Matt Rees's Blog - Posts Tagged "arab"

In the liberal Israeli daily Ha'aretz, Carol Novis reviews the third of my Palestinian crime novels THE SAMARITAN'S SECRET. I'm happy that she doesn't view my novel as coming down on one side or the other in the conflict here in the Middle East. I think of my novels as humanist, filtering out the politics that make people see the Palestinians as stereotypes (either of terrorists or victims).
"Rather than implicitly take sides in the seemingly intractable Israeli-Palestinian struggle, [Ha'aretz writes:] Rees, a former Time magazine bureau chief in Jerusalem, has chosen to draw a vivid picture of Palestinian life that will enlighten many who know little of its culture, family structure and society... All in all, the Omar Yussef mystery series attempts to show that as long as there are good men − and Rees evidently believes that there are − there is hope."

In popular blog Bookslut, Colleen Mondor has a terrific review of a series of books set overseas, giving it a particular slant toward young readers. She designates my new Palestinian crime novel, THE SAMARITAN'S SECRET, her "cool read" of the week. You can see other reviews by Colleen here, but meanwhile this is what she writes about my novel:

The Samaritan’s Secret, third in the Omar Yussef series by Matt Beynon Rees, continues his exploration of Palestinian life. Following the first book The Collaborator of Bethlehem and the second, A Grave in Gaza, this entry sends Yussef to the city of Nablus where the theft of a religious artifact from a small relatively unknown group sets off a mystery involving hundreds of millions of missing dollars and the political machinations of Hamas, Fatah and many who have no allegiance to anyone other than themselves. As he did in the first two novels, Yussef is unwavering in his dedication to the dead. This unlikeliest of heroes, a history teacher, puts his knowledge of the region to good use as he gets to the bottom of a murder and determines just how much can be revealed so that no one else ends up dead.

While Rees is clearly accomplished at crafting tight plots and surprises, it is his depth of knowledge about the Middle East that truly elevates these titles. Many Western readers will find the mysteries alone appealing and then fall into the twists and turns of contemporary Palestinian life. Rees, who lives in Jerusalem and was Time magazine’s bureau chief between 2000 and 2006, makes it clear that whatever we think we might know about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, it pales in comparison to an intimate portrayal of the day-to-day reality. The best part is that the Yussef titles are focused on Palestinian life and the characters, good and bad, are richly drawn examples of the men and women the media all too often shows only as caricatures -- as the clichéd grieving parent, enraged militant, tortured child. Rees gives us families like any other, committed friendships, and leaders motivated far more by greed than religious devotion. He gives readers people they can recognize and understand and thus he transforms a part of the world that has been determinedly presented as foreign into someplace we recognize; someplace that in many ways we already know.

The Omar Yussef mysteries are an excellent way for curious minded older teens to learn about this tremendously troubled and significant region. While The Samaritan’s Secret is a very intense read with a surprising number of personal moments, I recommend readers start with the first book so they can get to know Yussef from the beginning. I find myself enjoying this series more and more with each new title and being surprised all over again by how little I know about Palestinian life.

Historic World War I cemeteries badly damaged in recent attacks.
By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost

In Gaza, violence is so prevalent, even death doesn’t put you beyond its reach. Nor does a grave protect you from further insult to your dignity.

The fighting between Israeli forces and Hamas gunmen at the turn of the year damaged several hundred of the 3,500 gravestones in the World War I British military cemetery in Gaza City. A matter of months earlier, Palestinian Islamists entered another British war cemetery further south in the Gaza Strip at Deir el-Balah and blew up the 6-foot-high cross at the edge of the lawn where 727 soldiers — Christian, Jewish, Hindu and Muslim — have lain since 1917.

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission is demanding $135,000 compensation from the Israeli government for the damage to the Gaza graves. The Israeli army at first said the damage was probably caused by an accidental explosion in a Palestinian weapons cache at the site, though it later added that its troops returned fire at Palestinians shooting from the vicinity of the graveyard.

Many people have forgotten the British campaign in Palestine of 1916-18, and few even know that there are British military cemeteries in Gaza.

