Matt Rees's Blog - Posts Tagged "palestine"
Global Post features my articles on Nablus, the Samaritans from my new novel
The new U.S. website Global Post, which aims to provide Americans with the foreign news that they're missing since their newspapers fired almost all their international correspondents, features a series of stories by me. They're intended as introductions to my new Palestinian crime novel, THE SAMARITAN'S SECRET -- colorful features about life for the Palestinians who appear in the book. The second article tells how I came to know the remnants of the ancient Samaritans, living on a hilltop overlooking Nablus. Both articles include photographs I took of Nablus and links to video about the novel.
Israeli paper finds 'vivid picture of Palestinian life' in THE SAMARITAN'S SECRET
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."
"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."
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.
"Mystery fiction not limited by form, highly instructive"
People who don't know any better sometimes tell me that I'm a good writer and they'd like to see me write a "real novel," instead of my Palestinian crime novels. Usually I tell them Raymond Chandler once wrote that there are just as many bad "real" literary novels written as bad mysteries -- but the bad literary novels just don't get published. Now I'll be able to add something else to my always polite correction of this misconception about crime novels. That's because of a review of my new Palestinian crime novel THE SAMARITAN'S SECRET in the Feb. 7 issue of The Tablet, a British magazine published for the Roman Catholic community. The Tablet makes THE SAMARITAN'S SECRET "Novel of the Week" and reviewer Anthony Lejeune writes that it's "a novel thick with atmosphere, memorable, unusual and the clearest possible proof that mystery fiction can be moulded into any literary form and is often highly instructive."
Madame Secretary, when will we have peace? And bathroom breaks?
By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost
Published: March 4, 2009 15:25 ET
RAMALLAH — The further back you are in a motorcade, the more bemused the expression on the faces of the pedestrians watching you speed by. When I passed them, the people of this Palestinian city stared with slack jaws, as though they wondered if the parade of shiny black Chevrolet Suburbans would go on forever.
I was in car 22. Of 24.
But the people on the sidewalk weren’t the only ones scratching their heads.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s diplomatic caravan looped through the biggest Palestinian city in the West Bank on Wednesday. No doubt she’d maintain that she laid important diplomatic groundwork for the Obama Administration’s new path in the Middle East.
But the dozen Washington-based journalists who follow her wherever she goes complained that they’d been frozen out of the behind-the-scenes details just as abruptly as the stymied motorists forced to watch her drive by under the baleful stares of red-bereted Palestinian soldiers toting AK-47s.
Even before the journalists left Jerusalem’s King David Hotel in the morning, one correspondent for a prominent East Coast daily whined that he felt “like we’re the traveling Russian press.”
Throughout the day, correspondents griped to Hillary’s troop of press people that they didn’t know what she was telling the Palestinian prime minister and president in her closed-door meetings.
And these are people with lots of time to complain.
Because when you’re “inside the bubble” with the Secretary of State, there’s a lot of sitting around with nothing to do but whine about how little you have to do.
I jumped into my U.S. Embassy Chevy beside the King David at 8.45 a.m. Jerusalem time. I saw Hillary for six, maybe seven, minutes at 12.20 p.m. Eventually there was a 20-minute press conference which ended at 3 p.m.
Other than that, as Yasser Arafat used to say, “a big nothing.”
Of course, the State Department’s operation is impressive. Private security contractors with distinctly military demeanors and names like “Mac” and “Witt” run that 24-car motorcade with a precision not usually evident in the Middle East. Mac promised to throw himself on top of me if the convoy were attacked. Then an attractive, young USAID official jumped into the seat beside me. I saw Mac's attention to security shift focus. I was on my own.
Clearly, no one wanted to be late for the motorcade — Mac and Witt wouldn’t wait. With some minutes to go before departure, press people from the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv were faced with the most important question of the day that the traveling press actually were allowed to pose: “Do I have time to go to the bathroom?”
