Matt Rees's Blog - Posts Tagged "gaza"
Memories of blood and corpses
A foreign correspondent builds memories out of blood and corpses. Often they turn to nightmares.
While working on my second Palestinian crime novel, A Grave in Gaza, I sometimes wept as I wrote. I used to think that meant I was a damned good writer. Now I know it was my trauma, collected over a decade of monthly visits to Gaza, seeping onto the page.
I hope that makes it a better novel. I know it saved me from the creeping depression and sudden fear that sometimes gripped me when my mind would return to memories of burned bodies, scattered body parts, angry people who wanted to hurt me, the sound of bullets nearby from an unseen gun. It helped me understand what kind of man I really was.
Journalism can’t do that. It plunges you into other people’s traumas and, through the constant repetition of 24-hour cable news, seems to make those horrors part of our own lives. It pushes us to blame someone, to rage against them. To lash out, like traumatized people. To feel depressed.
I know. I’ve been a journalist based in Jerusalem for 13 years.
As the latest violence unfolded in Gaza, I wondered what keeps me here. When I largely quit journalism to write my novels three years ago, I could’ve gone to Tuscany, as I had always thought I would to do. I no longer needed the journalist’s daily proximity to the conflict. Even though for a decade previously I’d been as committed as any other journalist to learning every nuance of the conflict, I’ve since been weeks at a time without turning on the local news.
That’s why I’m still here.
News blots out real life. It makes Israelis and Palestinians seem like incomprehensible, bloodthirsty lunatics, ripping each other apart without cease. Living amongst them makes it clear that it’s the news that’s unreal, fashioned to quicken the pulse and shoot you up with adrenaline. By staying here, living a happy life among normal Palestinians and Israelis, I’ve beaten the bad dreams and the sudden rages. They exist only in a decade of dog-eared notebooks on my bottom shelf.
I’ve developed relationships over the years with people who’ve opened up their cultures to me, shown me a perspective on Gaza that’s beyond what you’d ever see in the newspaper.
Take my friend Zakaria, who lives in the northern Gaza Strip village of Beit Hanoun, a major battleground in the current fighting. Zakaria was for decades Arafat’s top intelligence man. I’ve seen him during hard times when he expected his home to be stormed by rival Palestinian factions; when he sent armed men to bring me to meet him in secret; when Israeli tanks took up positions at the edge of his olive grove. Times worthy of headlines.
But my deepest impression of him came when he jovially served me giant scoops of hummus laced with ground meat and cubes of lamb fat at breakfast. As a foreign correspondent, I’ve downed some rough meals (Bedouins once milked a goat’s udder directly into a glass and handed me the warm fluid to drink), but try raw lamb fat at 9 a.m. and see how you like it.
For Zakaria, the dish was a tremendous delicacy and a demonstration of his hospitality. The writer in me found the mannerisms with which he served me and his insistence that I eat a second plate just as revealing as his tension during moments of conflict.
Fiction is able to put across the true characteristics of my Palestinian friends--like Zakaria’s courtly hospitality--in a way that’s largely beyond journalism, with its headline focus on the literally explosive. I’ve filled my novels with those characteristics, because they remind me that the times when I felt threatened by violence were unnatural. They belong only to nightmares and they aren’t real any more.
I want to give my readers the true emotional experience of being among people who live in extreme situations, with all its traumas, but mostly its pleasures. For entertainment--sure, these are novels, not non-fiction tomes to be crammed down like cod-liver oil because they’re good for you. But also because if there’s a point to knowing about the world beyond our borders, it’s to see into the minds of other men and thus to better understand ourselves. Sometimes it might even save us from ourselves.
Matt Beynon Rees is the author of a series of Palestinian crime novels. The latest novel, The Samaritan’s Secret, was published in February (Soho Press).
While working on my second Palestinian crime novel, A Grave in Gaza, I sometimes wept as I wrote. I used to think that meant I was a damned good writer. Now I know it was my trauma, collected over a decade of monthly visits to Gaza, seeping onto the page.
I hope that makes it a better novel. I know it saved me from the creeping depression and sudden fear that sometimes gripped me when my mind would return to memories of burned bodies, scattered body parts, angry people who wanted to hurt me, the sound of bullets nearby from an unseen gun. It helped me understand what kind of man I really was.
Journalism can’t do that. It plunges you into other people’s traumas and, through the constant repetition of 24-hour cable news, seems to make those horrors part of our own lives. It pushes us to blame someone, to rage against them. To lash out, like traumatized people. To feel depressed.
