Is Anything Happening?

by Lustig, Robin;

  I was woken by a furious hammering on the door of my room. ‘Lustig. Get the hell up. We’ve got a story.’ It was David Blundy, my rival on the Sunday Times. He could have let me sleep and raced ahead without me, but that was not Blundy’s way. We may have been rivals, but we were also friends and colleagues. I like to think I would have done the same for him.

  During my three years based in Jerusalem, I reported from every country in the region with the exception of Sudan and Yemen. In Egypt, I watched a full-scale riot by police conscripts and spent a day hidden in a shop selling hijabs to report on the growing Islamisation of Egyptian fashion; in Jordan, I was arrested for trying to interview a local mayor who was regarded as ‘too close to the Muslim Brotherhood’, and then advised, discreetly, that I would not be welcome back. (I had no problems, however, when I returned to Jordan in 1999 to cover the funeral of King Hussein for the BBC.)

  In Iraq, I was an invited guest of Saddam Hussein and nearly gave a heart attack to a young Iraqi journalist who had been sent to spy on visiting foreigners. As we drove past yet another giant portrait of Saddam, I turned to her in mock puzzlement and said: ‘Remind me to ask someone who that guy is.’ The look of sheer terror on her face as she feared that we could have been overheard told me all I needed to know about the brutality of his regime. I was among several dozen foreign reporters who had been invited to Iraq, ostensibly to report from the front line on how well the Iraqi military were doing against Iran. The truth was that they were not doing well at all, and we never got anywhere near the front. Instead, we were taken on official tours to Karbala and Najaf, two of the holiest shrines to Shia Muslims, where we were expected to be suitably impressed by Saddam’s benevolence towards Iraq’s Shia majority. Beautiful as the shrines were, in strictly news terms they were of far less interest than a visit to the battlefield would have been.

  When I went back to Iraq eighteen years later, after Saddam had been toppled by the US-led invasion in 2003, it was as if I was visiting an entirely different country: in the 1980s, no Iraqi would dare to be seen talking to a foreign reporter, whereas after his demise, they all wanted to talk, incessantly, about the chaos and violence into which their country had been plunged.

  In Saudi Arabia, I met highly educated and accomplished women who tried to convince me that wearing a full face veil and not being allowed to drive a car did not necessarily mean that they were being discriminated against. And in Kuwait I was told that the only people who had the right idea about how to deal with the Palestinians were the Israelis. Being surprised became routine; being depressed became inevitable. I tried to seek out people who wanted to build bridges between the region’s warring communities, but they were hard to find. Wherever I went, the men with the guns were in charge, even if they wore sharp suits and wide smiles whenever they sipped coffee with Western reporters in opulent five-star hotels.

  I was never under any illusion that my brief flits across the region enabled me to do anything more than provide an instant snapshot of what I was able to glean in a few days. Sometimes, not even that: on my first visit to Damascus in March 1986, for example, I was startled one evening by the sound of a massive explosion, followed by the sound of emergency vehicles racing through the city. As I had no idea where the blasts had occurred, I headed for the local offices of Reuters and the Associated Press (‘Is anything happening?’) to ask what they knew. The answer was that they knew nothing and had no intention of trying to find out. The local Syrian stringers knew better than to ask awkward questions: ‘We’ll wait to see what the official Syrian news agency says, and then we’ll report that,’ they said. It later emerged that sixty people had been killed in the blast, which the Syrians blamed on Iraq. If I had been able to find out at the time what it was, it would have been a major story – but I failed. Just as I had discovered outside Ealing police station right at the beginning of my career, being in the right place at the right time is not always the same as knowing what is going on.

  To be a foreign reporter in Syria – or in Iraq or Libya, or any of the other countries in the region for which the words ‘police state’ might have been invented – was to understand that I was being spied on every minute of the day. When I went to the Ministry of Information in Damascus to pick up my official accreditation, the man in charge of issuing the required documents greeted me with a file bearing my name placed ostentatiously on his desk. ‘Ah, Mr Lustig,’ he beamed. ‘We know all about you…’ As I had just arrived from Jerusalem via Cairo, but had claimed to come from London, this was not what I wanted to hear. Nor was I reassured when I got a glimpse of the hotel room plan – I had gone to introduce myself to the telephone switchboard operators – and noticed that the rooms on each side of the one that I had been allocated had been shaded in. Not available for guests, it seemed. Reserved for state security.

  Most of my visits to the Gulf were attempts to get close to the ‘tanker war’ between Iran and Iraq, the two regional superpowers who had been at war since 1980, with incalculable losses on both sides. It was a war of which Henry Kissinger was said to have remarked that it was a shame that there could be only one loser, but after the Iranian Islamist revolution of 1979, most Western sympathies were with Saddam’s Iraq. After Iraq invaded Iran, the war quickly got bogged down, and by the mid-’80s, the Iraqis had started bombing tankers in the Gulf carrying Iran’s oil exports. Iran retaliated by hitting vessels from Gulf states backing Iraq.