But all this matters to me. I had two great-uncles who fought in Palestine, riding with the Imperial Camel Corps. One of them was still alive when I was a boy. He used to get drunk at Christmas and drop his pants to show us the scar where a Turkish bullet had wounded him in his backside, just before the British marched into Jerusalem.

I made the Deir el-Balah cemetery a key part of the plot of my second Palestinian crime novel “A Grave in Gaza” as a tribute to my great-uncles and the comrades who weren’t lucky enough to show off their wounds to kids like me.

That novel, whose plot involved the weapons smuggling and corruption that afflicts Gaza today, was published in February last year. Two months later, the cross in the graveyard was destroyed.

“The history of this region is complex. But the right of the dead to lie in peace and dignity is simple and should be respected by all,” the War Graves Commission said in a statement at the time. “We hope that the authorities in Gaza will make every effort to apprehend those responsible.”

Good luck.

As for the $100,000 cost of replacing the cross, Palestinians won’t be paying for that. Nowadays they have other things that need repairing more urgently.

Local residents say the cross was blown up by an Islamist group. It’s a shame because the cemetery includes sections for four major faiths. But in Gaza that kind of tolerance, even in death, is as outdated today as the terminology of the cemetery’s original plan, which designates its Muslim section as “Mohammedan.”

The Deir el-Balah cemetery is also a beautiful place. A green lawn and a neatly clipped hedge, its upkeep is paid for by the War Graves Commission and overseen by officials at the British consulate in Jerusalem.

Back in 1916, it was a place of carnage. The British launched an assault on the Turkish positions in Gaza that failed dismally. More than 6,000 British troops were cut down in a few days. It was the first time the British used the mustard gas that would become such a feature of trench warfare in Flanders. They failed to gauge the wind correctly and the gas blew back on their own soldiers.

The following year, with a more competent commander, the British returned and won. They left behind four cemeteries in the Gaza Strip: two in Gaza City, one in Deir el-Balah, and another in Rafah. All places devastated in the most recent fighting.
The War Graves Commission successfully pressed Israel for $150,000 compensation for damage to graves in one of the Gaza cemeteries after an army operation there in 2006.

That action was intended to rescue Israeli Corporal Gilad Shalit, kidnapped by Palestinian gunmen from his post on the edge of the Gaza Strip and still captive somewhere in Gaza.

This time there are signs of shrapnel on many of the gravestones in Gaza City, but the commission might run into difficulty proving that it was caused by Israeli troops. Potential witnesses among the local population had all been forced to flee the intense fighting before it hit the cemetery.

That leaves only the dead as witnesses. They’d surely testify that, almost a century after their passing, Gaza continues to have a special relationship with killing.

In its listing of recommended books new to paperback, The New York Times features the second of my Palestinian crime novels A GRAVE IN GAZA, just out in softcover from Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. (The UK paperback, titled THE SALADIN MURDERS, has been out in small format for a while already.) Here's what the Times writes:
"Omar Yussef, an aging Palestinian schoolteacher, is the hero of a series of mysteries by Rees, a former Jerusalem bureau chief for Time magazine. In this one, he encounters corruption and violence when he attempts to free a teacher from one of the United Nations schools who’s been jailed on spying charges. “Setting a mystery in the epicenter of a war zone challenges the genre conventions,” Marilyn Stasio wrote in the [New York Times:] Book Review about the series’s first book, THE COLLABORATOR OF BETHLEHEM, but “it clarifies the role of the detective as the voice of reason.”
Incidentally, 'The Collaborator of Bethlehem' is titled THE BETHLEHEM MURDERS in the UK.

Guest blogging on A Book Blogger's Diary, I write about why my publishers like to have a new title for the same book in almost every country...Choosing one is almost as hard as writing the book itself... Almost.

On Global Post, I report on the fairly crazy mess (even by Middle East standards) in which both Israeli and Palestinian politics find themselves just now.

My new Palestinian crime novel THE SAMARITAN’S SECRET gets great reviews this week on both sides of the Atlantic – and in the blogosphere, wherever that is.

