Matt Rees's Blog - Posts Tagged "west-bank"

The best thing about moving from journalism to fiction writing is that people show you more respect.

As a journalist covering a troubling issue like the Israel-Palestinian conflict, I was often subject to rather nasty verbal attacks during public speaking engagements. For a partisan of either side, I seemed a fine target for their generalized contempt—they thought journalists were all against them and here was a live reporter on whom they could vent their spleen.

Thankfully that doesn’t happen now that I’m the author of a series of Palestinian crime novels. I wasn’t sure that it would be different, but it turns out that there’s a big change in the way people behave toward me.

Here are two examples from the last week alone.

In Cologne, Germany, last week, I talked in a bookstore at the invitation of the Cologne-Bethlehem Association. Much of the audience was made up of middle-aged and older Germans who visit Bethlehem frequently and have made strong ties with the people there.

One older gentleman suggested that, because my first novel THE COLLABORATOR OF BETHLEHEM shows the corruption and extortion carried out by the gunmen of the town during the intifada, my book “tended toward Israeli propaganda.”

But the old fellow was very respectful and as I answered him I could tell he was listening. (My response, of course, is along the lines of “No, actually the book doesn’t even address whether or not it’s right to shoot at Israelis; the book concerns itself with the negative effect those gunmen had WITHIN Palestinian society.”) Listening’s something that was often evidently not happening when, as a journalist, I would talk to audiences.

Then this week I went to the Israeli settlement of Efrat in the West Bank. I’ve visited many times before to write news reports about the confiscation of land or the endless pressure from Washington to stop building in the settlements. This time I was invited by the Gush Etzion Book Group, a few dozen women who live in the local settlements.

There had been quite some fiery debate within the group about whether to have me come and speak to them. Indeed, someone hinted that certain members of the group had stayed away.

Nonetheless, I was glad to be there. After all, much of THE COLLABORATOR OF BETHLEHEM takes place in the village of Artas and the Dehaisha Refugee Camp, which abut the northern reaches of Efrat. I want very much to talk about my books with people who have a stake in the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. Provided they’re willing to listen respectfully, to examine what I’m actually saying and not what they think I’m saying (or what they wish I’d say.)

The evening in Efrat went well and, in fact, much of what we talked about was how little I’m interested in politics—despite the apparently political subject-matter of my novels. What interests me is “the life that remains when politics is sluiced away like the filth a stray dog leaves in the street” (that’s a line from my sleuth Omar Yussef in THE FOURTH ASSASSIN, the next of my novels, which will be published Feb. 1).

Such respectful treatment is a big contrast to situations I encountered as a journalist. Then I would look out over audiences which seemed to be entirely red-faced and with arms crossed over every chest. The hostlie body language didn’t change, even though I was essentially saying the same things I’m saying now. Partisans hate journalists and, I believe, many of them used somehow to detest that I had found a kind of personal peace in covering the very conflict that stirs them up and stresses them so.

In Cologne and Efrat, people heard what I had to say and understood that I’m pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli. I'd like all the people I know here to have a good life, not the violent situation they suffer. Politics makes people choose sides, and I want no part of that.

I also think choosing sides makes for rather bad novels. It’s in the shades of gray, where decisions are so difficult or even impossible to make, that a novel becomes truly compelling--think of Graham Greene’s best novels. Political journalism on the other hand is, to say the least, dreary. Think of the glib rubbish turned out by columnists who have to fill three op-ed spaces each week.

Who would you respect more—Graham Greene or G. Gordon Liddy? See what I mean?

So I’ll continue to talk about my books to anyone who’ll take the time to read them, because that in itself is a sign of respect and openness. Those, after all, are the qualities most needed by both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict if they’re ever to find peace.

(I posted this first on a joint blog I write with some other international crime writers.)

The dead man's mother raged and wept as she told me how she’d discovered her son’s body, in the cabbage patch outside her home. She’d gone down on her knees, she said, touched his blood and wiped her fingers on her face, calling out that God is most great.

As the winter wind came cold off the Judean Desert, I watched her tears and thought: “I have to write a novel about this.”

Forgive me if that sounds callous, but I’m a writer. Or, I should say, that’s the moment when I became a writer.

I was Time Magazine’s Jerusalem bureau chief, covering the violence of the Palestinian intifada, when I went to that bereaved mother in her village on the edge of Bethlehem in 2002. I had always written fiction, but only published a few short stories. In the midst of the despair that engulfed Israelis and Palestinians, I found the very thing that could make me happy – the material for my series of Palestinian crime novels.

