Robert Fisk's Gaza omen was right: Israel always wanted genocide

In 2013, my historical novel Bone Ash Sky was published in Australia and the UK, and subsequently translated and published in Greece. The novel was based on the Armenian Genocide, the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and the massacres of Palestinian women and children at the Sabra and Shatila camps in Beirut. Little did I expect that the situation I wrote about with the misplaced confidence of youth would become infinitely worse for the Palestinian people.

Years before publication, I sent my early chapters to The Independent’s foreign correspondent and author, Robert Fisk. I'd admired him from afar since visiting Beirut for the first time when I was twenty-one and reading his classic on the Lebanese Civil War, Pity the Nation, in preparation for my trip.

I didn’t expect I would hear back from him. Since my backpacking days, I’d travelled to Lebanon and Syria twice more to research my novel, but had missed Fisk, who divided his time between Dublin and Beirut.

One evening in the Sydney spring of 2009, just as I was putting my child to sleep, the phone rang. My husband held it out to me, simply saying, "It’s Fiskers."

Since that night, I was privy, through phone calls and old-fashioned postcards, to Fisk’s thoughts on the history of colonialism in the Middle East, the autumn rain in his Irish home, and the plight of the Palestinians since 1948. He line-edited chapters of my novel. He gave me ideas about character development, scene setting and chronology. He helped shape my book and, at the same time, framed my worldview with nuance and context. He is often described as the ‘truth-teller’, and in this way also helped me grow the courage to tell the truth.

Robert Fisk claimed, even then, that the ultimate aim of far-right Israeli politics was to push the Palestinians into the sea, to annihilate them completely.

I wonder what he would say now about the extremist Likud Party led by Benjamin Netanyahu and the rhetoric of Finance Minister Smotrich and Ben Gvir, Minister of National Security.

Fisk railed against what he called the ‘cosy’ idea of competing narratives, of the tired refrain, ‘it’s complicated’, trotted out by journalists and apologists when covering any asymmetric conflict between oppressor and oppressed, coloniser and colonised. He told me he had long observed the sick equation of one Israeli life equalling one hundred Palestinian lives and saw absolutely no excuse for the killing of women and children, on either side.

He did temper his private words in a 2009 piece for The Independent when he said: "Gaza’s one and a half million refugees are treated outrageously enough, but they are not being herded into gas chambers or forced on death marches."

Yet not even Fisk could have foreseen the utter annihilation of Gaza today. There are no schools, mosques, churches, markets, houses, roads, or infrastructure. Death marches and gas chambers may be the next step after the deliberate starvation and targeted killings at so-called 'aid sites.'

In Pity the Nation, published in 1990, Fisk was eerily prescient: "When Palestinians murder Israelis, we regard them as evil men. When Israelis slaughter Palestinians, America and other Western nations find it expedient to regard these crimes as tragedies, misunderstandings or the work of individual madmen. Palestinians — in the generic, all-embracing sense of the word — are held to account for these deeds. Israel is not."

The state of Israel has always aligned itself, since its inception, with the ‘civilised’ West. In this way, the dehumanisation of the ‘barbaric’ Palestinians is legitimised. 

Watching the livestream of yet another genocide, I can’t help but chart parallels between the terror the Armenians endured in 1915 and what we are seeing every day, right now in Gaza. The photographs of attenuated bodies, hollow eyes and cavernous faces are mirror images of Armenians on death marches through the Syrian desert. Those same erased identities, those same fleshless bodies, have also haunted me since I first saw the photographs of piles of bodies in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen as a child.

Since the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, over 60,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel. Many were women and children, as well as deliberately targeted aid workers, doctors, artists, students and journalists.

Now we see starving children and toddlers in images reminiscent of those past genocides, newborn babies frozen to death, and others with their heads and legs blown off. We count the largest number of child amputees in modern history, some having their limbs amputated in bombed-out hospitals without anaesthesia. We now watch the herding of Palestinians into enclaves that will resemble concentration camps, with US-backed mercenaries using food, medicine, water and fuel as weapons of war. We bear witness to permanent dispossession and ethnic cleansing under this guise of ‘aid’. The Nakba of 1948 pales in comparison.

The overarching question in my novel was how the descendants of a genocide or Holocaust can continue to perpetrate it on others. Victims become perpetrators, and so the cycle of violence and death continues.

Fisk, too, wrote about these links. He intimately understood the Irish struggle for independence and saw its parallels with the Palestinian struggle for self-determination. His reporting on the Troubles in Northern Ireland was informed by his understanding of Palestinian resistance and the way in which imperialism shaped both.

In 2009, Fisk also wrote: "It’s about justice – something the Palestinians have never received – and it’s about bringing criminals to trial." Anyone still failing to call the Netanyahu government, Israel itself and our own Western governments to justice is remaining wilfully ignorant. 

In my home country, Australia, our politicians and journalists debate the semantics of the word genocide. They wonder how far they can condemn the actions of Israel without losing key political allies. They are much more comfortable calling this genocide by less controversial, less contested words: ‘famine’ or a ‘humanitarian crisis.’ In this way, they absolve themselves of guilt and responsibility. They can feign ignorance of what the International Court of Justice, UN experts and human rights organisations, even within Israel, such as B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights, have ruled as genocide.

As we now recall the Armenian Genocide and the Jewish Holocaust, so we will remember the Gaza Genocide in decades to come. Those who turn their faces away now will be judged as complicit. They will be called deniers. Let’s name this what it is. Humanitarian crisis, without a doubt. Ethnic cleansing, indisputably. And finally, genocide. Another black period of history Robert Fisk foresaw decades ago. 

Katerina Cosgrove is an award-winning writer, editor, and journalist of Greek and Australian descent, whose work explores themes of identity, displacement, and power. She is the author of three books, The Glass Heart, Bone Ash Sky, and Zorba the Buddha, and her writing has appeared in Al-Jazeera, The Independent, SBS Voices, The Sydney Morning Herald, Island magazine, Sunday Life, and other national and international outlets.

Follow Katerina on Instagram: @katerina.cosgrove

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