Matt Rees's Blog - Posts Tagged "west"
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.
Netanyahu holds his line
Israeli Prime Minister ignores Obama and reiterates same policies
by Matt Beynon Rees on Global Post
JERUSALEM — It’s as if Obama never happened.
Less than two weeks ago President Barack Obama laid out his plans for the Middle East in a speech in Cairo. He called for a freeze on Israeli settlement construction, among other things.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately announced that he’d make a key policy address in Tel Aviv. Commentators wracked their brains figuring out how Bibi, the nickname by which the Likud leader is known, would walk the tightrope between his nationalist coalition — which is very supportive of the West Bank settlements and disdains the idea of a Palestinian state — and Obama, who had made it clear that he sees the settlements as Israel’s main contribution to the failure of peace efforts.
But Netanyahu outsmarted them all. No smokescreen, no artful diplospeak, no talking out of both sides of his mouth.
Nothing but old-school Bibi.
The big policy speech turned out to be filled with typical nationalist rhetoric about the settlements. The olive branch held out to the Palestinians was loaded with the kind of conditions Netanyahu surely knows are unacceptable in Ramallah — let alone Gaza.
“We would be prepared to reach agreement as to a demilitarized Palestinian state side by side with the Jewish state,” Netanyahu told his audience at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv.
He said “Palestinian state,” but he added an adjective that grates rather hard on the Palestinian ear: “demilitarized.” For Netanyahu that’s important because a militarized Palestinian state would, as he sees it, be much as Gaza is today, with the capacity to rain missiles on Tel Aviv and the country’s international airport. It could make a military alliance with Iran, like Hezbollah on Israel’s northern border and Hamas in Gaza. We’ve all seen how that turned out for Israel.
To Palestinians, a demilitarized state sounds like no state at all. Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said Netanyahu would “wait a thousand years to meet a Palestinian who’d accept his conditions.”
As for Obama’s gripe about settlements, Netanyahu seemed at first to be edging toward a compromise, something so cunning in its apparent straightforwardness that no one would notice he’d refused to comply with the American demands. “We have no intention of founding new settlements,” he said.
Well, that’s not the heart of Obama’s argument. He doesn’t want to be deflected by Israel pulling out of a few remote hilltop outposts. The U.S. wants even existing settlements to stay as they are — not growing by so much as a single brick — until the future of the land on which they stand is decided.
But Netanyahu trotted out the same formula Israel has always used for evading a settlement freeze: so-called natural growth. “We must give mothers and fathers the chance of bringing up their children as is the case anywhere in the world,” he said.
In other words, if children grow up in a settlement, Israel is bound to build a home for them there when they want to have their own place, so they don’t have to move elsewhere to find accommodation.
As if their parents didn’t move to the settlements from somewhere else.
As if Barack Obama didn’t insist there be no “natural growth” in the settlements.
No one expects Netanyahu to go head to head with Obama. The speech wasn’t intended as a gauntlet in the face of the U.S. But the Israeli prime minister is sailing pretty close to the White House wind.
It all played well with Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud Party. “It was a Zionist speech from his faith and heart,” said Limor Livnat, a leading Likud hawk. “I’d have preferred he hadn’t said ‘Palestinian state,’ but it was a good speech.”
The country’s rather lackluster opposition recognized that Netanyahu hadn’t given ground to Obama. “The speech was typical Netanyahu,” said Ofer Pines, a legislator from the Labor Party (Labor is part of the coalition, but some of its lawmakers including Pines refused to join the government.) “He said a very small ‘Yes,’ and a very big ‘No.’ He’s really only talking to himself.”
Except he’s not the only one listening. There must surely have been bemusement in Washington, as officials watched the speech, waiting for Netanyahu to adjust his previous positions.
Wait on. The Palestinians must recognize Israel as a Jewish state, he said. Jerusalem, too, “would be the united capital of Israel.” He didn’t even offer to open the checkpoints into Gaza to let in construction material to rebuild the city ruined in the war between Israel and Hamas at the turn of the year.
The most optimistic of assessments — at least among those who oppose Netanyahu — was that the speech was just words. “It’s not what he says, it’s what he does after this that interests me,” said Haim Ramon, a legislator from the opposition Kadima Party.
Obama will surely second that.
by Matt Beynon Rees on Global Post
JERUSALEM — It’s as if Obama never happened.
