coming back to Beirut singing the Nazis’ praises. You’d think that would mean the Phalangists hated Jews, but you’d be wrong. As an elite minority, they welcomed the citizens of the new country to the south as kindred spirits: educated, cultured sophisticates keeping the torch of Western values alight in a vast ocean of unwashed, ignorant Muslims. Don’t be fooled, ladies and gentlemen, because according to these people, they were not Arabs, despite the resemblance they bore their fellow Lebanese. No, as the Phalange and many other Christians in Lebanon had each other convinced (some still are, sadly), they were Phoenicians, direct blood descendants of that great bygone merchant empire. And so an alliance was born.

  “I can tell you, their names don’t really belong in the dictionary under what you would consider Christian,” an ex-Mossad agent recently told me with a chuckle, referring to the Gemayels. He was active at the time of my father’s abduction. “They were quite ridiculous. Well, they were crazy. The whole place was crazy, and we just added fuel to it.”

  The Israeli government was on its quest to eliminate the PLO, which had moved into southern Lebanon following the Palestinians’ abrupt need to relocate after the establishment of the Jewish state. The PLO quickly wore out its welcome by using its host country as a base from which to launch attacks against its powerful new neighbor and behaving badly in someone else’s country, managing to piss off pretty much every faction in Lebanon. When Israel invaded southern Lebanon in June of 1982, causing Arafat and the rest of the PLO leadership to flee the country, the Phalange realized the Israeli occupation was going to be extremely helpful in their mission to keep the country safely in Christian hands. They hated the Palestinians too, so a little quid pro quo happened, backs were scratched, the Phalange killed a lot of Palestinian civilians, and Israel thought it would maintain a sense of plausible deniability by keeping its soldiers’ hands clean of the actual massacre. They simply watched from afar, overseeing the bloodletting. But after Sabra and Shatila, the flames Israel fueled were too high to be ignored, because the people who died at those camps did not do so unnoticed. The Beirut press corps was there to hold the horrific things they saw up to the world in disbelief, and Fisk was one of the first to arrive on the scene.

  “I went to the camp in the morning with [another journalist],” he tells me. “And while we stayed in the camp with all these corpses, there were still some men in armored trucks and vehicles there, so we hid in a backyard. Suddenly we looked around and we saw a woman dead on her back, with fresh blood—she’d just been killed . . . there were a lot of raped women. You could tell when you went into the houses—the smell was appalling, of course—but you’d see the tables overturned with food on the ground, and you’d go into the bedroom, and you could see that’s where the killings and rapes had gone on.

  “I came out and the Israeli soldiers were walking past Sabra and Shatila, and I’m just standing there watching them,” Fisk continues. “They were running past me, stooped right down low . . . and this sergeant comes to me and says, ‘You, go away.’ And I said no. I think I actually said, ‘Fuck you.’ And he said, ‘Why are you here?’ And I said, ‘For the same reason you are. Because all those people in there have been massacred.’ ‘No, they are terrorists.’ ‘Well they’re all dead,’ I replied. ‘Yes, the terrorists are all dead.’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘Civilians. Women. Babies. All dead. Killed by your friends.’ And then these other soldiers wanted to talk to me about what had happened. They were frightened of the terrorists. Terrorists, terrorists, terror, terror, terror, terror.”

  That’s an incessant refrain now firmly established in our culture—the characterization of all Arabs, even defenseless ones, as terrorists. It’s a conviction many Israelis still hold close. As recently as July of 2014, Ayelet Shaked, then a member of the Israeli Knesset [parliament] and now Israel’s minister of justice, posted this on Facebook:

  Behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism. They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons; nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the little snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.

  Little snakes. The depth of the dehumanization is utterly chilling, and very widespread. It’s true that plenty of Arabs return the favor with gusto, but the media has become so saturated with their bigotry that we often miss the fact that the hatred happens on both sides.

  Fisk knows all about it. “Sabra and Shatila changed my life as a journalist,” he tells me. His eyes go bright for a moment. “The job of a journalist is to be neutral and unbiased, on the side of those who suffer. It is not our job to treat the Middle East like a fifty-fifty game of football. What they teach you at your first newspaper—equal time to both sides—well, even when you think you’re being equal, the Middle East is a bloody tragedy. And what happened there—I interviewed an Israeli soldier who was quite psychotic. He was a young officer from France who said, ‘I know you are tape-recording this, but the Palestinians are all cunts and I want them dead.’ They knew what the Phalange was like.”

  I can’t stop thinking about those people, the women and children cut down like animals, like little snakes. But if I shudder at the thought, how must it be for Robert Fisk, who keeps watching the dead pile up, unable to stop working, to retire and tear his eyes from the Middle East as it burns itself to dust?

  “Can I ask you a personal question, Robert?” I say.

  “Go ahead,” Fisk replies, but a wary look crosses his face.

  “Do you still see those people when you close your eyes at night? The ones from Sabra and Shatila.”

  “No, not at all,” he says quickly, firmly. “The only thing that happened was one night after I’d written the big story, I thought the corpses were lying around me on the bed. The reason was that my clothes stank of dead people . . . And we were so tired during the Israeli invasion and siege, absolutely exhausted, that I had strange dreams. I had a dream at one point—I’d been in so many air raids—that through the window of my bedroom, a little tiny Israeli plane came. I could see the pilot, and he whizzed out of the other window.”

  He gives a short, bright burst of laughter. “That’s what happens when you’re very tired.”

  “But you must know about PTSD,” I argue. “You’re saying all of it never affected you?”

  “No, not at all,” he repeats. “However terrible the things I’ve seen . . . I can come home to Beirut, go to a French restaurant, and forget about it. You have to be tough to work in the Middle East, and if you’re affected by it very badly, go home.”

  “But the toughest people I know in this job—they see ghosts at night, most of them,” I persist.

  “I
don’t see ghosts,” Fisk insists. “I never see ghosts. Never seen a ghost in my life.”

  “Well, not ghosts. But my friend is a tough guy. He’s seen some bad shit. And he freely admits, and I’ve heard him because I’ve slept on his couch, that he has terrible nightmares.”

  “Well, I’ve never done that,” Fisk says uncomfortably. “No, I’ve been fine. I think you can turn the recorder off now.”

  “Wait, wait,” I respond quickly. “I grew up with journalists, Robert, and I never deluded myself that anything I wrote would make a difference. For me, it was never about changing things—”

  “I don’t think we do change very much, sorry to say,” Fisk interjects shortly. I can see I’m losing him.

  “It must bother you, though, seeing all this and writing about it—”

  “No. It doesn’t.”

  “And never seeing anything change,” I finish. “Did you ever feel as though you detached?”

  “No,” he says again, with finality. “I felt very sorry for dead people. But when you’re around a lot of dead people, you’re quite frightened, not because it reminds you that we’re all going to die, but because you know the killers aren’t far away and they’re not going to care about your life. Especially with the indignity at Sabra and Shatila—with the heat of the summer, the bodies were corrupting very quickly. Within two days, they were leaking chemicals all over the road and the stench was indescribable. I remember I did a film interview with Irish television, and I kept having to swipe the flies off my face because they were going from the bodies to me. When I got back to Dublin, they told me they could see me swiping at my face but they couldn’t see the flies on TV. The immigration officer said, ‘Oh, we know you, Bob. You’re the fella that keeps slapping yourself around the face.’”