Dispatches from the war zone

Reporting from the frontline of the Palestine-Israel conflict has convinced RTÉ’s Richard Crowley that the spiral of violence is likely to continue. But it is wrong to believe that the blame is equal.

Jason O'Toole, 16 Nov 2007

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.”

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