Less than two weeks ago President Barack Obama laid out his plans for the Middle East in a speech in Cairo. He called for a freeze on Israeli settlement construction, among other things.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately announced that he’d make a key policy address in Tel Aviv. Commentators wracked their brains figuring out how Bibi, the nickname by which the Likud leader is known, would walk the tightrope between his nationalist coalition — which is very supportive of the West Bank settlements and disdains the idea of a Palestinian state — and Obama, who had made it clear that he sees the settlements as Israel’s main contribution to the failure of peace efforts.
But Netanyahu outsmarted them all. No smokescreen, no artful diplospeak, no talking out of both sides of his mouth.
Nothing but old-school Bibi.
The big policy speech turned out to be filled with typical nationalist rhetoric about the settlements. The olive branch held out to the Palestinians was loaded with the kind of conditions Netanyahu surely knows are unacceptable in Ramallah — let alone Gaza.
“We would be prepared to reach agreement as to a demilitarized Palestinian state side by side with the Jewish state,” Netanyahu told his audience at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv.
He said “Palestinian state,” but he added an adjective that grates rather hard on the Palestinian ear: “demilitarized.” For Netanyahu that’s important because a militarized Palestinian state would, as he sees it, be much as Gaza is today, with the capacity to rain missiles on Tel Aviv and the country’s international airport. It could make a military alliance with Iran, like Hezbollah on Israel’s northern border and Hamas in Gaza. We’ve all seen how that turned out for Israel.
To Palestinians, a demilitarized state sounds like no state at all. Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said Netanyahu would “wait a thousand years to meet a Palestinian who’d accept his conditions.”
As for Obama’s gripe about settlements, Netanyahu seemed at first to be edging toward a compromise, something so cunning in its apparent straightforwardness that no one would notice he’d refused to comply with the American demands. “We have no intention of founding new settlements,” he said.
Well, that’s not the heart of Obama’s argument. He doesn’t want to be deflected by Israel pulling out of a few remote hilltop outposts. The U.S. wants even existing settlements to stay as they are — not growing by so much as a single brick — until the future of the land on which they stand is decided.
But Netanyahu trotted out the same formula Israel has always used for evading a settlement freeze: so-called natural growth. “We must give mothers and fathers the chance of bringing up their children as is the case anywhere in the world,” he said.
In other words, if children grow up in a settlement, Israel is bound to build a home for them there when they want to have their own place, so they don’t have to move elsewhere to find accommodation.
As if their parents didn’t move to the settlements from somewhere else.
As if Barack Obama didn’t insist there be no “natural growth” in the settlements.
No one expects Netanyahu to go head to head with Obama. The speech wasn’t intended as a gauntlet in the face of the U.S. But the Israeli prime minister is sailing pretty close to the White House wind.
It all played well with Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud Party. “It was a Zionist speech from his faith and heart,” said Limor Livnat, a leading Likud hawk. “I’d have preferred he hadn’t said ‘Palestinian state,’ but it was a good speech.”
The country’s rather lackluster opposition recognized that Netanyahu hadn’t given ground to Obama. “The speech was typical Netanyahu,” said Ofer Pines, a legislator from the Labor Party (Labor is part of the coalition, but some of its lawmakers including Pines refused to join the government.) “He said a very small ‘Yes,’ and a very big ‘No.’ He’s really only talking to himself.”
Except he’s not the only one listening. There must surely have been bemusement in Washington, as officials watched the speech, waiting for Netanyahu to adjust his previous positions.
Wait on. The Palestinians must recognize Israel as a Jewish state, he said. Jerusalem, too, “would be the united capital of Israel.” He didn’t even offer to open the checkpoints into Gaza to let in construction material to rebuild the city ruined in the war between Israel and Hamas at the turn of the year.
The most optimistic of assessments — at least among those who oppose Netanyahu — was that the speech was just words. “It’s not what he says, it’s what he does after this that interests me,” said Haim Ramon, a legislator from the opposition Kadima Party.
Obama will surely second that.
Omar Yussef for President of Palestine!
My latest post on the International Crime Authors Reality Check blog:
Unlike the Palestinians (who don’t have one), Palestinian politics is in a real state. A civil war that’s been bubbling and sometimes burning for two years plus. No government in Gaza because Hamas, which rules there, is isolated. Accusations by a top PLO official that current Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas had his predecessor Yasser Arafat poisoned.
But don’t worry, Palestine. I have the solution, insh’allah. I propose a plan to end the violence and bring Palestine out of its international isolation. I propose that my fictional Palestinian sleuth Omar Yussef stand for election as president.
There are supposed to be elections next year. Abbas, whose term is already up, has refused to step down because he says the parliament approved an extra year due to the civil war emergency. Hamas responds that it controls the parliament, which hasn’t been able to sit because of the civil war.
