The Great War for Civilisation (179 page)

Michael Dutfield, the director, and I knew this would be easy for a British audience to watch. Europeans are used to free if sometimes bitter debates on the Middle East, where the old canard of “anti-Semitism” flung at anyone who dares to criticise Israel has largely lost its power. There are, as I always say, plenty of real anti-Semites in the world whom we must fight without inventing more in order to smother all serious discourse on Israel and the Arabs. But in the United States we knew things would be different. Our film would be a challenge not for American audiences—who were perfectly mature enough to understand our film if given the chance to watch it—but for the U.S. lobby groups which regularly set out to prevent the showing of any documentary that presents Americans with an alternative to the pro-Israeli “news” regularly served up on U.S. networks. Initial reports in the American media were faintly critical and often inaccurate.
¹⁹⁰

Then, only days after Discovery showed the three films coast-to-coast, the letter-writing campaign began. Discovery first reported that some of its advertisers were being pestered with telephone calls from supposedly outraged viewers. American Express, one of the channel's sponsors, received credit cards back from customers; the cards had been cut in half. An outfit calling itself “Promoting Responsibility in Middle East Reporting” (Primer) wrote to Discovery with a sinister warning. Robert Fisk had “impeccable English diction,” wrote Joseph I. Ungar, the group's vice president, in June 1994. Fisk projected “the essence of refinement and respectability . . . He could easily play the stage role of Henry Higgins. But he could be a Higgins with fangs.” In journalism, you have to laugh at this sort of nonsense. But the campaign against
Beirut to Bosnia
was not funny at all. The president of the same lobby group, Sidney Laibson, wrote a letter to John Hendriks, chairman of Discovery, the same month. “By airing
From Beirut to Bosnia
,” he wrote, “the Discovery Channel has provided the purveyors of insidious propaganda an opportunity to spread their venom into the living-rooms of America.”

Ungar's letter claimed that for us to say that Israel “confiscates,” “occupies” and “builds huge Jewish settlements on Arab land”—all facts acknowledged by Israeli human rights groups, Israeli journalists and foreign correspondents as well as by the U.S. government for more than twenty years—was “twisted” history. A reference in my commentary to the “Christian gunmen” that the Israelis sent into the Sabra and Chatila camps—a course of action described in Israel's own Kahan commission of inquiry—was condemned by Ungar as “an egregious falsehood.” Alex Safian of the “Camera Media Resource Center” wrote to Clark Bunting, senior vice president of Discovery, to claim that we had edited an interview with the Jewish settler Mickey Molad in such a way as to cut out a remark by him that Jews originally owned most of the land for the future settlement. We diligently searched back through all the rough-cuts—an hour of them—of the Molad interview only to find that he made no such comment in any of them. Safian's claims, Dutfield wrote back, were “absurd and demonstrably wrong.” There were further meretricious statements: that the Palestinian woman refused permission to go to hospital was a fraud, that she was not even pregnant. She gave birth to her child three months after we filmed her.

Then an
Independent
reader informed me that “American friends” had told her a scheduled re-airing of our series had been cancelled by Discovery because of the complaints. Dutfield wrote to the channel asking for an explanation. Bunting sent back the most preposterous denial I have ever heard from a television executive. “. . . given the reaction to the series upon its initial airing,” he wrote, “we never scheduled a subsequent airing, so there is not really an issue as to any re-airing being cancelled.” When I read those gutless words, I was ashamed to be a foreign correspondent.

Here we were, trying to explain a grim reality of our age to an audience that deserved to hear another side to the Middle East conflict, that needed to hear the voices of those deeply aggrieved, increasingly angry people upon whom great injustice was being visited. Yet those who claimed to speak for truth—and for Israel—had effectively censored us off the air, with the cringing assistance of a major television channel. Here, long in advance of the international crimes against humanity of 2001, were answers to the “whys” that we would be told not to ask
after
the attacks on New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. In advance, we were not supposed to explain the explosion to come—even if this warning might have helped us to prevent it. Afterwards, we would be ordered to remain silent. This, for me, remains one of the most frightening and distressing elements to the “war on terror”: the suppression of a truth without which no free judgement could be made, before or after the event.

