Dispatches from the war zone

After six years of reporting from the frontline of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, RTÉ’s Richard Crowley decided that he’d experienced enough of the madness. Having opted to return home earlier this year, Crowley felt it would probably be best if he took an extended leave of absence from a broadcasting career that, during a 20 year period, had seen him present many of RTÉ’s top current affairs programmes, most notably including a six year stint on the flagship radio show, Morning Ireland.
But what was meant to be a time-out for reflection and relaxation, instead found Crowley drawing on his extensive experiences to write a book about the conflict in the Middle East. The resulting tome, No Man’s Land, has allowed the 48-year-old journalist to wrestle with the unresolved emotions he feels, having witnessed the tragic body count mount on an almost daily basis. But the book offers much more than the insights of one Irish journalist. For No Man’s Land, Crowley interviewed a broad cross-section of people representing a huge diversity of opinions on the conflict. The conclusions Crowley draws are worrying indeed.
“The impression I’m getting from talking to people out there is: if we are on a clock, it is 10 to 12 – midnight is the deadline,” Crowley states. “Let’s say, no more than 30 or 40 people are being killed in a week. But that’s a phenomenal death toll. At the end of my six years there, more than 4,000 people were killed.”
He doesn’t mince his words about the Israeli occupiers. “Keeping other people down at the point of a gun is fundamentally wrong, stupid, illegal, immoral, and self-defeating,” he argues. “Israelis would say, ‘Well, we are doing it because of the threat we face’; and I would say, ‘You’ve got to look at it the other way around. Part of the threat you face is because of the Occupation’. It is by its very definition an evil – ruling over somebody is evil.
“The damage just isn’t to the Palestinians, it is to the Israelis as well. I’d argue that it corrodes their souls and it is causing them huge social problems. There is a figure out just this week – 28 percent of Israelis drafted didn’t serve in 2007, some of them for religious reasons, some of them for – quote – ‘health’ reasons, some pretending to be gay. I mean, there were all sorts of reasons. People do not want to be part of this. And why would they? Good people do not want to go in and point a gun at some Palestinian kid who is 16. They don’t want to shoot him. They want out. Meanwhile, billions of dollars are being wasted in keeping a sort of status quo. I would be critical of the Americans and the Europeans for not giving it concretive, honest attention.”
Would Crowley agree that EU and US funding contributes to sustaining, rather than alleviating, the conflict?
“The Americans treat it as a terrorism issue and the Europeans deal with it as a humanitarian issue,” Crowley nods. “The Europeans are basically propping up the Palestinians with aid. And you have the Americans pumping in money to the Israelis. There’s billions being spent. When the Israelis went into Gaza, in August of 2006, they destroyed hundreds of millions of dollars worth of roads and bridges and power stations, paid for by the Europeans. And they also destroyed infrastructure paid for by American aid. So, you have American taxpayers dollars funding F16s to blow-up European funded power stations, which is ludicrous. It’s almost as if unless it gets out of control, they’re happy to throw money at the problem.”
So what should the EU do?
“The Europeans should concentrate on the human rights issues and say, ‘What you are doing is illegal. There is collective punishment. There are targeted killings. There is the establishment of settlements. There are all of these things going on which are just illegal. Don’t do them or we won’t do trade with you’. Give them a year or a two-year time span to stop it, and put the pressure on.”
In his book, Crowley interviews the former Chief Rabbi of Ireland, David Rose, who says the Palestinians will not admit to their contribution to the suffering and tragedies. Should the blame be split evenly?
“It’s not equal,” Crowley assesses. “They should, at some stage, apologise for the attacks on Israeli civilians – apart from being morally wrong, they were counterproductive. In the book, I ask Palestinians about killing Israeli civilians, they say, ‘There are no Israeli civilians – they all grow up to be soldiers’. It is kind of sinister if you think about killing a four-year-old because he’s going to grow up someday and have a gun but, unfortunately, that’s how some of them see it.”
Israel has continuously stated that Palestinians are taught to hate Israelis, particularly with propaganda filtered into the children’s programmes aired on State television.
“A bit of that goes on. A lot of that is on Palestinian and Hezbollah TV, but a lot of Palestinians don’t watch that type of TV,” maintains Crowley. “The other thing is: they don’t need to watch TV to hate, it is in their daily lives. If you are 16 and you’ve watched your father being humiliated at a checkpoint, or if you’ve watched your brother being shot when the Israeli troops come in, or if you can’t get to school, or if your uncle can’t run a business because there are 500 Israeli checkpoints in your country, or if you watch your land being seized for the building of the wall in the West Bank, or if you watch settlers moving up onto the hill of your village and they take your land and your water – that’s why they hate.
“Unfortunately, it is characterised as an anti-Jewish/anti-Semitic thing, but that’s manipulated by a certain element in Israeli society and also by a certain element of Israeli lobby in America. One of the interviewees says to me that for the Israelis to apologise and accept responsibility is to make it look like – quote – ‘the State of Israel born in sin’. That’s a difficulty for them, but it’s a reality. They’ll have to come to terms with it sooner or later.”
Crowley agrees that the emotional scars from the Holocaust are still very evident among the Israelis.
“There is a right wing group that tries to make the link from anything that is said about Israel, or done to Israel, back to the Holocaust,” Crowley points out. “They’ve lived with war – ‘48-‘67, ‘73, ‘78, ‘82, and another Lebanon war a year-and-a-half ago. So, they’re justifiably paranoid and they do still feel that it’s about an existential struggle. One of the things people said to me – and these are guys who are in their 30s and 40s who don’t remember the Holocaust and even their memories of the earlier wars are not that vivid – was that it is not safe yet for Jews in the world. So, you do have to take that into account. But there is another sort of more rational, more intelligent thought in Israel that separates one from the other and says, ‘These are quite distinct issues and we’ve got to deal with them separately’.
“What happened in German and Europe in the 1940s was appalling and, yes, it must never happen again, but let’s not allow it to cloud or distort our thinking about what’s happening here, now.”