The two sides, Hamas and Abbas’s Fatah, are due to meet this weekend in Cairo to discuss a truce. Don’t hold your breath. Fatah’s long-awaited Congress is set for early August in Bethlehem and no one will go out on a limb before that – young reformers want to get rid of Arafat’s corrupt old hacks, and no one wants to go into that vulnerable to criticism for being soft on Hamas.
So here’s my pitch for Omar Yussef.
Unlike Fatah, Omar is not associated with massive financial corruption. Neither is he, like Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniya, drawing close to Iran for financial backing, in the face of an international boycott. Omar is a decent, honorable Palestinian who stands against the corruption and violence that engulfs the Palestinians.
On book tours, people often ask me if Omar and his stance accord with the views of real Palestinians. I say, yes, that’s exactly what most Palestinians want. They don’t have a political alternative to Hamas and Fatah because both groups are armed and backed by big international donors – and prepared to squash any opponents.
But you can’t kill a fictional detective, which means Omar is able to stand up to the gunmen who bully other Palestinian politicians into silence.
It’s not certain that the elections will take place, unfortunately. Either Hamas will succeed in stopping them, or Abbas will realize that he’d lose to Haniya and cancel them at the last minute (Arafat called presidential elections more or less every time anyone annoyed him, but somehow he almost never got around to holding them.) Who better than a fictional character to run in an election that’ll never take place for the job of president of a country which doesn’t yet exist (and looks further away from statehood every day)?
If they step aside for Omar Yussef, Abbas and Haniya could get down to the real business they seem so keen to sidestep: an agenda for peace within the Palestinian factions and true negotiations with Israel for an end to the conflict.
Or is that just fiction, too?
Stay tuned for more on Omar’s candidacy.
Note for a future blog: try to find the office in Ramallah where Presidential candidacies can be registered.
Second note to self: Remember to place bets with anyone who’ll take the other side that such a place doesn’t exist or that it’d be closed when I visit.
Unlike the Palestinians (who don’t have one), Palestinian politics is in a real state. A civil war that’s been bubbling and sometimes burning for two years plus. No government in Gaza because Hamas, which rules there, is isolated. Accusations by a top PLO official that current Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas had his predecessor Yasser Arafat poisoned.
But don’t worry, Palestine. I have the solution, insh’allah. I propose a plan to end the violence and bring Palestine out of its international isolation. I propose that my fictional Palestinian sleuth Omar Yussef stand for election as president.
There are supposed to be elections next year. Abbas, whose term is already up, has refused to step down because he says the parliament approved an extra year due to the civil war emergency. Hamas responds that it controls the parliament, which hasn’t been able to sit because of the civil war.
The two sides, Hamas and Abbas’s Fatah, are due to meet this weekend in Cairo to discuss a truce. Don’t hold your breath. Fatah’s long-awaited Congress is set for early August in Bethlehem and no one will go out on a limb before that – young reformers want to get rid of Arafat’s corrupt old hacks, and no one wants to go into that vulnerable to criticism for being soft on Hamas.
So here’s my pitch for Omar Yussef.
Unlike Fatah, Omar is not associated with massive financial corruption. Neither is he, like Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniya, drawing close to Iran for financial backing, in the face of an international boycott. Omar is a decent, honorable Palestinian who stands against the corruption and violence that engulfs the Palestinians.
On book tours, people often ask me if Omar and his stance accord with the views of real Palestinians. I say, yes, that’s exactly what most Palestinians want. They don’t have a political alternative to Hamas and Fatah because both groups are armed and backed by big international donors – and prepared to squash any opponents.
But you can’t kill a fictional detective, which means Omar is able to stand up to the gunmen who bully other Palestinian politicians into silence.
It’s not certain that the elections will take place, unfortunately. Either Hamas will succeed in stopping them, or Abbas will realize that he’d lose to Haniya and cancel them at the last minute (Arafat called presidential elections more or less every time anyone annoyed him, but somehow he almost never got around to holding them.) Who better than a fictional character to run in an election that’ll never take place for the job of president of a country which doesn’t yet exist (and looks further away from statehood every day)?
If they step aside for Omar Yussef, Abbas and Haniya could get down to the real business they seem so keen to sidestep: an agenda for peace within the Palestinian factions and true negotiations with Israel for an end to the conflict.
Or is that just fiction, too?
Stay tuned for more on Omar’s candidacy.
Note for a future blog: try to find the office in Ramallah where Presidential candidacies can be registered.
Second note to self: Remember to place bets with anyone who’ll take the other side that such a place doesn’t exist or that it’d be closed when I visit.