I know. I’ve been a journalist based in Jerusalem for 13 years.
As the latest violence unfolded in Gaza, I wondered what keeps me here. When I largely quit journalism to write my novels three years ago, I could’ve gone to Tuscany, as I had always thought I would to do. I no longer needed the journalist’s daily proximity to the conflict. Even though for a decade previously I’d been as committed as any other journalist to learning every nuance of the conflict, I’ve since been weeks at a time without turning on the local news.
That’s why I’m still here.
News blots out real life. It makes Israelis and Palestinians seem like incomprehensible, bloodthirsty lunatics, ripping each other apart without cease. Living amongst them makes it clear that it’s the news that’s unreal, fashioned to quicken the pulse and shoot you up with adrenaline. By staying here, living a happy life among normal Palestinians and Israelis, I’ve beaten the bad dreams and the sudden rages. They exist only in a decade of dog-eared notebooks on my bottom shelf.
I’ve developed relationships over the years with people who’ve opened up their cultures to me, shown me a perspective on Gaza that’s beyond what you’d ever see in the newspaper.
Take my friend Zakaria, who lives in the northern Gaza Strip village of Beit Hanoun, a major battleground in the current fighting. Zakaria was for decades Arafat’s top intelligence man. I’ve seen him during hard times when he expected his home to be stormed by rival Palestinian factions; when he sent armed men to bring me to meet him in secret; when Israeli tanks took up positions at the edge of his olive grove. Times worthy of headlines.
But my deepest impression of him came when he jovially served me giant scoops of hummus laced with ground meat and cubes of lamb fat at breakfast. As a foreign correspondent, I’ve downed some rough meals (Bedouins once milked a goat’s udder directly into a glass and handed me the warm fluid to drink), but try raw lamb fat at 9 a.m. and see how you like it.
For Zakaria, the dish was a tremendous delicacy and a demonstration of his hospitality. The writer in me found the mannerisms with which he served me and his insistence that I eat a second plate just as revealing as his tension during moments of conflict.
Fiction is able to put across the true characteristics of my Palestinian friends--like Zakaria’s courtly hospitality--in a way that’s largely beyond journalism, with its headline focus on the literally explosive. I’ve filled my novels with those characteristics, because they remind me that the times when I felt threatened by violence were unnatural. They belong only to nightmares and they aren’t real any more.
I want to give my readers the true emotional experience of being among people who live in extreme situations, with all its traumas, but mostly its pleasures. For entertainment--sure, these are novels, not non-fiction tomes to be crammed down like cod-liver oil because they’re good for you. But also because if there’s a point to knowing about the world beyond our borders, it’s to see into the minds of other men and thus to better understand ourselves. Sometimes it might even save us from ourselves.
Matt Beynon Rees is the author of a series of Palestinian crime novels. The latest novel, The Samaritan’s Secret, was published in February (Soho Press).
Making deserts bloom
Jerusalem endures both suffocating dust and torrential downpours as Middle East confronts water shortage.
GlobalPost
Published: February 23, 2009 12:02 ET
JERUSALEM — When you experience the weather here, you start to understand how the biblical prophets found such great material for their doomy prognostications. Last week high temperatures had locals wearing T-shirts in midwinter, then a blanket of dust settled over Israel, only to be washed away by two freezing days of thunder and lightning.
It’s the latest dramatic chapter in what might be called the real crisis of the Middle East — the chronic water shortage affecting much of the Levant.
"This has been an extremely dry winter, with the lowest recorded rainfall since Israel started keeping track,” the country’s National Infrastructure Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said at a recent cabinet meeting.
Israel has seen less than half its usual rainfall. Some towns have cut off supplies to certain neighborhoods for limited periods. In Jerusalem, nature’s fecund bounty has been in particularly short supply — only a third of the average. Last month the Israeli Agriculture Minister Shalom Simhon advocated changing all the national Water Authority’s mezuzot — scrolls of parchment attached to the doors and containing a Jewish prayer — in the hope of encouraging divine intervention in the water shortage.
The weather — or, one might say, the lack of it — isn’t only Israel’s problem. In Syria, faucets ran dry last summer, after four consecutive winters without adequate rainfall. Worse is to come, however, as precipitation this winter has been about 45 percent of the average.
The water shortage might seem like the least of the region’s worries, given all its apparently more explosive issues. But it’s more than just a problem for Zionists, whose claim to have “made the deserts bloom” with new agriculture is one of their proudest boasts. Academics have been warning for years that a Middle East war could one day be fought over water, rather than land.