On the “This Book for Free” blog, Shoshana writes that THE SAMARITAN’S SECRET “has taken me into a part of the world I wouldn’t have known at all. I have no idea that there are actual Samaritans left in these world. This book was an eye-opener for me. I know about the “Good Samaritan” from the bible. But like other things biblical, I thought they don’t exist anymore. Well, this book took me on a field trip in this part of the world. The mystery is a bonus for me. But what really got me into this book is the way it takes me on a tour in Nablus. I believe I can almost smell the place and taste the food. This book is one of the best armchair traveling tools I have encountered.”

In world of “old media” Philiadelphia Inquirer reviewer Peter Rozovsky (who blogs about international detective fiction) picks up on the way my novel handles the very current battle between Hamas and Fatah, the two main Palestinian factions: “Partisans of Fatah, which Arafat headed, might squirm at a plot set in motion by Arafat's massive financial corruption. Their Hamas counterparts are no more likely to enjoy depictions of a fanatical sheikh - or the glimpses of Hamas green as thugs beat up Yussef. But Rees is interested less in Fatah and Hamas than in the tortured history of the Palestinian people. ‘No one knew who would be alive the next day,’ a character tells Yussef. ‘You could be killed by the Syrians, the Israelis, the Christian militias, the Shiite gangs, by one of the other Palestinian factions, or even by the Old Man himself.’

In Eurocrime, Laura Root writes that: “THE SAMARITAN'S SECRET provides a sensitive and fascinating portrait of Palestinian life and culture, both at grassroots and the political level, imaginatively evoking the smells, food and customs of the casbah, cafes and bathhouses….THE SAMARITAN'S SECRET is an intriguing, complex thriller giving a compelling insight into the politics, culture and day to day family life in this Palestinian city.”

The UK’s Jewish Chronicle runs a review under the headline “Shlumpy sleuth lifts the lid on Palestine” which includes: “The Samaritan’s Secret is not as bloody or with as high a body count as Rees’s previous two books, but, like them, it provides a really fascinating inside view of Palestinian society. Not least, post-Gaza, is Rees’s skilful delineation of the war between Fatah and Hamas, here fighting over an expected tranche of funds from the World Bank. Hamas’s attempt to show that “the Old Man” — Arafat — died of Aids is cleverly deployed by Rees as a shameful propaganda weapon with which to attack Fatah. The exposure of further dark secrets, including that of the eponymous Samaritan, cast a useful light on quite how Hamas maintains its grip on the Palestinian street…Rees’s novels should be required reading for anyone seeking to understand the Palestinian mind-set.”

Here's my post this week on Global Post:

JERUSALEM — In Hebrew the word for “to visit” – levaker – is the same as the word for “to criticize.” He visited me; he criticized me. Exactly the same.

So why would you invite 30 of the most critical people in the country to visit you every Sunday, to sit around your table and run their mouths?

You wouldn’t. Unless you wanted trouble.

That’s exactly what the new Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has done. Each Sunday, an enormous cabinet – more than half the parliamentarians in the governing coalition are ministers and deputy ministers – will troop up the stairs to his office, preening for the cameras before they settle into their caramel leather chairs and let rip at the boss.

This wasn’t supposed to happen.

Last time he was Prime Minister – from 1996 to 1999 – Netanyahu held together a shaky coalition of rightists and hawkish centrists as long as he could. The religious-nationalists in the cabinet brought him down in the end.

Bruised he went into exile as a “consultant” for companies doing business in the U.S. He returned rich, bought a villa in the exclusive Mediterranean town of Caesarea, and gradually eased back into the politics of the Likud Party. His message, delivered in private in those days, was that he had learned his lesson. He was a different man. For a time he even tried to get people to stop calling him by his childhood nickname, “Bibi.”

One of the reasons the far right abandoned him in 1999 was, according to legislators, that he would always promise whatever you wanted, trying to make you happy, to make you like him. Then he’d contradict himself by pledging to do whatever the next person to enter his office wanted. When he returned to politics, Netanyahu said, he would no more be manipulated into giving tiny parties just what they demanded.

Take a look at this new government and you have to wonder if that’s true.

Netanyahu handed the rightist Yisrael Beitenu control of the Police Ministry, though the party’s leader is under police investigation for money laundering and fraud.