(This was a major feature of the day and apparently one of the most significant considerations for people who must parse a few minutes of often anodyne diplospeak and manage to get an 800-word article out of it. You don’t want to be sighing at the urinal when Hillary’s ticking off the details of how she made a big peace breakthrough in the Middle East. Nor do you want to be wriggling with discomfort in the motorcade. I counted six occasions in five hours when Hillary’s press aides were asked to advise on bathroom breaks.)
While Witt and Mac kept Beyonce at a modest volume in the front of the Suburban, the motorcade came through the checkpoint into northern Ramallah. “Trailerpark,” Mac said mysteriously into the microphone on his lapel. “Hatbox, hatbox.” Secret service code words, apparently.
We pulled up at the Council of Ministers. The traveling press was shown into a room with a table 20 yards long. The reporters were told they’d have to wait a half hour and wouldn’t get a chance to see Clinton and the Palestinian prime minister, let alone ask a question.
It was the table around which the Palestinian cabinet meets. But no one seemed interested in finding out where they actually were. A network correspondent sat in the prime minister’s chair and played with the on-off button on his microphone. A few others asked me about the top-notch spread of baklava laid out for us. Yet it seems travel inside the bubble isolates you not only from the world outside, but also from the very place where you are. I’ve never seen a group of people whose fingers were so glued to the toggles of their BlackBerrys.
The next stop was the kind of photo op journalists detest. A school funded by the State Department called AMIDEAST that provides English classes to underprivileged Palestinian kids mostly from refugee camps. The place is so praiseworthy journalists are guaranteed to hate it. Particularly after Hillary emerged to tell us that she’d confided in a few of the Palestinian kids inside that as a little girl she’d wanted to be an astronaut.
I was ready to shout “Hatbox,” but a Reuters correspondent gamely yelled a serious question about Israeli settlement construction on Palestinian land. Clinton twice told her she wouldn’t answer.
She did say that an independent Palestinian state with highly qualified graduates of the AMIDEAST school ready to confront the 21st century and live up to its international responsibilities was “absolutely—uh, probable.” Perhaps in the diplomatic world that qualifies as a big vote of confidence. Let’s hope.
There were occasional remarks among the more forgiving of the correspondents that Clinton’s predecessor Condoleezza Rice took some time to understand the needs of the traveling press, before she instituted “round tables” at which the reporters could grill her during the trip. Meanwhile one of the Secretary’s press aides cheerily promised that once they arrived at Clinton’s next stop, Brussels, “we’re all going to have chocolate-covered nuts. That’s going to be fun, isn’t it?”
It almost made me sorry I’d be breaking off to return to Jerusalem, when the rest of the group went to the airport.
But first there was the highlight of the day, the meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. We pulled into the Muqata, the office complex where Arafat was kept under siege during the intifada. It’s no longer bombed out and Arafat’s tomb is topped by an apparently computer-generated cube of the kind that seems popular with architects of museums and headquarters of big organizations these days. The Muqata, of course, is both.
The traveling press waited with local journalists for an hour while Hillary lunched with Abbas. The local journalists smoked cigarettes in the sun out in the courtyard. The traveling press maintained their bubble, tapping away on laptops in the seats assigned to them.
A correspondent for a leading daily in the nation’s capital boasted of the “flaming email” he’d sent to one of Hillary’s aides about the lack of access to the secretary of state. A pair of wire service reporters asked if there was time for a visit to the bathroom. The blue-blazered traveling reporters from the Washington bureaus popped the earpieces on their simultaneous translation modules into place. They sat there with them attached to their ears for 20 minutes, listening to the translator whispering to a colleague. Perhaps it made them feel like macho Witt and Mac with their lapel microphones and the curly wire leading from the back of their jackets up to their ears. Meanwhile, the local press, the reporters who live here, chatted mostly in Arabic and had no need of the translation, anyway.
By the time Clinton and Abbas arrived, I had counted the tiles on the ceiling of the massive press room twice and was admiring the banner behind the stage. It was a photo of Abbas, who appears to be scowling past the emblem of the Palestinian Authority at a grinning Arafat like a wife whose husband has come home from the bar with all his wages spent.