Syrians have been forced to buy water for their homes on the black market, because of rising industrial demand combined with falling supplies. The government of President Bashar Assad is trying to persuade Japan to fund a $2 billion project to bring water from the Euphrates River in the east of the country to the populous regions in western Syria.
The Japanese already gave $50 million five years ago to rebuild Damascus’ aging water system. But those were different economic times and the Syrians are concerned that the money might not be forthcoming.
Israel has considered various ideas for solving its own shortage from filling oil tankers with water from Turkey to floating a massive balloon of water across the eastern Mediterranean. Those plans were probably going nowhere even before the recent diplomatic spat with Ankara, sparked by Turkish anger at the Israeli attack on Hamas in Gaza.
That leaves Israelis facing their freakish weather alone. On a drive from the coastal city of Herzliya to Jerusalem on Thursday, I found myself encased in a khaki-orange cloud of dust, blown up from the Sinai Desert. Visibility was a little more than 100 yards.
Arriving in Jerusalem, my blinking eyes were instantly filled with painful grit. An asthmatic friend wheezed with more than a touch of desperation.
Yet 24 hours later, the dust was gone on a tide of rainwater. “The dust dirties, the rain cleans,” read the breezy headline on the back page of Yediot Aharonoth, Israel’s biggest newspaper. But this was no ordinary rain.
During the Jewish Sabbath on Friday night and Saturday, the only people on the streets of Jerusalem were worshippers rushing home from synagogue in the torrential hail downpour, illuminated by lightning and monumental bursts of thunder from the cloud that scudded low over the city in the 50 miles-per-hour winds.
Heavy rain in Jerusalem meant floods on the road alongside the Dead Sea as the water washed down through the deep desert wadis to the lowest point on earth.
On the coast, thousands of Palestinians remained in tents in Gaza, because their homes were destroyed in the fighting there at the turn of the year. Gaza was never exactly a pretty picture in the rain, with its inadequate sewerage system. After the damage inflicted during the Israeli operation against Hamas last month, conditions are even worse.
Critics say the problem is less to do with lack of rainfall and more a matter of ill-used resources. Israeli academic studies show the country wastes 35 percent of its water through leaky pipes. The priorities of Israeli agriculture are questioned, too. Haifa University Professor Dan Schueftan criticizes the massive Israeli watermelon industry for “putting all our scarce water into their product, then exporting it. It’s crazy.”
Maybe deserts just weren’t meant to bloom.
GlobalPost
Published: February 23, 2009 12:02 ET
JERUSALEM — When you experience the weather here, you start to understand how the biblical prophets found such great material for their doomy prognostications. Last week high temperatures had locals wearing T-shirts in midwinter, then a blanket of dust settled over Israel, only to be washed away by two freezing days of thunder and lightning.
It’s the latest dramatic chapter in what might be called the real crisis of the Middle East — the chronic water shortage affecting much of the Levant.
"This has been an extremely dry winter, with the lowest recorded rainfall since Israel started keeping track,” the country’s National Infrastructure Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said at a recent cabinet meeting.
Israel has seen less than half its usual rainfall. Some towns have cut off supplies to certain neighborhoods for limited periods. In Jerusalem, nature’s fecund bounty has been in particularly short supply — only a third of the average. Last month the Israeli Agriculture Minister Shalom Simhon advocated changing all the national Water Authority’s mezuzot — scrolls of parchment attached to the doors and containing a Jewish prayer — in the hope of encouraging divine intervention in the water shortage.
The weather — or, one might say, the lack of it — isn’t only Israel’s problem. In Syria, faucets ran dry last summer, after four consecutive winters without adequate rainfall. Worse is to come, however, as precipitation this winter has been about 45 percent of the average.
The water shortage might seem like the least of the region’s worries, given all its apparently more explosive issues. But it’s more than just a problem for Zionists, whose claim to have “made the deserts bloom” with new agriculture is one of their proudest boasts. Academics have been warning for years that a Middle East war could one day be fought over water, rather than land.
Syrians have been forced to buy water for their homes on the black market, because of rising industrial demand combined with falling supplies. The government of President Bashar Assad is trying to persuade Japan to fund a $2 billion project to bring water from the Euphrates River in the east of the country to the populous regions in western Syria.
The Japanese already gave $50 million five years ago to rebuild Damascus’ aging water system. But those were different economic times and the Syrians are concerned that the money might not be forthcoming.