The killing of that woman’s son as he crept home in the dark was the basis for the opening death in my first novel “The Collaborator of Bethlehem.” The book won a Crime Writers Association Dagger. Since then I’ve published two more crime novels set in the Palestinian towns.

They’re a response to the emotional questions that, as a journalist, I was never able to answer. Strangely, fiction proves to be a better way to understand extreme events than journalism.

Since the first time I set foot in the West Bank in 1996, I had grown disillusioned with the ability of journalism to convey the depth of what I learned about the Palestinians. Back then, I visited the family of a Nablus man tortured to death in one of Yasser Arafat’s jails. The news article I wrote was a good one, uncovering the internal Palestinian violence so often overshadowed by the more spectacular conflict with Israel. But my impressions were much deeper.

I was struck by the candor and dignity with which the dead youth’s family spoke to me; the sheer alien nature of the place thrilled me. At the entrance to the family’s house in the casbah, an old oil drum held black flags and palm fronds, symbols of Islamic mourning. Men sat around smoking under a dark awning. I felt a powerful sense of adventure, as though I had uncovered an unknown culture.

The lawlessness of Palestinian life also gave me great characters for my fictionalized good guys. But also the villains. Unfortunately there are many Palestinians who have strong motivations to kill each other. I’ve spent a lot of time over the years with some of these men, trying to learn why they take the path of violence—time that has led to a deeper characterization of the villains in my books.

With my new novel, “The Fourth Assassin,” I brought my sleuth Omar Yussef to New York because I wanted him to confront the most important issue of the last decade – an issue which is crystallized in its most horrifically concrete form in the city of 9/11.

It’s a natural progression for a series that began in the cabbage patch near Bethlehem. When I stood there, it was seven months after the attacks on New York and Washington. The questions posed to anyone thinking about the Middle East had just become so much more complex. Too complex and emotional for journalism to encompass them and, all these years later, for politicians, too.

Whether it’s a single sniper’s bullet cutting through the chest of a man outside his mother’s house or a jetliner bursting through a 110-story building, my novels are aimed at the most explosive points in our recent history. That’s why I simply had to write them.

(I posted this on a joint International Crime Authors blog I write with three other writers. Check it out.)

How the son of a Hamas founder ended up an Israeli agent, as told by the "Green Prince" himself. (I posted this on GlobalPost)
RAMALLAH, West Bank — Parents often lament that their kids don’t follow them into their chosen professions. They ought to think themselves lucky. They could be Sheikh Hassan Youssef, a founder of the Islamic militant group Hamas whose son converted to Christianity and became a key Israeli agent.

Mosab Hassan Youssef, 32, reveals his secret life in a book published this coming week “Son of Hamas: A Gripping Account of Terror, Betrayal, Political Intrigue, and Unthinkable Choices” (Salt River Press).

A few days ago on his Facebook fan page, Youssef announced that he’d given an interview with the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz about the contents of the book. “The story will blow your minds away, it is going to be like a tsunami in the Middle East, couple of days later it will spread like a wild fire,” he wrote.

The tsunami was that Youssef’s previous account of his struggles — that he had turned against the violent ways of Hamas and, consequently, rejected Islam as a religion of hatred and violence — wasn’t the whole story. In fact, Youssef had been an agent for the Israeli Shin Bet domestic security service during the intifada, informing on the very organization of which his father, Sheikh Hassan, was a prominent leader.
His actions earned Youssef the codename “Green Prince” from the Shin Bet, a reference to the Islamic green of Hamas’s flags.

The account in Ha’aretz was verified by Gideon Ezra, an Israeli legislator who’s a former deputy chief of the Shin Bet.

Youssef’s father was a founder of Hamas and is currently serving a six-year sentence in an Israeli jail. The younger Youssef has said that he turned against Hamas when he realized that his father, who’s seen as a relative moderate, didn’t represent the heart of the organization. Youssef saw that core as rotten with a self-destructive hatred that brought down disaster on the Palestinian people.

Sheikh Youssef’s reputation as a moderate, of course, doesn’t preclude him giving fiery speeches about the victory of Islam in battle — which I witnessed several times at his mosque in al-Bireh, a city abutting Ramallah.

The sheikh’s broad white mosque with its plain carpeted floors is a long way from the Barabbas Road Church in San Diego, Calif., where Mosab Youssef now worships.

In 2005, the last time I saw Sheikh Hassan during the intifada, he claimed that as a representative of Hamas he was in contact with U.S. diplomats via a European intermediary. “And I know that what I tell the Americans they will tell Israel,” he said, “so, yes, I’m talking to the Israelis.”

In Hamas, that makes him pretty moderate.

