Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War

by Robert Fisk

What happens when the world uses Lebanon.

For you if

you want to understand how a country becomes a proxy war and stops being a country.

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In 1982, Robert Fisk was one of the first journalists to walk through Sabra and Shatila after the massacre — Lebanese militiamen, operating under Israeli military protection, killed somewhere between 800 and 3,500 Palestinian civilians in three days. This book is what led him there: a decade of reporting from Beirut, watching Lebanon get dismembered by every faction that touched it — the PLO, the Syrians, the Americans, the Israelis, the militias. Fisk's method is journalism at its most demanding: go there, stay there, talk to the people dying. The result is the fullest account of how Lebanon's civil war actually worked — not as a conflict between factions, but as a demonstration of what happens when a small country becomes useful to everyone else's purposes.

Where This Book Lives

Setting: Lebanon
Voice: An outside perspective on Lebanon
Themes: bearing witness colonialism's legacy complicity in atrocity foreign intervention impunity and injustice military occupation war journalism war and civilians
Topics: cold war israeli-palestinian conflict

Fisk is the most decorated British foreign correspondent of his era — seven British Press Awards, the Orwell Prize, the Martha Gellhorn Prize. The seam worth naming: his 2018 Douma reporting was criticized for relying on Assad government-arranged sources, and in 2007 he questioned aspects of the 9/11 account in ways some colleagues found irresponsible. That is not what this book is. This is 1990, built on a decade in Beirut, and the pages on Sabra and Shatila — he was one of the first journalists there — are among the most important pieces of war journalism ever written about this region. P&P recommends this book; knowing the later career is part of reading it honestly.

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