The ultra-Orthodox Shas party is practiced at squeezing prime ministers and received four ministerial seats in return for the support of its mere 11 legislators.

Ha-Beit Ha-Yehudi is an ultra-right backer of West Bank settlement and is sure to make problems for Netanyahu next time U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton comes calling.

The least of his troubles ought to be Labor, traditionally powerful and center-left, because it stands for little except keeping its leader, Ehud Barak, in the Defense Ministry. Still some of the Labor legislators say they’ll rebel against Barak and won’t support the government.

Even within Netanyahu’s own Likud Party, some leaders are grumbling that they failed to secure top cabinet jobs.

The government has 69 out of 120 seats in the Knesset. Politically, socially, ethnically, it’s all over the map. Technically three of Netanyahu’s four partners could block his majority in parliament.

The new prime minister seems to be repeating his self-defeating pattern.

Where does this tendency come from? From the Netanyahu family.

Global Post editor-in-chief C.M. Sennott last week examined the way Bibi’s relationship with his father drives him (http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/is...). I’d expand upon that: Bibi’s family relationships determine his performance as Prime Minister — and may have set him up for another failure as Prime Minister.

As a young man, Bibi lived in the shadow of the dominant father detailed by Sennott. He was also most definitely in second place behind his elder brother Yoni. In the nationalist-Zionist set of the day, Yoni was seen as a future chief of the army, even a prime minister. He died in the 1976 rescue of hostages at Entebbe, Uganda, leading the commando force that stormed a hijacked Air France jetliner.

That death — both heroic and tragic — preserved Yoni as he had been, a perfect example which any human — certainly one who followed such a compromising path as politics – could never quite live up to.

When Bibi became Prime Minister, he might have overcome this. But he didn’t. His performance back then showed that he had to leave room for Yoni to continue to be superior to him. It was as though surpassing Yoni would’ve been an act of defiance against the father who idolized his departed son. So Bibi sabotaged himself.

When I met him shortly before his ouster he was a shadow of the confident orator who narrowly won an election three years before. He toyed with a cigar stub and stared at his crystal ashtray, barely attempting eye contact. He was generally acknowledged to have been a poor prime minister.

I put this family theory to Netanyahu as delicately as I could when I rode in the armored car he called his Batmobile on election day in January 2003.

“I used to be in a hurry,” he said. “Now I’m not anxious. I don’t have to prove anything to anyone. I only have to prove things to myself. I’ve climbed the greasy pole. Now I’m perched on a branch.”

Uh-huh… I pushed him on the role his departed brother played psychologically in his first term as Prime Minister.

“In public life you shouldn’t press Rewind,” he said. “Or Fast Forward. You can press Eject, or you can press Play.”

Analyze that. Well, without Rewind, you can’t analyze anything. It’s the definition of repression.

We drove to the Har Hamenuchot cemetery on a stark Jerusalem hillside. It was the third jahrzeit — the anniversary — of the death of Tsila, Netanyahu’s mother. His father, Ben-Zion, stood stern and jowly, like John Gielgud cast as a headmaster. He wore a flat cap and a blue raincoat and was still, staring ahead as though unaware of the crowd of several hundred. Bibi read kaddish with his brother Ido, though his usually powerful baritone was a barely audible whisper.

The inscription on Tsila’s grave was in particularly complex language. I asked Bibi to clarify it for me. “It’s a very high Hebrew. My father wrote it,” he said. “It’s hard to translate.”

Perched on a branch back then, Netanyahu has crawled out all the way along the limb with his new coalition. If he can’t master his own psychological demons as Prime Minister this time, he won’t be the only one to take a fall.

I wrote a guest post for A Book Blogger's Diary this week. The post, headlined "Fiction more real than journalism," explains why I turned from journalism about the Middle East to fiction, as a better way of explaining the profound things I had learned in more than a decade here in Jerusalem.

The Wanderlust and Words blog has a post about how my writing, in particular my second novel A Grave in Gaza, has channeled my traumatic experiences as a war correspondent and placed them on the page in the form of shocking moments for my characters.