The following week, Sheikh Hassan was arrested by the Shin Bet (with the aid of his son, it turns out).

In prison, according to Mosab Youssef, his father was devastated by the news that his son had become a Christian. The sheikh refused to disown his son, however, because that would imply consent to the boy’s murder.

Former Shin Bet deputy chief Ezra said Mosab Youssef was recruited as an agent while being held in an Israeli jail. Ezra, like several anonymous Shin Bet sources quoted by Ha’aretz, said Youssef’s information helped prevented numerous suicide bombings and saved many Israeli lives.

Most Palestinian informers — or collaborators, as Palestinians call them — are recruited either in jail or when they visit Israeli military bases to obtain travel permits. The collaboration begins with something small and apparently harmless, in return for permission to travel through army checkpoints for medical treatment in Jerusalem, say. By the time the Palestinian realizes he’s a fully fledged collaborator, the Shin Bet are able to control him by the threat of exposure.

In Mosab Youssef’s case, no such threats were needed, it seems. In the Ha’aretz interview, he expresses a desire to be in Gaza so that he could secure the release of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier held hostage there, and end the suffering of Gaza’s people under the Hamas regime.

A Hamas leader, Ismail Radwan, denounced the report as an attempt to undermine Sheikh Youssef’s standing. "The Palestinian people have great confidence in Hamas and its struggle and they will not be fooled by this slander and these lies of the Israeli occupation," he said.

As I travel the Middle East to research my Palestinian crime novels, I love to come upon a stinking squatting-toilet, its evacuation hole bubbling with dark, sinister turds and the air strong with the scent of barely digested, unhygienically prepared lamb kebab. I adore such a khazi on sight, because no one cleaned it up for me or tried to create an illusion that it was just like a toilet in Manhattan or Munich or my mother’s house.

That toilet is suddenly all around me and it’s real, down to the ragged little cloth and the old watering can for washing myself afterwards. I can even remember the most spectacularly smelly ones, like the reeking mess of my hotel toilet in Wadi Moussa, Jordan, where I paid $1.60 per night for a room, or the delightful filth of the Fatah headquarters in Nablus.

According to Virginia Heffernan, The New York Times television and “media” columnist, the sensuous depth of my experiences with Palestinian toilets is worthless. Every time I crap, I ought to be doing it in a replica of the Tokyo hotels which spray your backside with hand cleansing soap solutions, whether you like it or not.

How did Heffernan get into my toilet habits? Well, she didn’t. Actually she told me that the scent of books not only doesn’t matter but is a subject she finds tedious. The “aria of hypersensual book love is not my favorite performance,” she writes this week. “I sometimes suspect that those who gush about book odor might not like to read. If they did, why would they waste so much time inhaling?”

So if you like food, do you have to choose one sense as the limit of your experience? If you're invited out to eat with Heffernan: Don’t look at the plate and don’t savor the aroma; just eat the bloody thing.

The lady ought to get out more and think about her own senses. Most people only seem to notice smell when it makes them wrinkle their nose in disgust.

Whenever I’m in a Palestinian town, I can hardly breathe for all the sniffing I do. Strong cigarettes, body sweat, dust that seems superheated, donkey dung, cardamom from the coffee vendor and other spices in sacks outside a shop. The connection between scent and memory is in fact much stronger than the link between sight and our memories.

So forgive me if I go home from the Palestinian john and give my library the same attention.

I should add that Heffernan’s weird article posits the arguments of the great philosopher Walter Benjamin in favor of the love of a library, its scents and sense of touch. She then puts forward her argument in favor of e-readers which is that… Well, as far as I can see it’s just that she thinks Benjamin would probably have liked the Kindle, even though all the things he says he likes about books in his essay on collecting books don’t conform to the Kindle experience (except for the actual words you read).

It’d be like me writing that my old college tutor Terry Eagleton (author of “Walter Benjamin, or Toward a Revolutionary Criticism” 1981) wanted to elucidate a way for socialist literary critics to utilize new French deconstructionist techniques (true), only to add that he’d probably think Heffernan was a tasty bit of crumpet (probably true, knowing Terry, but no more than a hunch on my part.)

I’m not against the Kindle or other e-readers. I think it’s quite possible that many people will read more because of the ease with which they can download a range of works onto their little screens. One of my good friends here in Jerusalem loves his Kindle and has noted that, while I have to wait weeks for my books to be delivered, he can be reading whatever he wants in the seconds it takes to download a digital file.

My pal also points out that e-readers might be good for authors in the end (despite the fears of publishers) because he can’t lend my books once they’re bought on his Kindle. He has to buy another copy as a gift. See, I’m all for that.