Within a minute of the end of the conference, the traveling press had been whisked into the motorcade. I sat next to a major network correspondent this time.
“How do you handle this day after day?” I asked.
She made a gesture as though to slit her throat.
“Are you traveling on to Brussels?” I said.
“I’m going to Baghdad,” she said. “I’d rather be in Iraq than have another day of this.”
The motorcade turned right at the Ofer Checkpoint, headed for Ben-Gurion International Airport. Our car cut left for Jerusalem. “Mouse, Duck, breaking off,” said Mac, his finger on his lapel microphone.
The traffic was backed up for three miles on the highway, waiting for the motorcade to pass. I hoped those drivers had asked to go to the bathroom before they hit the road.
Published: March 4, 2009 15:25 ET
RAMALLAH — The further back you are in a motorcade, the more bemused the expression on the faces of the pedestrians watching you speed by. When I passed them, the people of this Palestinian city stared with slack jaws, as though they wondered if the parade of shiny black Chevrolet Suburbans would go on forever.
I was in car 22. Of 24.
But the people on the sidewalk weren’t the only ones scratching their heads.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s diplomatic caravan looped through the biggest Palestinian city in the West Bank on Wednesday. No doubt she’d maintain that she laid important diplomatic groundwork for the Obama Administration’s new path in the Middle East.
But the dozen Washington-based journalists who follow her wherever she goes complained that they’d been frozen out of the behind-the-scenes details just as abruptly as the stymied motorists forced to watch her drive by under the baleful stares of red-bereted Palestinian soldiers toting AK-47s.
Even before the journalists left Jerusalem’s King David Hotel in the morning, one correspondent for a prominent East Coast daily whined that he felt “like we’re the traveling Russian press.”
Throughout the day, correspondents griped to Hillary’s troop of press people that they didn’t know what she was telling the Palestinian prime minister and president in her closed-door meetings.
And these are people with lots of time to complain.
Because when you’re “inside the bubble” with the Secretary of State, there’s a lot of sitting around with nothing to do but whine about how little you have to do.
I jumped into my U.S. Embassy Chevy beside the King David at 8.45 a.m. Jerusalem time. I saw Hillary for six, maybe seven, minutes at 12.20 p.m. Eventually there was a 20-minute press conference which ended at 3 p.m.
Other than that, as Yasser Arafat used to say, “a big nothing.”
Of course, the State Department’s operation is impressive. Private security contractors with distinctly military demeanors and names like “Mac” and “Witt” run that 24-car motorcade with a precision not usually evident in the Middle East. Mac promised to throw himself on top of me if the convoy were attacked. Then an attractive, young USAID official jumped into the seat beside me. I saw Mac's attention to security shift focus. I was on my own.
Clearly, no one wanted to be late for the motorcade — Mac and Witt wouldn’t wait. With some minutes to go before departure, press people from the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv were faced with the most important question of the day that the traveling press actually were allowed to pose: “Do I have time to go to the bathroom?”
(This was a major feature of the day and apparently one of the most significant considerations for people who must parse a few minutes of often anodyne diplospeak and manage to get an 800-word article out of it. You don’t want to be sighing at the urinal when Hillary’s ticking off the details of how she made a big peace breakthrough in the Middle East. Nor do you want to be wriggling with discomfort in the motorcade. I counted six occasions in five hours when Hillary’s press aides were asked to advise on bathroom breaks.)
While Witt and Mac kept Beyonce at a modest volume in the front of the Suburban, the motorcade came through the checkpoint into northern Ramallah. “Trailerpark,” Mac said mysteriously into the microphone on his lapel. “Hatbox, hatbox.” Secret service code words, apparently.
We pulled up at the Council of Ministers. The traveling press was shown into a room with a table 20 yards long. The reporters were told they’d have to wait a half hour and wouldn’t get a chance to see Clinton and the Palestinian prime minister, let alone ask a question.