  In May 1987, the crew of an Iraqi Mirage F-1 fighter jet mistakenly attacked a US navy frigate, apparently in the erroneous belief that it was a tanker. Thirty-seven Americans were killed, because the frigate’s captain had failed to engage the vessel’s automatic anti-missile system. The Middle East press corps flocked to Bahrain to report on what looked like a hugely embarrassing US military failure. My report on the news conference held in the Bahraini capital, Manama, by the frigate’s unfortunate captain reflected my incredulity.

  To the American servicemen on board the USS Stark, the little blip on their radar screens was obviously a friendly aircraft. It had to be, since no one would have any reason to attack them.

  ‘Perhaps we Americans sometimes see the world a bit differently,’ said their commander ruefully. ‘We tend to assume that people are not out there to shoot at us.’

  A navy review board later recommended that the frigate’s captain should face a court martial, but he received a letter of reprimand instead and chose to retire early. It was not the US military’s finest hour, but once we had reported on the immediate aftermath of the attack, we reporters decided to take full advantage of the fact that we had a rare opportunity to see what was going on in Bahrain, and we started poking about to see what other stories we could dig up.

  That was when the Bahraini authorities decided that they had seen enough of us. An impeccably courteous official from the Ministry of Information summoned us to a news conference at the hotel where we were all staying and made an important announcement. It went something like this:

  I am sorry to inform you that we have just been informed by the hotel management that this hotel has to close with immediate effect so that urgent repairs can be carried out. We have tried to find you alternative accommodation, but without success, so as a courtesy we have arranged for you all to be transported direct to the airport to fly back to your respective homes. For your convenience, buses are waiting outside the hotel and will be departing shortly.

  The charm with which the message was delivered may have been impressive, but the bottom line was clear enough: we were being summarily expelled.

  Until my run-in with Jordanian security forces over my encounter with the Muslim Brotherhood mayor, Jordan was the easiest of Israel’s neighbours for me to visit, even though the two countries did not sign a formal peace treaty until 1994. The borders with Lebanon and Syria were closed, and to get to Cairo required either a flight or an impossible drive across the Sinai desert.

  All that was required to cross into Jordan was a quick taxi ride
from Jerusalem down to the Allenby Bridge, which marked the de facto border at the river Jordan (a piddly little trickle rather than a mighty biblical waterway, prompting Henry Kissinger’s alleged remark that it is ‘proof of what good PR can do’), then through the Israeli checkpoint on foot and another taxi ride into Amman. Total distance: less than forty-five miles.

  There were always at least two good reasons for spending a few days in the Jordanian capital, even though it could easily have qualified as the most boring city in the Middle East. First, the journalistic reason: it was where Yasser Arafat’s Number Two, Abu Jihad, lived, and he was usually more than happy to entertain visiting reporters to brief them on the latest thinking in the top echelons of the PLO. Remember, this was long before the signing of the Oslo Accords, which gave the PLO a formal status and a formal presence in the Palestinian territories – in the ’80s, it was still an imprisonable offence to show a Palestinian flag or to belong openly to the PLO, so Jerusalem-based reporters had either to talk to so-called ‘Palestinian notables’ who pretended to have no connection to the PLO, or flit across to Amman or Cairo.

  Abu Jihad (real name Khalil al-Wazir) was a slight, dapper man who lived with his wife and family in a comfortable home in the Amman suburbs. He was a co-founder of Fatah, the biggest faction in the PLO, and as the commander of its military wing undoubtedly bore personal responsibility for the deaths of many Israelis over the years. In 1988, he was shot dead in an Israeli commando raid in Tunis.

  My personal reason for visiting Amman was that it was the home of two American correspondents who were to become very close friends and who later played an important role in my move from print to broadcast journalism: Deb Amos of National Public Radio and Rick Davis of NBC. We would go out for dinner nearly every night to an Italian restaurant, Romero’s, and they would fill me in on all the latest Middle East gossip. It was their insights – they had arrived in the Middle East a few years ahead of me – that frequently wove their way into the imperfect tapestries that I created most weekends for Observer readers.

  Rick was expelled from Jordan in 1988 for ‘biased reporting’, but he and Deb then transferred to London, so we still saw quite a bit of each other after I joined the BBC. We had lunch together the day before Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990 and, Middle East experts that we were, we agreed that although there were already signs of Iraqi military activity close to the Iraq–Kuwait border, Saddam would never be daft enough to start another war so soon after the end of the eight-year bloodbath against Iran. Wrong again…

  In the mid-’80s, when I was living in Jerusalem, it was still relatively easy for correspondents to travel to and through the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, despite the permanent Israeli military presence. A car with Israeli licence plates would rarely have any difficulty negotiating the Israeli army checkpoints, and the simple expedient of placing a black or red checked keffiyeh, much favoured by Palestinian youths, on the car’s dashboard would usually be taken by potentially hostile Palestinians as a sign of at least neutrality, if not outright sympathy. (The so-called ‘separation barrier’ or ‘security fence’ that was to form a physical wall between Israel and the West Bank was built only in the mid-’90s as a response to a spate of Palestinian suicide bomb attacks.)