Suffering 101
Palestinians and Israelis take an eternal debate into the classroom, leaving the UN stuck in the middle. By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost
JERUSALEM — In the Book of Lamentations, the people of Jerusalem cry out against the destruction of the city: “Is any suffering like my suffering?”
The answer, of course, is: No. Ever since, Jeremiah’s phrase has pretty much been the catchphrase of the entire Middle East.
On a recent Sunday, the Israeli Education Minister Gideon Saar told the cabinet that the word Arabs use to describe the foundation of Israel — “Nakba,” or catastrophe — would be removed from Arabic-language textbooks in the schools of Israel’s Arab minority. His contention: it wasn’t a catastrophe for him or the government that pays the schools’ bills, so out with “Nakba.”
The same day, Hamas lashed out at the U.N. agency that educates Palestinian refugees. The agency, Hamas alleged, was planning to change its textbooks to teach Palestinian children about the Holocaust. Hamas’s contention: the Holocaust didn’t happen, and teaching about it would legitimize the State of Israel which, in the opinion of most Palestinians, was foisted on them as payback for the Holocaust by guilt-ridden Europeans.
Recognizing the sufferings of the other side is generally the first step in conflict resolution. It makes the enemy seem human. It’s something Israelis and Palestinians find particularly hard to do.
In a letter to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, the Hamas-affiliated Popular Committees for Palestinian Refugees called the Holocaust “a big lie that was fabricated by the Jews and a big campaign of propaganda.” The U.N., the letter says, should “erase the subject of the Jewish Holocaust from the curriculum, and stop future attempts to insert strange concepts which contradict Palestinian values and principles.”
Hamas claimed to have uncovered plans to teach about the Holocaust in a human-rights course. There are 200,000 Gazan children in U.N. schools.
U.N. officials tried to set the record straight. Karen Abu Zayd, the UNRWA commissioner-general, said Tuesday that she could "refute allegations that the U.N. school curriculum includes anything about the Holocaust."
A relief, perhaps, to anyone worried about offending Palestinians. Maybe not such a relief to those hoping the U.N. provides refugee children with a fully rounded awareness of history — the history of the people who live right next door.
Holocaust denial is common among Palestinians. That’s because they believe the enormity of the Holocaust diminishes — in the eyes of the world — the significance of their own suffering. The figure of 6 million murdered was made up, they contend, so that it would dwarf the 750,000 Palestinians who lost their homes and became refugees in 1948 when Israel was founded.
Hamas has backers in this regard. Since its international isolation in 2006, the Islamic group has increased its political and financial ties to the Holocaust-denying regime in Tehran.
In contrast, Saar, the education minister, didn’t entirely deny the grievance of Israel’s Arab population at the cabinet meeting in Jerusalem. “It can be said with certainty that Arab Israelis experienced a tragedy in the war [of 1948:],” he said. “But there will be no use of the word ‘Nakba,’ whose meaning is similar to Holocaust in this context.”
For Saar it seems to be more a matter of capitalization. That is, 1948 was a catastrophe for the Palestinians, but not a Catastrophe.
“Nakba” didn’t have a very long run in Israel’s schools. The left-wing education minister, Yuli Tamir, introduced it two years ago to third-grade Arabic-language textbooks. Saar took office this spring as part of a more rightist government.
“The creation of the State of Israel cannot be referred to as a tragedy,” he said, “and the education system in the Arab sector will revise its studies in elementary schools.”
All this is just in time for the return of students to school for the start of a new academic year.
Now that’s a kind of suffering everyone can relate to.
JERUSALEM — In the Book of Lamentations, the people of Jerusalem cry out against the destruction of the city: “Is any suffering like my suffering?”
The answer, of course, is: No. Ever since, Jeremiah’s phrase has pretty much been the catchphrase of the entire Middle East.
On a recent Sunday, the Israeli Education Minister Gideon Saar told the cabinet that the word Arabs use to describe the foundation of Israel — “Nakba,” or catastrophe — would be removed from Arabic-language textbooks in the schools of Israel’s Arab minority. His contention: it wasn’t a catastrophe for him or the government that pays the schools’ bills, so out with “Nakba.”
The same day, Hamas lashed out at the U.N. agency that educates Palestinian refugees. The agency, Hamas alleged, was planning to change its textbooks to teach Palestinian children about the Holocaust. Hamas’s contention: the Holocaust didn’t happen, and teaching about it would legitimize the State of Israel which, in the opinion of most Palestinians, was foisted on them as payback for the Holocaust by guilt-ridden Europeans.