Murder by the Book Mystery Bookstore blogs about my first novel The Collaborator of Bethlehem, which it calls "a thought-provoking, very different look at a community in crisis."

By Matt Beynon Rees, published on Global Post
JERUSALEM — So, there are two eastern European guys, one from Ukraine and the other from Moldova.

One of them is on the short side and is a chess whiz who suffered through a Siberian labor camp for his uncompromising belief in democracy and freedom. Meet Natan Sharansky, who was picked this weekend by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to lead the Jewish Agency for Israel.

The other is a beefy former nightclub bouncer who says nasty things about Arabs and is generally seen as just plain uncompromising. Meet Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who, it’s fair to say, is feared and loathed as a hardliner.

The two men couldn't carry themselves more differently and you don't have to be a longtime observer of Israel to know which one fits in better with the western diplomatic community and is most favored by America.

Trouble is they’re essentially the same guy.

Both reflect something unbending in current Israeli political thinking. But international diplomats will make a mistake if they ignore the reality signaled by the popularity of these two politicians and its consequences for the peace maneuvers that got underway this last week.

Sharansky pulled out of former prime minister Ariel Sharon’s government in 2005 to protest the Israeli withdrawal from its Gaza settlements and has since been occupying an office in a right-wing think thank in Jerusalem — when he hasn’t been touring the U.S. on high-paying speaking gigs.

Lieberman, meanwhile, lives in a settlement, drove his party to third place in the country’s February election with a promise of imposing a loyalty oath on Arab citizens of Israel, and, in his first statement as foreign minister, said "If you want peace, prepare for war."

That classically Lieberman aphorism prompted gritted teeth at the State Department, which sent special envoy George Mitchell to Ramallah and Cairo recently to prepare the U.S. plan for handling the new Israeli government.

But in their different ways, Sharansky and Lieberman are both saying the same thing: Israelis are tired of being pressured to hand over land to Palestinians, while the Palestinians ignore the world’s polite requests for an end to terrorism.

When I met with Sharansky just after he resigned from the cabinet in 2005, he explained what he had told Prime Minister Sharon when he went to his office to quit.

“One-sided concessions by us leave the Palestinians with their problems,” he said. “It’s an illusion to think international pressure on us will stop when we make concessions. We’re making terrorism legitimate. We dismantle settlements, terror continues, and the world will say we just didn’t dismantle enough.”

That’s how most Israelis tend to see things these days. (If you don’t believe that, check out the election results and witness the disappearance of the so-called left-wing parties.) And Sharansky's position is remarkably close to that of Lieberman. For example, instead of simply giving up the West Bank to the Palestinians, Lieberman has said that Israel ought to keep some of its settlement blocs and, in return, hand over parts of Israel where its Arab population lives to a new Palestinian state.

For Israelis, that would give them a sense of having driven a good bargain and received something in return for their concessions.

Western observers may not see things that way, but now they know what Israelis think. And Israelis are the ones that count.

So maybe we need to look for the difference between the two men for a hint of how we ought to interpret their positions.

The answer: democracy.

Sharansky, 61, wrote “The Case for Democracy” in 2004. It was a favorite of George W. Bush. It argued that the dictatorial Arab regimes couldn’t make peace with democratic Israel — totalitarian regimes need an enemy to demonize. The west needed to make the Arab countries democratic, instead of bolstering dictators.

We all like democracy, of course. So thumbs up for Sharansky, whose book went onto The New York Times bestseller list.

Lieberman, on the other hand, is generally portrayed as rather Stalinist in his approach to dissent and minorities. That earns him the Bronx cheer from the media.

The thing to remember is that it also earned him 15 seats in the parliament, leadership of the second-biggest party in the new coalition government, and the foreign minister’s chair.

Sharansky, by contrast, is being nominated to lead a body whose main function in these days of falling immigration is to encourage Jews in the diaspora to remain connected to their community. (Jewish Agency officials fear the dwindling population of Jews worldwide through intermarriage, and cite 50,000 new “former Jews” each year around the world due to assimilation.)

The former dissident Sharansky will be the lovable face of Israel’s new tough line and may even make it to the (ceremonial) president’s mansion in a few years. But it’s Lieberman who wields power.