Israel has considered various ideas for solving its own shortage from filling oil tankers with water from Turkey to floating a massive balloon of water across the eastern Mediterranean. Those plans were probably going nowhere even before the recent diplomatic spat with Ankara, sparked by Turkish anger at the Israeli attack on Hamas in Gaza.
That leaves Israelis facing their freakish weather alone. On a drive from the coastal city of Herzliya to Jerusalem on Thursday, I found myself encased in a khaki-orange cloud of dust, blown up from the Sinai Desert. Visibility was a little more than 100 yards.
Arriving in Jerusalem, my blinking eyes were instantly filled with painful grit. An asthmatic friend wheezed with more than a touch of desperation.
Yet 24 hours later, the dust was gone on a tide of rainwater. “The dust dirties, the rain cleans,” read the breezy headline on the back page of Yediot Aharonoth, Israel’s biggest newspaper. But this was no ordinary rain.
During the Jewish Sabbath on Friday night and Saturday, the only people on the streets of Jerusalem were worshippers rushing home from synagogue in the torrential hail downpour, illuminated by lightning and monumental bursts of thunder from the cloud that scudded low over the city in the 50 miles-per-hour winds.
Heavy rain in Jerusalem meant floods on the road alongside the Dead Sea as the water washed down through the deep desert wadis to the lowest point on earth.
On the coast, thousands of Palestinians remained in tents in Gaza, because their homes were destroyed in the fighting there at the turn of the year. Gaza was never exactly a pretty picture in the rain, with its inadequate sewerage system. After the damage inflicted during the Israeli operation against Hamas last month, conditions are even worse.
Critics say the problem is less to do with lack of rainfall and more a matter of ill-used resources. Israeli academic studies show the country wastes 35 percent of its water through leaky pipes. The priorities of Israeli agriculture are questioned, too. Haifa University Professor Dan Schueftan criticizes the massive Israeli watermelon industry for “putting all our scarce water into their product, then exporting it. It’s crazy.”
Maybe deserts just weren’t meant to bloom.
Gaza violence disrupts even the dead
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.
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.
NY Times recommends "A Grave in Gaza"
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.
"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.
Choosing a title -- again, and again, and again...
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.
A lesson in (mad) Mideast politics
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.
Live at the Leipzig Book Festival!
On my recent tour of Germany, I was interviewed (in English) on the 3Sat tv channel's stage at the Leipzig Book Fair. Of the big Germany book festivals, this is the one that gives the most time to readers and authors (the biggest, Frankfurt, is mainly for publishers to get a little more than tipsy together -- oh and to do some deals, of course). I was interviewed by a lovely, knowledgable German journalist named Tina Mendelsohn about my second Palestinian crime novel A Grave in Gaza, which is just out in German and proving very successful there. It was a bit of a demanding situation to maintain concentration, with thousands of people wandering by me only a few yards away -- many of them dressed rather disconcertingly as Japanese cartoon characters...But it was fun, too.
Gaza gets manure, but no one to spread it
Billions promised, but Gazans still waiting
Four months on from the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, Palestinians have seen little of the money pledged for reconstruction. By Matt Beynon Rees, on Global Post.
RAMALLAH — Money, wrote the English philosopher Francis Bacon, is like manure: of very little use unless it is spread.
Since an international aid conference in March promised $5.2 billion to rebuild Gaza, the stink of un-spread money has been strong in the nostrils. That’s particularly unpleasant for the people of Gaza, who also have to deal with a largely destroyed sewage system, thus giving them a double-helping of manure.
International diplomats, Israeli officials and leaders of the Palestinian Authority haven’t been able to figure out how to rebuild Gaza while keeping the cash out of the hands of Hamas, which runs the narrow strip of land. Food aid can get in, but substantial reconstruction hasn’t begun.
“The Sharm conference was just a big public relations stunt,” says a diplomat who works in the development arm of a European government. “The money promised for Gaza is just not there.”
Gaza’s 1.5 million people have been in desperate straits since the war there at the turn of the year. Israeli ground and air forces attacked Hamas to halt the Islamic group’s missile strikes on towns in southern Israel. About 1,300 people died.
At least 14,000 homes throughout the Gaza Strip were destroyed or badly damaged, according to the UN Development Program. Infrastructure, such as roads, water, sewage and electricity supply, were severely affected.
In early March, a wide range of international donors converged on the swanky Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh. Responding to public concern about the plight of ordinary Gazans, the donors dug deep. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton promised $900 million from the United States. Saudi Arabia pledged $1 billion.