Recognizing the sufferings of the other side is generally the first step in conflict resolution. It makes the enemy seem human. It’s something Israelis and Palestinians find particularly hard to do.
In a letter to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, the Hamas-affiliated Popular Committees for Palestinian Refugees called the Holocaust “a big lie that was fabricated by the Jews and a big campaign of propaganda.” The U.N., the letter says, should “erase the subject of the Jewish Holocaust from the curriculum, and stop future attempts to insert strange concepts which contradict Palestinian values and principles.”
Hamas claimed to have uncovered plans to teach about the Holocaust in a human-rights course. There are 200,000 Gazan children in U.N. schools.
U.N. officials tried to set the record straight. Karen Abu Zayd, the UNRWA commissioner-general, said Tuesday that she could "refute allegations that the U.N. school curriculum includes anything about the Holocaust."
A relief, perhaps, to anyone worried about offending Palestinians. Maybe not such a relief to those hoping the U.N. provides refugee children with a fully rounded awareness of history — the history of the people who live right next door.
Holocaust denial is common among Palestinians. That’s because they believe the enormity of the Holocaust diminishes — in the eyes of the world — the significance of their own suffering. The figure of 6 million murdered was made up, they contend, so that it would dwarf the 750,000 Palestinians who lost their homes and became refugees in 1948 when Israel was founded.
Hamas has backers in this regard. Since its international isolation in 2006, the Islamic group has increased its political and financial ties to the Holocaust-denying regime in Tehran.
In contrast, Saar, the education minister, didn’t entirely deny the grievance of Israel’s Arab population at the cabinet meeting in Jerusalem. “It can be said with certainty that Arab Israelis experienced a tragedy in the war [of 1948:],” he said. “But there will be no use of the word ‘Nakba,’ whose meaning is similar to Holocaust in this context.”
For Saar it seems to be more a matter of capitalization. That is, 1948 was a catastrophe for the Palestinians, but not a Catastrophe.
“Nakba” didn’t have a very long run in Israel’s schools. The left-wing education minister, Yuli Tamir, introduced it two years ago to third-grade Arabic-language textbooks. Saar took office this spring as part of a more rightist government.
“The creation of the State of Israel cannot be referred to as a tragedy,” he said, “and the education system in the Arab sector will revise its studies in elementary schools.”
All this is just in time for the return of students to school for the start of a new academic year.
Now that’s a kind of suffering everyone can relate to.
Israel's new weapon: water?
Yet another report accuses Israel of human rights abuses, this time for denying Palestinians water. By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost
JERUSALEM — Human-rights reports condemning Israel’s dealings with the Palestinians have become so frequent of late they’re like the dripping of Chinese water torture.
In the last few months, there have been reports on the conduct of Israeli forces in Gaza, on restrictions on medical supplies and food entering Gaza and the necessity for a boycott of Israeli products and people. This week Amnesty International made its latest contribution with a report on water itself.
Amnesty issued a 112-page report that accuses Israel of denying sufficient water to Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The report says Israelis uses more than three times as much water per person as Palestinians, and that Gazans are down to 20 liters of water a day — the World Health Organization’s designated minimum level for subsistence.
“Water is a basic need and a right, but for many Palestinians obtaining even poor-quality, subsistence-level quantities of water has become a luxury that they can barely afford,” said Amnesty's researcher for Israel and the Palestinian territories Donatella Rovera.
Palestinian officials gushed about the Amnesty report. Israelis told them to suck it up.
A measure of the importance of water in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — and throughout the parched Middle East — is the position water rights were given in the Oslo Peace Accords between the two sides.
When the peace agreement was signed in 1993, the most difficult issues were set aside for “final-status negotiations.” In other words, the two sides figured they’d be able to agree on some issues only when they’d already made nice for a few years, their people would’ve seen the benefits of early measures, and consequently would accept compromise on the toughest questions.
Those tough questions, by the way, were: the status of Jerusalem, the future of Palestinian refugees, the final borders of a Palestinian state.
And water.
The first three issues are essentially at the heart of every story you read every day about this conflict. Water, on the other hand, doesn’t get so much coverage.
Because it’s harder to deal with than any of the others.
That’s right. You can pay refugees to make new lives in the West Bank and Gaza or Sweden. You can draw a line on a map and call one side of the line “Palestine.” You can even give sovereignty over the Temple Mount above ground to the Palestinians and underground (where all their ancient relics are) to the Israelis.
But you can’t make more water.
There are three main sources of water for Israel and the Palestinians, and they’re all in rotten shape.