Heffernan’s argument falls in line with the thoughtless cool accorded often-useless gadgets by people who haven’t looked beyond the sleek design and beeping sounds. (By this I mean the following conversation which I’m sure you’ve all experienced: “It’s cool.” “Why?” “It’s just cool, man.”)

Heffernan bloviates about scrolling through her “odorless dustless Kindle library,” comparing that with a dusty, odoriferous real library. But when she’s scrolling, she oughtn’t to compare herself to people who love books. The best comparison is to people who love card catalogues, because she isn’t looking at the books, only at their titles and some other referents.

“I have literally no memory of opting to get any of these books on Amazon,” she writes as she breezes down the list of contents on her snazzy device. That, Virginia dear, is because though it’s called a “Kindle,” you’re reading a computer. When I look at my computer, I often can’t remember when I wrote any number of blog posts or news stories based on a perusal of their file names. A few words in a digital list are nothing more than that. They have no design, no sensual triggers, no other association at all.

But I remember where and when I bought almost every book I own. (I also have a special place in my heart for the ones I stole as a teenager, but it turns out that might be easier to do with digital devices as well. Another thrill of youth lost to new technology.)

“The Kindle delivers a new kind of bliss,” Heffernan concludes. I’m sure it does, though Heffernan can’t tell us what that bliss might be.

Meantime, don’t forget about books. And, in spite of what I wrote above, don’t forget to flush.

(I posted this on a blog I write with three other international crime authors. Check it out. For more of my own blog post, visit my blog: The Man of Twists and Turns.)

GIVAT ONAN, West Bank—On this windblown outpost in the hills north of Jerusalem, a small group of Israeli settlers strives to bring the day of redemption promised, as they believe, in the Bible.

A controversial sect shunned by nearby Israeli settlements, the Brothers of Onan believe that by “spilling their seed” on the land of the ancient biblical Jewish homeland, they will hasten the coming of the Messiah. With the Israeli communities of the West Bank considered illegal under international law, the Onanists are the outcasts among outcasts. But they’re unperturbed.

“We can never give up this land,” says the group’s leader, Rabbi Meir Gedalia Kaplowitz. “You can ejaculate all you want in Tel Aviv or New York, but the Holy One, blessed be He, wants us to perform the miracle here.”

Kaplowitz sits in a messy caravan on a windy hilltop, taking a brief break from his endless routine of Talmud study and self-abuse. Wild-eyed and gaunt, he is the picture of the stereotypical Israeli settler extremist. Only, if anything, even more wild-eyed and gaunt.

The sect takes its name from the biblical Onan, who was ordered by his father Judah to impregnate Tamar, his brother’s widow, and to pass off the resulting children as belonging to his deceased brother. Not wanting to have children he couldn’t regard as his own, Onan fornicated with Tamar but at the moment of ejaculation he “spilled his seed.” God punished this disobedience by killing Onan.

Onanism has become a term used to describe such coitus interruptus, though it is also used for masturbation. In the Hebrew spoken on Givat Onan, masturbation is “onanut.”

“We’re proud to use that word for what we do,” says Haim Hercz, who occupies the caravan next to Kaplowicz. “But it's not all about Onan. Sometimes we call it flogging the Pharisee or chafing the camel. We have a sense of humor, just like people who have sex with women. But anyone can do that five or six times a day. We know that what we’re doing has a deeper purpose, and that’s what keeps us going.”

The Brothers of Onan celebrated Passover with a traditional Orthodox seder meal this week. (“Frankly it was nice to have something else to keep us occupied for six hours,” says Hercz.) But next week they plan to take their struggle to Tel Aviv, where they will pray and “shoot their short Uzis” outside the Israeli Defense Ministry to protest any restrictions on building in the settlements.

Successive Israeli governments have justified new construction in the West Bank by arguing that they are only satisfying “natural growth,” whereby the growing families of settlers must be accommodated with new homes. “Obviously that’s not fair on us,” says Kaplowitz.

Israelis who oppose the settlements say the Brothers of Onan are more than a dangerous fringe group. Orla Mohel, a Tel Aviv masseuse, founded Wank Watch to combat the influence of the group. “I’m concerned that a lot of people in Tel Aviv will see them as harmless ‘frotteurs,’” she says. “But they celebrate a story from Genesis in which a father forces a brother to have sex with his sister-in-law, tries to get a third son to marry her, then has sex with her himself.”

Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz writes in his book “The Genesis of Justice” that Onan probably had non-penetrative sex with Tamar, or maybe anal sex.