The total was put at $5.2 billion, though $700 million of that was made up of old pledges that hadn’t ever been fulfilled (a perverse international aid equivalent of re-gifting). New pledges amounted to $4.4 billion. That's more than Germany received, in real terms, under the Marshall Plan after World War II. It ought to have been enough to rebuild a place as small as Gaza where, it's fair to say, the residents have low expectations for the luxuriousness of their habitat.
Yet the people of Gaza quivered in their wintry tent encampments, waiting for the manure to be spread.
They’re still in the tents. Sweltering now with the onset of the long heat that runs from April until November in Gaza.
What happened to the cash?
After all, when the money was promised, diplomats claimed it would be easy enough to figure out a way to give the aid money without letting Hamas get its hands on it.
That was important because the U.S. wouldn’t give a cent if it might end up paying for more missiles aimed at Israel. Last week a Florida congresswoman told Clinton the aid money was “a bailout for Hamas.”
Most Arab states were keen to back the Palestinian Authority, which is still engaged in a civil war with Hamas. No problem, diplomats said at the time, we can set up mechanisms to get around Hamas.
European diplomats and Jerusalem-based aid agencies tell GlobalPost that these claims turned out to be hot air. Basic humanitarian aid, such as food, gets through no problem. But the rest of the cash remains unused.
Diplomats are concerned that even if the aid doesn’t go directly to Hamas, the Islamic party which took over absolute control of Gaza two years ago might tax or divert the money — or simply steal it, as its militiamen did when they raided a U.N. food warehouse after the end of the fighting.
The donors thought the situation would become clearer after the formation of a new Israeli government and with progress in Egyptian-sponsored reconciliation talks between Hamas and their West Bank rivals, Fatah.
No luck. Hamas and Fatah seem to be drifting further apart, maneuvering behind the scenes as they prepare for a new round of talks.
Fatah, which controls the Palestinian Authority from Ramallah, lacks urgency due to the fact that it’s still receiving the money it has been promised by the United States. Hamas hasn’t been doing much to kiss and make up, either. A Human Rights Watch report released last week said Hamas killed at least 32 political rivals during the Israeli assault and in the three months since. It also shot 49 Palestinians in the legs and broke the legs or arms of another 73, according to the rights group.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered a review of the policy of barring construction materials from Gaza, after he took office a month ago. But the review isn’t due to be completed for another three weeks, according to officials in Netanyahu’s office.
“Keeping the money out of the hands of Hamas is a challenge,” says one Israeli official. “Whether the money is dollars, Euros or shekels, no one has easy answers.”
It turns out blame is easier to spread than money.
Four months on from the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, Palestinians have seen little of the money pledged for reconstruction. By Matt Beynon Rees, on Global Post.
RAMALLAH — Money, wrote the English philosopher Francis Bacon, is like manure: of very little use unless it is spread.
Since an international aid conference in March promised $5.2 billion to rebuild Gaza, the stink of un-spread money has been strong in the nostrils. That’s particularly unpleasant for the people of Gaza, who also have to deal with a largely destroyed sewage system, thus giving them a double-helping of manure.
International diplomats, Israeli officials and leaders of the Palestinian Authority haven’t been able to figure out how to rebuild Gaza while keeping the cash out of the hands of Hamas, which runs the narrow strip of land. Food aid can get in, but substantial reconstruction hasn’t begun.
“The Sharm conference was just a big public relations stunt,” says a diplomat who works in the development arm of a European government. “The money promised for Gaza is just not there.”
Gaza’s 1.5 million people have been in desperate straits since the war there at the turn of the year. Israeli ground and air forces attacked Hamas to halt the Islamic group’s missile strikes on towns in southern Israel. About 1,300 people died.
At least 14,000 homes throughout the Gaza Strip were destroyed or badly damaged, according to the UN Development Program. Infrastructure, such as roads, water, sewage and electricity supply, were severely affected.
In early March, a wide range of international donors converged on the swanky Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh. Responding to public concern about the plight of ordinary Gazans, the donors dug deep. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton promised $900 million from the United States. Saudi Arabia pledged $1 billion.
The total was put at $5.2 billion, though $700 million of that was made up of old pledges that hadn’t ever been fulfilled (a perverse international aid equivalent of re-gifting). New pledges amounted to $4.4 billion. That's more than Germany received, in real terms, under the Marshall Plan after World War II. It ought to have been enough to rebuild a place as small as Gaza where, it's fair to say, the residents have low expectations for the luxuriousness of their habitat.
