Jeremy Bowen on the Middle East

Veteran war correspondent Jeremy Bowen is visiting Bath this month, as part of the Curious Minds festival. He took the time to answer some themed questions from us about his book on the Middle East, recently brought out in paperback, and to talk about his many years’ experience reporting on the conflicts there.

I wrote The Modern Middle East because so many people have said to me over the years, “Jeremy, can you give me the name of a book that will help me understand?” These have all been intelligent people, but if you didn’t study the Middle East at school or university or didn’t live there, why would you know? And it’s such an important thing to understand in terms of the way the world is. So I wanted to write a book that people could pick up with little or no knowledge of the region and think ‘Oh yes, OK, this is why people think the way that they think’.

Understanding the region’s history
In terms of the civilian population’s understanding of their past, I think history is more alive in parts of the Middle East than it is here in Western Europe. People have a strong feeling that they understand how they got to where they are.

Having said that, sometimes it’s not the full story because they absorb things in a very partial way. Jerusalem is a place where history is everywhere and people are conscious of it. A notable Israeli writer said once that Jerusalem is the only city where the dead are more important than the living. In other words, the weight of history bears down on the present.

This does mean that the conflict is extremely embedded and that things are very polarised, and the war in Gaza since 7 October has really deepened that. There is a potential resolution to all of this and that is the two-state solution, finding a way to split off an area for the Palestinians and the Israelis. If they don’t manage that, then they condemn themselves to perpetual war.

International intervention
The history of international intervention in the Middle East has been pretty disastrous. We haven’t made things better, because powerful western countries in the 21st century have had their own agendas. And these agendas matter more, in terms of where they are in the global race for power. Perhaps if we left the people of the region to try and sort things out for themselves it might have been easier.

Having said that, we are where we are and that’s not going to happen. Could the international community have done more since 7 October? They have been very invested in what has been going on, but there is a very different view between different foreign countries. The big countries in the European Union, along with the British, the Americans, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, have been supportive of Israel, but they are now thinking more and more strongly that there really does need to be a ceasefire.

Impartiality actually is truth… and sometimes the truth is complicated… So the challenge for a journalist is to explain all of that complexity”

The Americans have some leverage but it’s limited, although it’s clear they haven’t yet used the leverage they have to get the ceasefire. That’s because they have a lot of sympathy with Israel’s desire to get rid of Hamas. The question that the Americans particularly raise – because they are Israel’s closest ally – is that while they support its right to defend itself, they are not happy with the way Israel is fighting. We hear constant reminders to the Israelis in public, increasingly strongly worded, that they have to respect international humanitarian law. We can surmise that the Americans don’t believe Israel has done that, so perhaps more could be done. For example the Americans could say to the Israelis ‘Do not use heavy weapons against heavily populated civilian areas’, but then again, those heavy weapons were originally supplied by the US.

Impartial journalism
Impartiality is very important in journlism, but this does not mean some kind of false balance. It doesn’t mean ‘he says this, she says that and the truth lies somewhere in between’. Impartiality actually is truth. It is trying to establish a way of finding the closest to the truth of what is happening. And sometimes the truth is complicated. And for journalists reporting in the Middle East it sometimes means having to hold five or six contradictory things in your mind at the same time and find a way to explain those. It’s not black and white. So the challenge for a journalist is to explain all of that complexity. That’s not easy actually. At the BBC we do try very hard to get to that place, and what that means is being fair, and talking to as many different sides of the argument as you can.

Interviewing leaders in the region
I have met many of the senior leaders in the region, and the only way to talk to them is to be very direct, particularly important when you are dealing with powerful people. These are men, mostly, who can look after themselves. You must not pull your punches, but you don’t have to be rude. You can be perfectly polite, but you have to ask the hard questions or you don’t have credibility.

I’ve interviewed president Bashar al-Assad of Syria three times. He gave me an interview in 2015 and we were really prepared for that. The template used by the BBC’s HARDtalk programme is very good, because they base their questions on things that people have actually said. So if a leader comes back on something you have mentioned and says “Well that’s actually not true because…”, then you can say, “Well, I’ve got this statement that you made two years ago and you said this”. You have to know what you are talking about and you have to push. I interviewed the late Colonel Gaddafi of Libya, which was the last big interview he did before he was murdered by his own people. He always said to me, “My people loved me”. I think he actually believed it.

People have often said to me, “Oh my goodness you’ve been to see Gaddafi or Assad and isn’t it dangerous?”. Actually it’s not dangerous for foreign journalists, because you are there with their permission – it’s very public and they are trying to put a point across. Going to see a leader in a palace is not dangerous. They are very polite and they offer you tea. I’ve never felt one iota of danger in these situations. What is dangerous is when you meet someone at a road block, miles from anywhere, someone who is a very bad mood that day and may not like your country or your broadcasting organisation, or may have some strong belief that isn’t true about how people like me are against him. That is the dangerous moment.

A relevant commentary
A lot has happened since I wrote the book, which was published in September 2022, but that was always predictable in the Middle East. Of course since 7 October the situation has lurched into one of the most profound crises in decades. But does the book stand up? Yes, I hope so, because what the book is really trying to understand is why there is an Israeli Palestinian conflict and how the region got to where it is. Clearly now there is more to be said, but I wouldn’t want to do that until this immediate terrible crisis, this war in Gaza, has ended and we can see more clearly what the new shape of the region might look like.