“I didn’t go to Harvard and I’m not a lawyer, so I'm no expert on the Bible or anal sex,” responds Mohel. “But these Onanists also don’t want to give up the West Bank, which prevents a peace deal.”

Rabbi Kaplowitz contends that he’s no extremist. Rather he claims to represent the mainstream in Israel. “There are only a couple of dozen of us here, but there are thousands of others who’d like to join us. We’re out here in the lonely desert hills, doing something important for the redemption of the world. It’s not easy. We have very slow internet and sometimes youporn.com goes down for minutes at a time. Our thing is exhausting without visual aids.”

US Mideast envoy George Mitchell has condemned the Givat Onan outpost as “illegal under international law and pretty skeezy.” Mitchell also cited the 4th Century sage St. Athanasius of Paros as saying that “to have coitus other than to procreate is to do injury to nature.”

Kaplowitz rejected the criticism. “I don’t take sex advice from Greeks,” he said.

BETHLEHEM, West Bank — The good news is that the West Bank is normal — kind of — and that people are content — sort of. The bad news, the Palestine Liberation Organization thinks it’s responsible for the good news.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who’s also the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) chief, has decided to stamp down on the man who’s actually made life bearable in the West Bank, Prime Minister Salaam Fayyad, and his plan to declare a unilateral Palestinian state in 2011.

At a meeting of the Fatah Revolutionary Council, effectively the PLO’s ruling body, Abbas said last week that only the PLO was allowed to make decisions on behalf of the Palestinian people.

"It’s not the factions or the governments that take ownership of decisions," Abbas said.

Abbas wants to continue on the path that has led the Palestinians and the Israelis nowhere. So-called “proximity talks,” in which they talk via U.S. mediators, are supposed to start again soon. They’re unlikely to change anything.

Fayyad, who’s a political independent appointed to his post by Abbas mainly because the Americans insisted on it, announced his plan last year for the declaration of a state. The idea: truly to ready Palestinian institutions for independence and to dare Israel — and the U.S. — to oppose it.

Fayyad’s ability to clean up the economy and reform the security forces has made him popular among Palestinians. He’s also seen as untainted by the violence and corruption of the two main political parties, Abbas’s Fatah and the Hamas rulers of Gaza.

That makes him a potential rival to Fatah. PLO chiefs fear that if Fayyad declares a Palestinian state and the U.S. cheers, maybe its bankrollers in Washington and Oslo and Brussels will cut the PLO out of the power and money loop. That, after all, is what the PLO is all about. “organization” is the operative word in the name of the PLO, rather than “liberation."

A visit to Bethlehem this week delineates the precise choice on offer between Abbas and Fayyad.

In the Dehaisha Refugee Camp, less than a square mile that’s home to more than 16,000 poor Palestinians, there are bulletholes in the walls of the U.N. girls' school, left over from the second intifada. A reminder of the final bankruptcy of the PLO and its failure to convert itself from an outlaw band into a true government after the signing of the Oslo Peace Accords in 1993.

The casualties of that long descent into destruction are painted all over the walls. On the pedestrian bridge the girls cross to reach their school, there’s a 10-foot graffito of Sa'id Eid, masked and firing a mortar. He was killed by an Israeli Apache helicopter in 2003. As the girls come down on the other side, they pass another big stencil in black paint. This time it’s Ayat Akhras, at 16 the youngest female suicide bomber, who left her home in Dehaisha in 2002 to kill herself, a 17-year-old Israeli girl and an aging supermarket guard. She raises a pistol like a naif Bond girl.

At the corner, a falafel restaurant is decorated with murals of all the martyrs of the Palestinians, from Ghassan Kanafani, writer and Popular Front activist killed by the Israelis in Lebanon in 1972, to a collection of the intifada’s most famous victims, and above them Khalil Wazir, the Arafat lieutenant assassinated by Israel in 1988.

A continuation of that fatal litany is, frankly, what’s offered by the “proximity” talks. Because they’ll lead only to frustration, a sense that nothing can be achieved by negotiation, and a resultant impetus toward violence.

What’s the alternative?

Mike Canawati, one of Bethlehem’s leading businessmen, describes trade in his tourist shop on the road to the Church of the Nativity, the site of Jesus’s birth, as “excellent, really excellent.” That’s the result of Fayyad’s ability to convince the Israeli army that checkpoints can be lifted and his commitment to a higher level of training among Palestinian security forces, so that tourists don’t fear to enter Bethlehem as they did for much of the last decade.

It isn’t a total shift. The dangers are simply less immediately apparent. Canawati still sits at his desk flanked by a screen with 16 different closed-circuit images of the store, the alley behind it, his black Hummer parked at the side of the building.