The Sea of Galilee, according to Israeli government water officials, is so low after a decade of droughts that another winter of light rainfall could turn it into a “dead lake.” In other words, the water would become contaminated. Fears such as this led Israel’s Water Authority this summer to institute higher charges for homes that use large amounts of water.
Contamination isn’t a fear for the coastal aquifer, which runs beneath Gaza. It’s already a reality. The aquifer has been over-pumped, so that sea water has leeched into it and untreated sewage from the 1.5 million Palestinians living on top of it has seeped down into it. That’s led to dangerous quantities of nitrates in the water pumped out of the ground in Gaza.
The mountain aquifer beneath the West Bank is little better. Amnesty says Israel pumps 80 percent of the water that comes out of the mountain source, leaving only 20 percent to the Palestinians.
Israeli officials argue that they then sell much of that water back to the Palestinian Authority as they’re mandated to do under their peace accords (Article 40 of Annex III, to be precise). They also contend that the Palestinian Authority refuses to recycle its waste water, doesn’t build water plants even when Israel gives a permit to do so and has frittered away billions of dollars in Western aid without setting up its own water infrastructure (or pretty much any other infrastructure, in fact).
To be sure, the World Bank conceded recently that the Palestinian Water Authority is “in total chaos.” In most of the Palestinian villages of the West Bank, water is trucked in by leaky, old tankers, which sometimes fail to make it past Israeli military checkpoints.
Amnesty contends that Palestinians consume an average of 70 liters of water a day, including agricultural use. Much less than the Israeli average of 300 liters.
Israel disagrees with those figures. The Israeli Water Authority says Israelis use 408 liters a day of fresh water from natural sources, while Palestinians use 200 liters.
Those numbers won’t wash with Amnesty, which points the finger at Israeli settlements in the West Bank as big users of local water resources. Certainly the settlements have a lusher look than the neighboring Palestinian villages.
The language of Amnesty’s report highlights that water is not merely something that’s drunk or used for irrigation. The report "calls on the Israeli authorities to urgently address the desperate need for water security in the [occupied Palestinian territories:].”
“Water security.” Like everything else in the Middle East, water has turned into a security issue. In other words, something that can lead to violence.
Behind the politics, Amnesty points out the specific and pressing problems of the people of Gaza. The three-week Israeli offensive against Hamas in Gaza which ended in mid-January this year destroyed much of the infrastructure, such as it was.
Since then Israel has restricted construction materials entering the Gaza Strip, because it fears Hamas will use them to rebuild military facilities and weapons-smuggling tunnels beneath the Egyptian border. That, according to Amnesty, has brought the water situation in Gaza to “crisis point.”
Unfortunately the fact that water was supposed to be left to “final-status” peace negotiations means that there’s likely to be little change in the situation now. Final-status talks are a long, long way off. Palestinian negotiators have refused to talk to their Israeli counterparts until construction in Israeli settlements is at a complete halt. That means no water talks, either.
JERUSALEM — Human-rights reports condemning Israel’s dealings with the Palestinians have become so frequent of late they’re like the dripping of Chinese water torture.
In the last few months, there have been reports on the conduct of Israeli forces in Gaza, on restrictions on medical supplies and food entering Gaza and the necessity for a boycott of Israeli products and people. This week Amnesty International made its latest contribution with a report on water itself.
Amnesty issued a 112-page report that accuses Israel of denying sufficient water to Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The report says Israelis uses more than three times as much water per person as Palestinians, and that Gazans are down to 20 liters of water a day — the World Health Organization’s designated minimum level for subsistence.
“Water is a basic need and a right, but for many Palestinians obtaining even poor-quality, subsistence-level quantities of water has become a luxury that they can barely afford,” said Amnesty's researcher for Israel and the Palestinian territories Donatella Rovera.
Palestinian officials gushed about the Amnesty report. Israelis told them to suck it up.
A measure of the importance of water in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — and throughout the parched Middle East — is the position water rights were given in the Oslo Peace Accords between the two sides.
When the peace agreement was signed in 1993, the most difficult issues were set aside for “final-status negotiations.” In other words, the two sides figured they’d be able to agree on some issues only when they’d already made nice for a few years, their people would’ve seen the benefits of early measures, and consequently would accept compromise on the toughest questions.
Those tough questions, by the way, were: the status of Jerusalem, the future of Palestinian refugees, the final borders of a Palestinian state.
And water.
The first three issues are essentially at the heart of every story you read every day about this conflict. Water, on the other hand, doesn’t get so much coverage.
Because it’s harder to deal with than any of the others.