Yet the people of Gaza quivered in their wintry tent encampments, waiting for the manure to be spread.
They’re still in the tents. Sweltering now with the onset of the long heat that runs from April until November in Gaza.
What happened to the cash?
After all, when the money was promised, diplomats claimed it would be easy enough to figure out a way to give the aid money without letting Hamas get its hands on it.
That was important because the U.S. wouldn’t give a cent if it might end up paying for more missiles aimed at Israel. Last week a Florida congresswoman told Clinton the aid money was “a bailout for Hamas.”
Most Arab states were keen to back the Palestinian Authority, which is still engaged in a civil war with Hamas. No problem, diplomats said at the time, we can set up mechanisms to get around Hamas.
European diplomats and Jerusalem-based aid agencies tell GlobalPost that these claims turned out to be hot air. Basic humanitarian aid, such as food, gets through no problem. But the rest of the cash remains unused.
Diplomats are concerned that even if the aid doesn’t go directly to Hamas, the Islamic party which took over absolute control of Gaza two years ago might tax or divert the money — or simply steal it, as its militiamen did when they raided a U.N. food warehouse after the end of the fighting.
The donors thought the situation would become clearer after the formation of a new Israeli government and with progress in Egyptian-sponsored reconciliation talks between Hamas and their West Bank rivals, Fatah.
No luck. Hamas and Fatah seem to be drifting further apart, maneuvering behind the scenes as they prepare for a new round of talks.
Fatah, which controls the Palestinian Authority from Ramallah, lacks urgency due to the fact that it’s still receiving the money it has been promised by the United States. Hamas hasn’t been doing much to kiss and make up, either. A Human Rights Watch report released last week said Hamas killed at least 32 political rivals during the Israeli assault and in the three months since. It also shot 49 Palestinians in the legs and broke the legs or arms of another 73, according to the rights group.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered a review of the policy of barring construction materials from Gaza, after he took office a month ago. But the review isn’t due to be completed for another three weeks, according to officials in Netanyahu’s office.
“Keeping the money out of the hands of Hamas is a challenge,” says one Israeli official. “Whether the money is dollars, Euros or shekels, no one has easy answers.”
It turns out blame is easier to spread than money.
Beastly Me: What Israel learned from Arafat
Tomorrow's Netanyahu-Obama summit has Iran, Gaza, and settlements on the agenda, but the Israeli leader will bring a new tactic learned from an old nemesis. On The Daily Beast today, my take on how Bibi will "pull an Arafat."
May Allah bless such reviewers
America, the National Catholic weekly, includes a great review of The Samaritan's Secret, the third of my Palestinian crime novels, this week. "Rees masterfully concocts another claustrophobic tale from the occupied territories that takes us deep into the Palestinian experience even as it entertains," writes Claire Schaeffer-Duffy. She also calls my detective Omar Yussef "endearingly cranky." God bless him.
May Allah's blessings also fall upon the reviewer in Denmark's Information, who writes of the second of my novels "A Grave in Gaza" (UK title: The Saladin Murders): “Matt Rees who has run Time Magazine’s office in Jerusalem has traveled and lived amongst Palestinians and Israelis for years, and he knows what he’s talking about. This is why his new crime novel is both tremendous and terrible. It not cheerful, in fact it’s rather tragic, but Omar Yussef is a warm, jolly and lively acquaintance and the novel is certainly worth a read to find out what goes on behind the scenes in the Palestinian territories.“
Just to show that I prefer not to leave my books entirely in the hands of even the best of reviewers, the Media Line's Jerusalem bureau interviewed me for US radio stations a couple of days ago. Here I talk about my books and how I came to write them.
May Allah's blessings also fall upon the reviewer in Denmark's Information, who writes of the second of my novels "A Grave in Gaza" (UK title: The Saladin Murders): “Matt Rees who has run Time Magazine’s office in Jerusalem has traveled and lived amongst Palestinians and Israelis for years, and he knows what he’s talking about. This is why his new crime novel is both tremendous and terrible. It not cheerful, in fact it’s rather tragic, but Omar Yussef is a warm, jolly and lively acquaintance and the novel is certainly worth a read to find out what goes on behind the scenes in the Palestinian territories.“
Just to show that I prefer not to leave my books entirely in the hands of even the best of reviewers, the Media Line's Jerusalem bureau interviewed me for US radio stations a couple of days ago. Here I talk about my books and how I came to write them.