Only the night before we met, he had welcomed 700 Italian diners in his banquet hall near the church. “We should be thankful to these people for coming to our town,” Canawati said. During the dinner, a group of Fatah people entered and unfurled banners protesting that the Italians would later hold a meeting with Israelis in Jerusalem. “I had a big argument with them,” he said, “and I threw them out.”

Back in Dehaisha, I took my son to a birthday party at a friend’s home. My friend spent nine years in an Israeli jail without charge. He was, in fact, in jail seven years ago when the birthday boy was born. Now he’s studying for a Master’s degree in law.

A clown inflated sausage-balloons and tied them into the shape of swords. I was strangely relieved that they weren’t bent into Kalashnikovs.

When the birthday cake came out, the clown’s assistant emerged dressed as SpongeBob SquarePants. She sang “Happy Birthday” in Arabic with the aid of ear-splitting amplification and did some unexpected SpongeBob belly dancing moves.

Whatever Abbas and his PLO cronies say, that’s the kind of reality we should be wishing on the people of Dehaisha.

Hamas is steadily rebuilding its power in the West Bank, stockpiling weapons and material underground, biding its time for a renewal of the conflict with its Fatah rivals.

Palestinian security officials have been telling me this for some time, and they are frankly filled with fear and foreboding. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas mentioned it again in an interview with the Arabic newspaper al-Sharq al-Awsat during the week, accusing Hamas of smuggling weapons to the West Bank.

The Hamas buildup is one of the reasons Abbas has allowed his independent prime minister, Salaam Fayyad, to stay in his job so long, despite the popularity Fayyad is accruing at the expense of Abbas’s Fatah. Fayyad has managed to reform the Palestinian security forces, persuading the U.S. to give tens of millions of dollars in security aid.
Without those reforms, the Palestinian security forces would either fold in minutes if faced with a Hamas uprising in the West Bank, or would even join Hamas to save themselves.

So it’s significant that after 10 days in which Abbas repeatedly berated Fayyad’s plan to declare a Palestinian state in 2011 — which would convince the world that if Fayyad could create a state, Fatah might’ve become irrelevant and therefore not worth the cash it siphons away — the president also highlighted the urgency of Fayyad’s most important achievement. (He first talked about it in an interview with a Kuwaiti newspaper in January, when he said he had “verified information” that Hamas planned to take over the West Bank by force.)

Of course, U.S. and European security advisers to the Palestinian security forces don’t claim to have made much of their new charges. If Hamas is able to recreate its West Bank network, the Palestinian security forces will hold up their advance for only about a week, they estimate.

That’s not bad, given that two years ago the Palestinian security forces were good for nothing much at all. A week might also buy time for a cease-fire, which might in turn preclude an Israeli invasion of the West Bank — it’s unimaginable that the Israelis would allow the West Bank to come under Hamas control.

Part of Abbas’ accusation against Hamas is that its leadership is allowing radical young military leaders to blow off steam by plotting a West Bank armed takeover. In return, those military leaders aren’t pushing as hard for rocket attacks against Israel from Gaza.

The Hamas leaders in Gaza are keen to avoid such attacks, because they’re barely recovering from the hammering they received a year and a half ago at the hands of the Israeli army. The cause of that war, remember, was rocket attacks from Gaza into Israel.

Hamas kicked Fatah out of the Gaza Strip in 2007. Fatah people were shot and tortured, and a few were tossed from tall buildings. Since then, both sides have engaged in a low-flame civil war which involves lengthy detentions without trial, torture and kneecappings.

The West Bank looks like an attractive playground into which Hamas can shove its angrier military types. After all, if the Fatah cops fail to intercept a Hamas attack against Israelis in or from the West Bank, Israel usually blames Fatah rather than Hamas.

Within the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the Hamas military wing, support has been increasing for more militant action — yes, more militant than the leadership which ultimately wants to eradicate Israel but is prepared to wait a long time to do so. (In Gaza, that counts as dovishness...)

Those military leaders have turned, according to international analysts, to a brand of Islam more commonly called “Salafi.” In short, it’s the extreme Islam favored by many in the Gulf States. It’s quite alien to most Palestinians, who are conservative but not particularly fundamentalist in their religion. Still, once a military type gets stirred up, the hard line often looks appealing.

Abbas better hope he hasn’t leaned too hard on Fayyad. The week of grace his prime minister’s reforms will have bought him in the event of an attempted coup by Hamas might prove to be the difference between a nice retirement at his house in Dubai and the kind of kangaroo justice meted out by the Islamist in Gaza three years ago.