That’s right. You can pay refugees to make new lives in the West Bank and Gaza or Sweden. You can draw a line on a map and call one side of the line “Palestine.” You can even give sovereignty over the Temple Mount above ground to the Palestinians and underground (where all their ancient relics are) to the Israelis.
But you can’t make more water.
There are three main sources of water for Israel and the Palestinians, and they’re all in rotten shape.
The Sea of Galilee, according to Israeli government water officials, is so low after a decade of droughts that another winter of light rainfall could turn it into a “dead lake.” In other words, the water would become contaminated. Fears such as this led Israel’s Water Authority this summer to institute higher charges for homes that use large amounts of water.
Contamination isn’t a fear for the coastal aquifer, which runs beneath Gaza. It’s already a reality. The aquifer has been over-pumped, so that sea water has leeched into it and untreated sewage from the 1.5 million Palestinians living on top of it has seeped down into it. That’s led to dangerous quantities of nitrates in the water pumped out of the ground in Gaza.
The mountain aquifer beneath the West Bank is little better. Amnesty says Israel pumps 80 percent of the water that comes out of the mountain source, leaving only 20 percent to the Palestinians.
Israeli officials argue that they then sell much of that water back to the Palestinian Authority as they’re mandated to do under their peace accords (Article 40 of Annex III, to be precise). They also contend that the Palestinian Authority refuses to recycle its waste water, doesn’t build water plants even when Israel gives a permit to do so and has frittered away billions of dollars in Western aid without setting up its own water infrastructure (or pretty much any other infrastructure, in fact).
To be sure, the World Bank conceded recently that the Palestinian Water Authority is “in total chaos.” In most of the Palestinian villages of the West Bank, water is trucked in by leaky, old tankers, which sometimes fail to make it past Israeli military checkpoints.
Amnesty contends that Palestinians consume an average of 70 liters of water a day, including agricultural use. Much less than the Israeli average of 300 liters.
Israel disagrees with those figures. The Israeli Water Authority says Israelis use 408 liters a day of fresh water from natural sources, while Palestinians use 200 liters.
Those numbers won’t wash with Amnesty, which points the finger at Israeli settlements in the West Bank as big users of local water resources. Certainly the settlements have a lusher look than the neighboring Palestinian villages.
The language of Amnesty’s report highlights that water is not merely something that’s drunk or used for irrigation. The report "calls on the Israeli authorities to urgently address the desperate need for water security in the [occupied Palestinian territories:].”
“Water security.” Like everything else in the Middle East, water has turned into a security issue. In other words, something that can lead to violence.
Behind the politics, Amnesty points out the specific and pressing problems of the people of Gaza. The three-week Israeli offensive against Hamas in Gaza which ended in mid-January this year destroyed much of the infrastructure, such as it was.
Since then Israel has restricted construction materials entering the Gaza Strip, because it fears Hamas will use them to rebuild military facilities and weapons-smuggling tunnels beneath the Egyptian border. That, according to Amnesty, has brought the water situation in Gaza to “crisis point.”
Unfortunately the fact that water was supposed to be left to “final-status” peace negotiations means that there’s likely to be little change in the situation now. Final-status talks are a long, long way off. Palestinian negotiators have refused to talk to their Israeli counterparts until construction in Israeli settlements is at a complete halt. That means no water talks, either.
Looking for somewhere to kill someone: suggestions please
I’m always looking for a good spot in which to kill someone. Still, as a crime writer, I rarely have to ask about potential locations for a good murder. People are keen to suggest that the blood be spilled on their doorstep.
Most recently, it was a pastor and his wife.
To be fair, they actually said I ought to have my Palestinian detective Omar Yussef visit their church on the top of the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, where I live. But when I noted admiringly that it’d be a great place for a murder, they nodded and smiled in agreement.
Last week I visited the Augusta Victoria Compound on the Mount of Olives as a guest of the delightful Ulrike Wohlrab and her husband, Michael, the pastor of the Church of the Ascension. The compound, which was built to accommodate Kaiser Wilhelm II’s visit to Jerusalem in 1898 and named after his wife, is home to the second-biggest hospital in East Jerusalem, as well as Michael’s church. It’s also a meeting place for Germans in the city.
The idea behind my visit was for me to give my own little sermon on the mount – a talk about my Omar Yussef crime novels, which have been particularly well-received in Germany. But the discussion soon turned to murder…
“Omar Yussef hasn’t been to Jerusalem yet,” Michael said. “He ought to come here to the Augusta Victoria.”