Is there, I ask myself, a key to all this, some incident, some lone truth that will illuminate all that we have done to the Middle East, the anger we have created, the terror we have inflicted upon those we now regard as our enemies? Is there some way in which to communicate this without reiterating the demands of the self-righteous, some way in which the death of innocence can be portrayed outside the framework of hatred? Osama bin Laden does not have to be the voice of those who have suffered. He has no monopoly over their grief and pain. He was never appointed their representative on earth. So I am drawn to the story of a young woman who died needlessly and tragically, who could never have countenanced the crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001, but whose terrible end was ignored by the nation that killed her and whose reporters showed no interest in her fate.

THE AMERICANS KILLED RAAFAT AL-GHOSSAIN just after two o'clock on the morning of 15 April 1986. In the days that followed her death, U.S. officials claimed that Libyan anti-aircraft fire might have hit her home not far from the French embassy in the suburbs of Tripoli. But three weeks later, the Pentagon admitted that three bombs dropped by an F-111 aircraft in the U.S. attack on Colonel Ghadafi had “impacted in the vicinity of the French embassy” and had caused—to use the usual callous euphemism—“collateral damage.” Raafat was eighteen years old, a graduate of an English school on holiday from London, a promising and beautiful artist whose individual death went unrecorded in the country that killed her nineteen years ago.

She lives on only in the seventh-floor Beirut apartment of her parents and her younger sister where a half-hour videotape of Raafat's 1985 graduation day at Marymount International college at Kingston-on-Thames brings her briefly back to this world. “Raafat Bassam Fawzi al-Ghossain from Palestine,” the English principal announces, and a tall, striking young woman in a white ball gown can be seen walking self-consciously to receive her graduation certificate to the tinkling of Elgar's “Land of Hope and Glory” on a school piano. She listens attentively to a graduation speech from an American teacher who tells the girls that “with the gift of youth, nothing is too daunting.” On the left side of the stage on which she sits is the Stars and Stripes, on the right the Union flag of Britain.

In the college gardens, Raafat stands next to her American-educated Palestinian father Bassam. “Here we are,” he says when he spots the video camera, and Raafat dutifully kisses her father on the cheek. Her mother watches proudly through sunglasses while a six-year-old girl—Raafat's younger sister, Kinda— primps in front of the camera. As Raafat leaves the college hall with its American and British flags, the same high-pitched piano plays Thomas Arne's “Trumpet Voluntary.” On this English summer afternoon, Raafat al-Ghossain has less than a year to live. The men who will kill her are American, flying—with special permission of Margaret Thatcher—from RAF Lakenheath, scarcely 75 miles from Marymount International College in Kingston.

Palestine, Britain, Libya, America. It is as if the Western conflict in the Middle East hovered over Raafat al-Ghossain all her short life. Bassam always wanted her to have an English education—Kinda was born in London and holds a British passport—and still feels that Britain represents something intrinsically good in the world. His father, Fawzi, was a graduate of Balliol College, Oxford, a lawyer in the British Mandate government in Jerusalem, an adviser to Sir Herbert Samuel, the first High Commissioner to Palestine. A slightly blurred photograph shows Fawzi al-Ghossain and Samuel, who was Jewish, walking through a tree-lined avenue in Jerusalem together, deep in conversation. Even after the family was forced to flee Palestine in 1946 to settle for several years in Cairo, the al-Ghossains never lost their faith in the West. Bassam was given a scholarship to study in America by a Quaker couple who noticed his fascination with model aircraft. He graduated in chemical engineering from the Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia and started work as a petroleum engineer for the national oil company in British-administered Kuwait in 1957. “My family always admired the British,” Bassam says. Rarely was a family to be so cruelly betrayed by the society and culture in which they had put their trust.