(I posted this on Global Post.)

I often receive emails from book stores, amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, and online literary sites telling me how much I’d like the novels of Matt Beynon Rees. I’m delighted to see these emails, which are based on my other purchases and interests, as only I can truly know just how much the novels of Matt Beynon Rees have changed my life. (Try them, I’m sure you’ll agree.)

Of course, I also get the occasional email informing me that if I like Matt Beynon Rees, I might also enjoy another author named in the email. Well, they’re half-way there, because of course I DO like Matt Beynon Rees. No ifs. So I always have to look to see if they’re right about the second part.

The links are sometimes obvious – “if you like Matt Beynon Rees, try [insert crime novelist’s name here:]” – and occasionally baffling though thought-provoking. I had one a few weeks back suggesting fans of Matt Beynon Rees’s Palestinian crime series would really dig a nonfiction book about a cyclone that hit Burma in 2008.

The latest of these connections was no doubt the most bizarre. I clicked on an email from an online book blog a few days ago: “If you like Matt Beynon Rees, we think you’ll enjoy Jimmy Carter.”

Wow, I thought, how did they know that I, too, have lusted after women in my heart.

It could be that the connection was the result of the review of the paperback version of my third Palestinian crime novel THE SAMARITAN’S SECRET in The New York Times—it was featured in the same column as a review of the softcover edition of the 39th President’s ultra-controversial 2006 work of nonfiction “Palestine – Peace Not Apartheid.”

Now here’s where I part with the “If you like Matt Beynon Rees, we think you’ll enjoy Jimmy Carter” email. Of you like Matt Beynon Rees, you’ll probably enjoy crime fiction. Or just fiction. Rather than “Palestine – Peace Not Apartheid,” in which the loveable old peanut farmer from Georgia accuses Israel of the worst kind of discrimination against Palestinians in the West Bank.

I don’t have an opinion on Jimmy’s book. I never read it. It has “Palestine” in the title and, as Graham Greene wrote, once one has lived in a place for a while one ceases to read about it.

Also it has “Apartheid” in the title. I have an opinion about what Israel does in the West Bank. I’m not going to get into it here, but in a (pea)nutshell, I think it’s a mistake to compare Israeli policy to apartheid, because then the debate shifts to the similarities and differences between South Africa’s old regime and Israel’s occupation – instead of talking simply about what Israel does and what’s wrong with it.

As soon as Smiling Jim put “apartheid” in his title, his book’s content was largely ignored. Pro-Israel mouthpieces could condemn him as an anti-Semite simply for comparing Israel to the unlamented and certifiably pariah regime in Pretoria. Game over. Jimmy even issued an apology a couple of years ago to all Jews on Yom Kippur. As though saying something critical of Israel is somehow a criticism of all Jews. As though there weren’t any Jews who agreed with him about Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians. Game over with a slamdown.

For me, as for many others, Carter has been a mildly useful voice for decency in the world. Though he also represents something a little pitiful, as one might witness in the song “Jimmy Carter” by my favorite band, Detroit whacksters Electric Six:

“Like Jimmy Carter,

Like electric underwear,

Like any idea that never had a chance of going anywhere….”

However, the decisive element in the question “If you like Matt Beynon Rees, we think you’ll enjoy Jimmy Carter” is a matter of personal animus. In fact, it’s a family insult suffered by the Rees’s of 32 Neath Road, Maesteg, Mid-Glamorgan, Wales, at the hands of James Earl Carter Jr., 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C.

My grandfather Tom Rees read in the Western Mail that then-President Carter was suffering from hemorrhoids. Tom had faced the same ailment some years before and had found nothing eased the feeling of defecating broken glass, until he switched to Allinson’s wholewheat bread. He wrote a letter to the White House in his careful cursive script, letting the leader of the Free World know what he needed to do to poop painlessly.

He didn’t expect any public recognition. But he assumed he’d get a polite note.

Perhaps Carter’s people knew that my grandfather was a former Communist Party member and figured the brown bread was a plot of some sort to keep the Commander-in-Chief on the can and away from the nuclear button, while the Reds swarmed Capitol Hill. In any case, the President never wrote back. Not even a “President Carter has read your inquiry with interest, but regrets that he will not be able to make it part of United States planning and policy at this time, though he is sympathetic to your cause.”

My grandfather continued to consume wholewheat bread, even at a time (the 1970s) when those around him considered it to be a strange fad akin to today’s no-nightshades tomato-free diets.

That’s why I don’t like Carter. Not because of apartheid. Because of hemorrhoids.