It was the table around which the Palestinian cabinet meets. But no one seemed interested in finding out where they actually were. A network correspondent sat in the prime minister’s chair and played with the on-off button on his microphone. A few others asked me about the top-notch spread of baklava laid out for us. Yet it seems travel inside the bubble isolates you not only from the world outside, but also from the very place where you are. I’ve never seen a group of people whose fingers were so glued to the toggles of their BlackBerrys.
The next stop was the kind of photo op journalists detest. A school funded by the State Department called AMIDEAST that provides English classes to underprivileged Palestinian kids mostly from refugee camps. The place is so praiseworthy journalists are guaranteed to hate it. Particularly after Hillary emerged to tell us that she’d confided in a few of the Palestinian kids inside that as a little girl she’d wanted to be an astronaut.
I was ready to shout “Hatbox,” but a Reuters correspondent gamely yelled a serious question about Israeli settlement construction on Palestinian land. Clinton twice told her she wouldn’t answer.
She did say that an independent Palestinian state with highly qualified graduates of the AMIDEAST school ready to confront the 21st century and live up to its international responsibilities was “absolutely—uh, probable.” Perhaps in the diplomatic world that qualifies as a big vote of confidence. Let’s hope.
There were occasional remarks among the more forgiving of the correspondents that Clinton’s predecessor Condoleezza Rice took some time to understand the needs of the traveling press, before she instituted “round tables” at which the reporters could grill her during the trip. Meanwhile one of the Secretary’s press aides cheerily promised that once they arrived at Clinton’s next stop, Brussels, “we’re all going to have chocolate-covered nuts. That’s going to be fun, isn’t it?”
It almost made me sorry I’d be breaking off to return to Jerusalem, when the rest of the group went to the airport.
But first there was the highlight of the day, the meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. We pulled into the Muqata, the office complex where Arafat was kept under siege during the intifada. It’s no longer bombed out and Arafat’s tomb is topped by an apparently computer-generated cube of the kind that seems popular with architects of museums and headquarters of big organizations these days. The Muqata, of course, is both.
The traveling press waited with local journalists for an hour while Hillary lunched with Abbas. The local journalists smoked cigarettes in the sun out in the courtyard. The traveling press maintained their bubble, tapping away on laptops in the seats assigned to them.
A correspondent for a leading daily in the nation’s capital boasted of the “flaming email” he’d sent to one of Hillary’s aides about the lack of access to the secretary of state. A pair of wire service reporters asked if there was time for a visit to the bathroom. The blue-blazered traveling reporters from the Washington bureaus popped the earpieces on their simultaneous translation modules into place. They sat there with them attached to their ears for 20 minutes, listening to the translator whispering to a colleague. Perhaps it made them feel like macho Witt and Mac with their lapel microphones and the curly wire leading from the back of their jackets up to their ears. Meanwhile, the local press, the reporters who live here, chatted mostly in Arabic and had no need of the translation, anyway.
By the time Clinton and Abbas arrived, I had counted the tiles on the ceiling of the massive press room twice and was admiring the banner behind the stage. It was a photo of Abbas, who appears to be scowling past the emblem of the Palestinian Authority at a grinning Arafat like a wife whose husband has come home from the bar with all his wages spent.
Within a minute of the end of the conference, the traveling press had been whisked into the motorcade. I sat next to a major network correspondent this time.
“How do you handle this day after day?” I asked.
She made a gesture as though to slit her throat.
“Are you traveling on to Brussels?” I said.
“I’m going to Baghdad,” she said. “I’d rather be in Iraq than have another day of this.”
The motorcade turned right at the Ofer Checkpoint, headed for Ben-Gurion International Airport. Our car cut left for Jerusalem. “Mouse, Duck, breaking off,” said Mac, his finger on his lapel microphone.
The traffic was backed up for three miles on the highway, waiting for the motorcade to pass. I hoped those drivers had asked to go to the bathroom before they hit the road.
Bookslut: THE SAMARITAN'S SECRET "Cool Read"
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.
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.
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.