Bassam met his future wife, Saniya, half-Lebanese, half-Turkish—a daughter of the Beirut city treasurer—in 1963, but they left Kuwait during the 1967 Arab–Israeli War and moved to Algiers, where Bassam took a job in the country's oil production company. A French doctor delivered Raafat, weighing 3.8 kilos, at an Algiers hospital; when she was only five months old the family moved to Libya, where Bassam took a job with ESSO, and later with American Occidental. Colonel Ghadafi's revolution was only fifteen months away.

“We would take Raafat out to picnics with us, visiting the [Roman] cities of Leptis Magna and Sabratha,” Bassam remembers. “There were parties every week and swimming. When Raafat was four, we enrolled her at the Lycée Français in Tripoli. She was a very pretty little girl. She loved doll's houses, she liked putting all the members of a family in one house. Always she wanted our family to live together . . .” Raafat—“Fafo” was her nickname in the family—spoke French fluently but transferred to the American school in Tripoli when she was twelve. “She was there for two years but I thought the educational standards were not good enough. So we sent her to Marymount in Kingston-on-Thames.” And Bassam pulls from his file a thick bunch of school reports.

Raafat's sister Kinda had been born three years earlier, on 1 January 1979. At fifteen, Raafat now found herself alone at boarding school, with neither her parents nor her baby sister to comfort her. Racked by home-sickness, and schoolwork which she initially found too advanced, she begged to return to Libya, to the family villa not far from the sea, to the house in which all the al-Ghossains could live together. “A pleasant character,” a philosophy teacher noted coldly, “but quite ill-disciplined—will not work.” At maths, there were complaints of Raafat “misusing her ability” while a singing teacher reported that Raafat “would be an excellent choral member if she were not so chatty and giggly.” But in art, she excelled. Mr. McFarland, her art teacher, wrote to her parents in 1984 that “Raafat has worked really well this quarter & I am very pleased with her progress.”

The anguish that lay behind Raafat's unhappiness at school comes through painfully in a letter she wrote to herself in English on lined notepaper on 17 November 1981, addressed to “God” and headed with three words in capital letters: “PLEASE—PLEASE—PLEASE”:

Dear God, I love you very much. God, I have a few things I would like to ask you about and asking [
sic
] if you could help me. First, of course, is that you give us a long life for about 200 years (you know what I mean), I and my whole FAMILY and friends . . . Second, keep your blessings on us and help us through life . . . Third, please let my parents leave [Libya] on Friday 27th . . . or even Tuesday or Wednesday but please after this weekend . . . Fifth, please please a thousand times let it be my last year at Marymount or even if it is possible—half year . . . Don't separate our small family [in] Libya. Let the conditions in Libya push them to leave on [
sic
] January and make ME leave Marymount although it is a nice school but I get homesick too much. Let me go to a day-student school this year. PLEASE. Or make my parents come here and live . . .

Raafat's reference to “conditions” in Libya was not without reason. A self-declared enemy of Israel and America, Libya was already being accused of “international terrorism” by the United States and Britain. The British condemned Colonel Ghadafi's support for the IRA—he sent at least one shipload of weapons to Ireland—and in 1984 a British policewoman was shot dead by a Libyan “diplomat” outside the country's London embassy. Ghadafi had sent hit men to eliminate his domestic opponents abroad. The West was already treating Libya as a pariah state, although Raafat al-Ghossain—conscious of her father's birthplace and of her grandfather Fawzi's stories of life in Jerusalem—thought of a country that no longer existed, nearly 1,300 miles to the east of Tripoli.

“Return our holy land PALESTINE, soon and let my whole family enjoy it and live there for a long time—if it is possible, next year,” Raafat wrote in her letter to “God.” In 1982, enraged by the Sabra and Chatila massacre, she joined a peaceful protest march on the streets of London. A poorly focused photograph of Raafat shows her in a raincoat in Knightsbridge, a green, red, black and white Palestinian flag curling above her head. “She went on several demonstrations,” Bassam recalls. “They were all peaceful and she would come back from all of them drenched in rain.” In her last note in the Marymount school magazine in 1985, Raafat was to write that “I would like to say a final sentence and that is May Peace and Hope come from Palestine, my homeland.”