I wonder if Jimmy ever got them cured. Maybe he mentions it in his book. Perhaps I ought to read it after all…

NABLUS, West Bank — During the Palestinian intifada, I sat on a dusty hilltop overlooking this most violent of West Bank towns with a dozen of the top Israeli officers in the area. The brigade commanders told their regional chiefs that all the police work and house-to-house fighting of the intifada had made their troops ill-prepared for a real war. “If we had to fight in Lebanon, my men wouldn’t know what they were doing,” shouted one.

In 2006, that prediction was proven largely true, as Israeli forces were matched on the ground by Hezbollah’s militia. The air- and missile-warfare that went on over their heads was devastating to Lebanese and Israeli civilians, but Israel’s military planners were shocked by the difficulties faced by their ground troops.

For Israel, the threat these days is clear. Nablus is quiet, its gunmen subdued by Palestinian police who are trained with American help and the economy bolstered by American aid. This week, Israeli soldiers will run through a series of exercises to practice for a potential conflict with Hezbollah on the country’s northern border.

The main unknown in those exercises: How long does Israel have before the threat of nuclear attack will come into play?

Israeli government officials and security chiefs are reluctant to talk about how Israel might respond if Iran succeeds in obtaining nuclear weapons. They prefer to emphasize the destabilization of the international balance of power should such a situation arise. “We should focus on prevention,” Intelligence Minister Dan Meridor told international journalists last week. “Prophylactics, rather than dealing with unwanted results.”

So the disdain in Jerusalem was absolute for the Turkish-Brazilian deal announced last week under which Iran would ship some of its uranium to Turkey. To use Meridor’s biological analogy, that was about as much use as a prophylactic with a big hole in it. The Iranians were playing for time, Israeli officials said, and the United States was right to override the deal and go for strong sanctions.

Trouble is, most Israeli officials don’t expect those sanctions to work any more. Israel is starting to come to terms with a burgeoning Middle Eastern nuclear arms race. It will start the race with a lead — it has had nuclear weapons for four decades. But with Iran coming up on the rails and Saudi Arabia and Egypt, unwilling to be potentially threatened by Tehran, soon joining the competition, the dangers to the Jewish state are considerable.

It’s de rigueur for international strategists to say that Israel isn’t the country that should be most worried by Iranian nuclear ambitions. Instead, they posit the Gulf states, Shia Iran’s Sunni Muslim rivals, as the most at-risk.

There’s something to that. Yet Iran’s biggest success in exporting Islamic Revolution has been through Hezbollah in Lebanon. It also now has a direct line to Gaza with Hamas, which it helps to bankroll. Both would be easy places from which to use nuclear capability to influence regional — or even world — events.

Israel’s response to the Iranian move toward nukes is complicated. Its actions are limited. A potential aerial attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would be difficult without bunker-buster bombs or coordination with the U.S. and the Arab countries over which Israeli jets would have to fly.

Diplomatically, Israel has little faith that sanctions can do anything more than delay an Iranian bomb. Why? Because it has experience of its own in negotiating about an issue so long that its negotiating partner in the end accepts a sliver of what it had originally asked for — and even then the negotiations can start again without reference to previous deals.

That’s a familiar tactic in Jerusalem, which has frequently confounded Western negotiators. Just as Iran has infuriated Washington with the sanctions issue, agreeing to something when total breakdown seemed imminent and pulling back just before it was required to act.

In public, at least, Israeli officials are forced to push for stiff sanctions, as if they thought that'd make a difference. But rather than believing Iran’s nuclear program will be ended, they view the sanctions as a way of buying time for Israel to prepare its troops exercises like those this week and to ready more advanced missile defenses.

Congress this week voted for President Barack Obama’s plan to give $205 million to Israel to fund its short-range missile defense system. That’s vital to Israel now, given Hamas’ rockets in Gaza, which have Tel Aviv in range, and Hezbollah’s ability to hit any place in Israel with some of its 42,000 missile arsenal. But it will only be more important once the equation has a nuclear component.

(I posted this on Global Post.)

Their politics might be spinning wheels, but Palestinians are revving engines on the race track.
NABLUS, West Bank — For a change, the Palestinians gathered on the main street of Nablus were happy to be going around in circles.

Palestinian politics makes a lot of noise, only to end up spinning its wheels, moving no closer to statehood or peace. But the same combination on the race track is attracting growing attention for the Palestinian Motor Sport circuit.

“I love racing and I love speed,” said Suna Aweideh, the 39-year-old driver from Jerusalem who has become known as “Queen of the Car Races.” “It’s exciting for our people.”

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.