It’s true that Omar has so far solved mysteries in Bethlehem, Gaza, Nablus and (coming in February) New York. My intention is for him to hit Jerusalem next and Augusta Victoria is a real center of the Palestinian community.
The symbolism of the Mount of Olives would be hard to resist as a setting for an Omar Yussef Mystery. Starting at the far end of the ridge, there’s the Mosque of the Ascension, a simple structure of Crusader origin with (so it’s said) the imprint of Jesus’s last footprint in the stone from which he launched off over Bethany en route for his seat at God’s right hand. (It’s a mosque because, though Jesus’s ascension isn’t mentioned in the Koran, Muslims believe in it. The Crusader building was improved upon in Saladin’s time by some of his followers.)
Moving along the hill with the golden Dome of the Rock across the valley on your left, you reach the Church of the Ascension (the Russian Orthodox version) with its tall slim tower and nuns bound in all-black wimples.
Next is the German Protestant church, which has some of the most striking mosaics you’ll ever see – featuring a massive Kaiser Wili on the ceiling, of course. Keep going and with only a slight dip in the road you’re onto Mount Scopus and the Hebrew University. (I’ll have to leave that out of my mystery novel. Batya Gur’s already been there.)
I always warn people that inclusion in my books may not work out so well for them. One of my friends, a Palestinian from East Jerusalem who runs a book shop, asked me over coffee a while back if he could be a character in one of my novels.
“Sure, but I may have to kill you,” I said.
“Okay. Just make it quick,” he replied.
I can’t say yet quite how the German pastor and his wife will feature in my Omar Yussef series. I must confess that I don’t think I’ll have the heart to kill them. They’re too nice.
I must be going soft.
(I posted this on International Crime Authors Reality Check, a joint blog I write with Christopher G. Moore, Barbara Nadel, and Colin Cotterill. Check it out.)
Most recently, it was a pastor and his wife.
To be fair, they actually said I ought to have my Palestinian detective Omar Yussef visit their church on the top of the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, where I live. But when I noted admiringly that it’d be a great place for a murder, they nodded and smiled in agreement.
Last week I visited the Augusta Victoria Compound on the Mount of Olives as a guest of the delightful Ulrike Wohlrab and her husband, Michael, the pastor of the Church of the Ascension. The compound, which was built to accommodate Kaiser Wilhelm II’s visit to Jerusalem in 1898 and named after his wife, is home to the second-biggest hospital in East Jerusalem, as well as Michael’s church. It’s also a meeting place for Germans in the city.
The idea behind my visit was for me to give my own little sermon on the mount – a talk about my Omar Yussef crime novels, which have been particularly well-received in Germany. But the discussion soon turned to murder…
“Omar Yussef hasn’t been to Jerusalem yet,” Michael said. “He ought to come here to the Augusta Victoria.”
It’s true that Omar has so far solved mysteries in Bethlehem, Gaza, Nablus and (coming in February) New York. My intention is for him to hit Jerusalem next and Augusta Victoria is a real center of the Palestinian community.
The symbolism of the Mount of Olives would be hard to resist as a setting for an Omar Yussef Mystery. Starting at the far end of the ridge, there’s the Mosque of the Ascension, a simple structure of Crusader origin with (so it’s said) the imprint of Jesus’s last footprint in the stone from which he launched off over Bethany en route for his seat at God’s right hand. (It’s a mosque because, though Jesus’s ascension isn’t mentioned in the Koran, Muslims believe in it. The Crusader building was improved upon in Saladin’s time by some of his followers.)
Moving along the hill with the golden Dome of the Rock across the valley on your left, you reach the Church of the Ascension (the Russian Orthodox version) with its tall slim tower and nuns bound in all-black wimples.
Next is the German Protestant church, which has some of the most striking mosaics you’ll ever see – featuring a massive Kaiser Wili on the ceiling, of course. Keep going and with only a slight dip in the road you’re onto Mount Scopus and the Hebrew University. (I’ll have to leave that out of my mystery novel. Batya Gur’s already been there.)
I always warn people that inclusion in my books may not work out so well for them. One of my friends, a Palestinian from East Jerusalem who runs a book shop, asked me over coffee a while back if he could be a character in one of my novels.
“Sure, but I may have to kill you,” I said.
“Okay. Just make it quick,” he replied.
I can’t say yet quite how the German pastor and his wife will feature in my Omar Yussef series. I must confess that I don’t think I’ll have the heart to kill them. They’re too nice.
I must be going soft.
(I posted this on International Crime Authors Reality Check, a joint blog I write with Christopher G. Moore, Barbara Nadel, and Colin Cotterill. Check it out.)
