There is a careful art to good journalism. It involves not only seeing and writing what happens but also understanding the reason why, and the precedent that came before it. Empathy, combined with a cunning understanding of one’s environment and ability to talk to people are crucial instruments for a reporter hoping to get the whole story — not just the headline a paper may seek. Joining host Chris Hedges is Lara Marlowe, journalist and author, to talk about how her former husband and colleague Robert Fisk encapsulated all of that in his years as a journalist and writer and how his work, specifically his book "The Great War for Civilization,” serves as one of the West’s great tools in understanding the modern Middle East.

Marlowe details how Fisk meticulously reported on major stories, such as the US carrier Vincennes shooting down an Iranian civilian airplane or the massacre at Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon. She highlights what it was like to be a fly on the wall, observing his reporting methods, including often finding ways of reporting a story when official lines of communication were down. While in Iran reporting on the shooting down of Iran Air Flight 655, Marlowe tells Hedges, “Robert started sweet talking the Telex operator… and…started writing his front page story directly onto the Telex machine, which amazed me, it really did.”

When Fisk was subject to an almost fatal beating by an Afghan mob, Marlowe explains that even then, he was still understanding and empathetic to the anger of the people. “[Fisk] said that he didn't blame the people who'd beaten him, because he said if the Americans had just bombed my village and destroyed my house… and I saw a Westerner on a bus on the Afghan-Pakistan border, I'd want to kill him too,” Marlowe recounts.

It is this level of discernment and compassion that distinguished him from other reporters and what made him such an effective journalist. He would step where others wouldn’t and face controversy head on. One such instance involves Fisk’s reporting on the suicide bombing of a US Marine compound in Beirut in 1983, which killed 307 people, and how he interviewed parents and siblings of the bombers. Through this, Marlowe sums up his dedication to reporting: “He really made the effort to understand why they did it. And I think he came closer than anybody else in the West, any non-Muslim, to understanding.”

Video available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCBujuk6g48)

Transcript available: https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/robert-fisk-and-the-great-war-for

Watch this interview at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=see5c5Sgi14

The current world order is designed to be complex and confusing. Its function enshrines the power of our rulers, who purposely obscure its origins and underlying philosophy. Politicians, the media, so-called intellectuals at think tanks — along with the inertia of systemic falsehoods — perpetuate this veiled system. Neoliberalism has maintained its dominance through exploiting the many to sustain the prosperity of the few.

The discussion, Hedges and Monbiot make clear, extends far beyond economics and policy decisions. Neoliberalism affects every aspect of people’s lives and for this reason, it remains an elusive topic of discussion amongst its victims and beneficiaries. “Neoliberalism has permitted a kind of full spectrum capitalism, which could be described as totalitarian capitalism in that it penetrates every aspect of our lives,” Monbiot tells Hedges. “Everything becomes monetized, everything becomes commoditized, even our relations with each other.”

Neoliberalism establishes a tollbooth over the essential systems necessary for human survival. With little regard for regulation (other than its diminishment), the law or the overall well-being of humans and the planet, this system enables “this tremendously rich class of oligarchs emerging out of the rentier economy [to use] their exclusive capture of assets, assets which the rest of us need, to ensure that we pay way over the odds to them in order to use those assets.”

Monbiot illustrates this dynamic through his own experiences in the United Kingdom, referencing the privatization of the water supply, which allows for private companies to charge outrageous fees, invest minimally in maintenance and use rivers as sewers. “We have no choice,” Monbiot says. “We have to use the water. There's only one supplier in each region of the UK, so we have to go with that supplier. So they can charge pretty well what they want. There is a regulator which is supposed to limit that, but the regulator, as so often happens with neoliberalism, has been completely captured by the industry it is supposed to regulate.”

The world has failed Palestine. The United States and European Union pay lip service to principles of human rights and democracy while providing limitless support to Israel’s genocidal project of ethnic cleansing and apartheid. Western media outlets censor reporting of Israeli atrocities, and international humanitarian organizations require that Palestinians prove their victimhood over and over again. Arab states, on the whole, remain silent and complicit.

In the context of so much injustice, the new documentary Where the Olive Trees Weep offers a rare view into the everyday experience and psychological ramifications of occupation. Filmed in 2022 in the West Bank, the film follows Palestinian journalist and therapist Ashira Darwish, Israeli journalist Amira Haas, activist Ahed Tamimi, Dr. Gabor Maté, and others. On this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, Chris Hedges speaks with Ashira Darwish and with the film’s directors and producers, Zaya Ralitza Benazzo and Maurizio Benazzo.

Zaya & Maurizio’s intention for the project was to explore the cycles of trauma inflicted by the Zionist occupation. Since long before the present genocide, Israeli forces have been using violence with impunity to punish popular and nonviolent resistance, and to inflict terror on Palestinian men, women, and children going about everyday activities such as attending school. Consequently, the Palestinian experience is marked ubiquitously by violence and loss, and by the constant fear of further violence.

Darwish, who herself has been detained and seriously injured by Israeli soldiers while participating in nonviolent protest, observes how the violence of everyday life shapes attitudes towards death. For children in Gaza and the West Bank, “being in the hands of the divine” becomes a safer, easier option than life under occupation. Amidst endless loss, “death is a celebration also because you’re going home to your beloveds.”

As Palestinians embrace death, so do they embrace life. While filming in the West Bank, Maurizio and Zaya were moved by Palestinians’ joyful celebrations of life, deep sense of community, and fearless commitment to fighting for their freedom. Faith, community, and resistance are deeply intertwined, and integral to the process of healing collective trauma. As Darwish affirms, “the liberation of Palestine is our healing.”