Champion of freedom of speech

Journalist and former Lebanon hostage John McCarthy is keen to highlight social injustice, says Jo Kerrigan

I’ve just seen someone’s blog from Tel Aviv. He was so angry at my daring to speak out [about treatment of arabs in israel] he said it would have been better if I’d stayed chained up to that radiator in Lebanon!

IMAGINE being kidnapped at gunpoint and held hostage for five years, never knowing if you would see your loved ones again. Would you go back after being rescued? Journalist John McCarthy did. The lure of the Middle East, strong since childhood, was increased by his ordeal in the Lebanon between 1986 and 1991. He discovered a sense of identity, and empathy with everyone who felt threatened, lost, or without a home.

Interviewing McCarthy reveals no edginess, no trace of trauma. He is at ease with himself.

Will he ever forget? “That experience ceased to affect me, in any direct way, relatively soon after coming home. It was something that happened to me, and it’s in the past. Of course, there are still moments when I think of a particular incident and I’m frightened, but it doesn’t stay. I was lucky in that I came from a safe, secure home, and that was something to hold on to.”

A young journalist sent out on his first foreign assignment, to Beirut in 1986, he was on his way to the airport and home when kidnapped by Islamic terrorists. Had it not been for the tireless efforts of his then girlfriend Jill Morrell, who kept his name and his cause in the headlines, he might still be there. Five and a half years passed before he saw England again. By then, his mother was dead. His father died from cancer some years later, and, more recently, so did his beloved brother, Terence. Much of this was lived in the cruel glare of the limelight. Happiness, long delayed, finally came when he met and married Anna, in 1999, and had a daughter, Lydia. Having a home, a family, grounded him. Yet soon after his release, he returned to the Middle East, to make a radio series in Israel on Bible history. There must be other parts of the world he would rather visit? After all, McCarthy is, inter alia, a presenter of the Radio 4 travel programme Excess Baggage. Wouldn’t he prefer somewhere easier? “It’s not the only place I like to go, but I do have a very profound connection with it,” he says. This interest was sparked by his father, who was in the Middle East during the war. “I listened enthralled as he talked of making camp in wadis and gazing up at the starlit sky. I wanted such adventures. Then, there is the whole Holy Land thing. That’s part of our make-up, the history, the Bible stories, the sense of dramatic landscape and the desert. There is this wonderful mixture of culture there.”

While working on the radio series, McCarthy met a Bedouin family whose traumatic experiences since the formation of the state of Israel in 1948 gave him a new view of that country, and led to his most recent book, You Can’t Hide the Sun. To research it, he travelled widely in what was once Palestine, talking to people whose families had lived there for hundreds of years, but who lost everything when Israel came into being. Homes demolished, villages emptied, families torn apart, husbands, brothers, fathers shot — these were the experiences of people who had every right to live there — Palestinians.

“I was so struck by their experience. Having a child of your own makes you far more aware of this. Their home, their way of life, was under threat just because they were Arabs in Israel. I wanted to learn more and see if it was reflected everywhere. It is the total opposite to the official history that we are given, this untold real story of what happened to the Palestinians in their own country. Rather than interviewing politicians, you are seeing and talking to people who really experienced it,” he says.

It could be a disaster — a diatribe against a powerful nation that doesn’t take criticism kindly, a recital of uncomfortable facts, injustice piled upon injustice. But it isn’t. McCarthy withdraws his own personality and lets his interviewees speak for themselves, lets readers draw their own conclusions. It is hugely effective.

He’s pleased that this was evident. “I wanted to get it across in a way that didn’t make people uncomfortable. I’m wary of political diatribes. They turn readers off. It’s better to try to convince rather than ram your ideas down their throats,” he says.

There have been negative reactions. “I’ve just seen someone’s blog from Tel Aviv. He was so angry at my daring to speak out that he said it would have been better if I’d stayed chained up to that radiator in Lebanon.” He laughs. “Producers are both wary and weary of the hassle involved in speaking out about the situation in Israel, so they tend not to do it. I’m not too bothered about the hassle. Someone has to say it. I’ve had a lot of people telling me it’s so good to hear it from someone they can trust. I am starting to hear some say that they are Jewish and they support the idea of Israel, but they hate the way the Palestinians have been — are still being — treated. That shows a steady shift of opinion, which may help in the end,” he says.

So what are the chances of peaceful coexistence in Palestine? “On one level, particularly at the moment, it looks very grim indeed. Very separatist, racist ideas are promoted, making the Arabs seem the strangers rather than the indigenous population,” he says. But there is room for hope if not optimism. “Too often, things get whittled down to black and white. Reflecting the complications is the way forward. It has to be.”

There is one question that must be asked. His kidnap experience has made his career as writer and broadcaster. What path might he otherwise have taken? Does he ever think ‘what if?’ Now for the annoyance, the snapped reply. But no. He grins disarmingly.

“I would like to think that I would have got here anyway, but without that experience as a hostage, as a celebrity, to develop my skills as a broadcaster and writer, I might well still be a backroom journalist. It changed me, and now, finally, with this book I think I’ve found my voice.”

* John McCarthy appears at the West Cork Literary Festival in the Maritime Hotel, Bantry, on Sunday Jul 8 at 8.30 pm. www.westcorkmusic.ie. You Can’t Hide The Sun is published by Bantam Press.