  Only rarely – fortunately – do the horrors of conflict impinge directly and personally on the journalists reporting them. For me, the execution of Farzad Bazoft was one such occasion, and the deaths of David Blundy, John Schofield and Marie Colvin were three others. They were all friends and fellow journalists, so it was not surprising that I was personally affected by their deaths. Natasha Simpson, however, was not a journalist; she was just eleven years old when she died, a victim of an attack at Fiumicino airport in Rome by gunmen belonging to the Palestinian group headed by Sabri Khalil al-Banna, better known as Abu Nidal.

  A little over eleven years ago, I attended the christening of the first-born child of some friends in Rome. She was a noisy infant, and she yelled throughout the ceremony. The vicar, I recall, was on the loquacious side, and I disgraced myself by giggling as he struggled to make himself heard over the lusty bawling of the little girl.

  Nine days ago, she died, in a hail of machine-gun fire at Rome airport. Her name was Natasha Simpson.

  … Anyone who earns his living, as I do, covering the Middle East is likely to have seen more than his fair share of death and destruction. There is no shortage of tragedy, of pointless waste, or of inhuman brutality. Many children have died over the years, each of them mourned by family and friends. To that extent, there was nothing special about Natasha, other than that she was someone I knew.81

  Tony Howard told me that he did not much like mawkish sentimentality on his op-ed pages but, on this occasion, he was prepared to make an exception.

  Reporting from Israel in the 1980s was like walking on eggshells. It often felt as if every single Jew and Palestinian on earth was born with an unshakeable conviction that the world’s media were deeply and implacably biased against them. No reporter escaped unscathed, but the antipathy was especially evident toward the British. Many Jews believe that anti-Semitism is rife among the English upper classes, and that the Foreign Office is stuffed full of public school-educated Arab sympathisers who harbour fantasies of being the next Lawrence of Arabia. Palestinians blame the UK for the Balfour Declaration of 1917, in which the then Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour told the Zionist Federation that ‘His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object…’

  The remainder of the sentence is much less well known: ‘… it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.’

  The Balfour Declaration may have been one of the earliest examples of what diplomats like to call ‘constructive ambiguity’, a way of agreeing a text that can mean different things to each party that signs up to it. What exactly is a ‘national home’? Is it the same as a state? Zionists insist that it is; non-Zionists argue that there was no such implication. And how do you establish a ‘national home’ for Jews, while doing nothing to ‘prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities’?

  As so often in diplomacy, an ingeniously constructed form of words has led to countless deaths. Another example came after the Six Day War in 1967. When Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Golan Heights, UN Security Council Resolution 242 famously called, among other things, for the ‘withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in recent conflict’. It did not, however, specify which territories. All of them? Or only some of them? The French text, however, referred to the ‘retrait des forces armées israéliennes des territoires occupés…’ which translates as ‘from the territories occupied’, implying all such territories. Fifty years later, the ambiguity still remains.

  When I first arrived in Jerusalem, I had to apply for accreditation as a resident foreign correspondent in order to acquire a press card that would enable me to pass through police and military checkpoints. Among the forms that I was required to sign was one agreeing to be bound by military censorship – in other words, that whenever I wrote anything that referred directly to Israel’s defence forces, I would have to submit it to the military censors’ office before transmitting it to London. As soon as I had signed it, I was handed a document that listed the names and home telephone numbers of every government spokesperson, information that in most other Western democracies would take many months, if not years, to acquire. The contrast between these two pieces of paper – military censorship and laudable government accountability – seemed to sum up so many of Israel’s contradictions, and they soon got me into trouble.

  In October 1986, two Israel air force officers ejected over Lebanon when
they ran into trouble during a bombing mission against PLO targets near Sidon. One was located and rescued, and then flown back to Israel, hanging on to one of the landing skids of a military helicopter as it flew low over southern Lebanon. The other man was not found and was reported to have been captured by Amal militia forces. (He was later handed over to Hizbollah and is believed to have died while in captivity.)

  The rescue was a huge story and the BBC World Service phoned me to ask if I could do a short interview about what had happened. Before going on air, when I put in a call to the Israeli military spokesman to get the latest information, I learned that the missing man was the plane’s navigator. I duly passed on this nugget to the BBC’s global audience, without even thinking of checking with the military censor since the information had come directly from the military’s own press office.

  Big mistake. As I soon discovered, press officers and censors do not always see eye to eye. I was hauled in for a severe reprimand from the censor and warned that I was at risk of having my accreditation withdrawn.

  I had already had a run-in with the military censors less than two weeks previously. The Sunday Times had published a huge exclusive story detailing the closely guarded secrets of Israel’s nuclear weapons programme, based on the testimony of Mordechai Vanunu, a former technician at the Dimona nuclear facility. Vanunu had disappeared shortly before the story was published – he had been lured to Rome in a classic honey-trap operation by a female agent of the Israeli spy agency Mossad. He was then drugged and bundled onto an Israeli navy vessel to be taken back to Israel, where he was tried in secret on charges of treason and espionage and sentenced to eighteen years in prison.