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April 27, 2007
Trouble in Palestine
Journalist publishes his first mystery novel.
GIL ZOHAR
After 11 years of working as a journalist in Israel and the Palestinian
territories, including a six-year stint as Time magazine's
Jerusalem bureau chief, Matt Beynon Rees came to the conclusion
that the strictures of journalistic objectivity prevented him from
conveying the larger truth of life for Palestinians.
He decided that bitter reality could be better presented in a novel.
Reasoning that readers love a good whodunit, the 40-year-old Welsh-born
writer turned to the murder mystery format. So Omar Yussef was born:
a fictional history teacher and amateur detective working at the
girls school in the Dehaishe Refugee Camp run by the United Nations
Relief and Works Agency.
Yussef is the protagonist of Rees' first novel, The Collaborator
of Bethlehem. The character – also known as Abu Ramiz,
the pensive reformed alcoholic trapped in an untenable world –
is due back in A Grave in Gaza, slated for release in early
2008. A projected third book is set in Nablus. Rees's aim is to
provide a window for the reader into the soul-destroying conditions
experienced by the Arab residents of the West Bank and Gaza –
without demonizing Israelis. In fact, there are hardly any Israelis
in The Collaborator of Bethlehem.
Interviewed at Café Tmol Shilshom, a literary oasis in downtown
Jerusalem, where Rees was reading from his first two novels, the
Arabic-speaking writer was careful to emphasize that all the details
in The Collaborator of Bethlehem are based on actual events
he covered as a journalist. "I weaved them into a single mystery,"
he said. Some of the characters are based on friendships he made
in the West Bank. Others are modelled on people he met whose abiding
hostility made an impression on him.
"My using these characters was a way to take these relationships
beyond journalism," he said.
Rees explained that the murder at the heart of his first novel –
set in a cabbage patch in the picturesque mixed Christian-Muslim
village of Irtas, just south of Bethlehem, during the al-Aqsa intifada
– accurately portrays an incident in which Palestinian militants
lynched an innocent man as a warning to collaborators. The ancient
Christian communities in the West Bank and Gaza are being inexorably
squeezed out by Muslim extremists, he said.
The result is a stillborn-state permeated by suspicion and lack
of trust. "No one knows who is too close to the PA or who is
a collaborator," said Rees. In this pervasive atmosphere of
fear, he said people would tell him things they wouldn't dare say
to a fellow Palestinian. Being a neutral observer allowed him a
lot of freedom, he said.
"I felt completely liberated by coming here [to Jerusalem],"
he pointed out, "because I'm not committed to anything. And
that helps me with my writing."
While neither Jewish nor Arab, Rees – who studied at Oxford
University and the University of Maryland – spoke with great
affection about his adopted homeland. Two of his great-uncles fought
with Gen. Allenby in the Imperial Camel Corps in the First World
War, in the battle to liberate the Holy Land from its Ottoman Turkish
masters. One was wounded in the backside, he said, and, at Christmas
in Wales, when sufficiently drunk, would pull down his pants to
show his battle scar.
That childhood fascination with Palestine, coupled with a girlfriend
in New York who got a job in Israel, brought Rees to the region.
The couple eventually married, and then divorced. But Rees stayed
on, attracted by a country that offered him both freedom and endless
fascinating subjects to write about.
Rees won awards for his Time magazine coverage of the violence
of the al-Aqsa intifada. In 2004, he published a nonfiction account
of the divisions within Israeli and Palestinian societies called
Cain's Field: Faith, Fratricide and Fear in the Middle East.
But politics is not Rees's forte. In fact, he has entirely stopped
working as a journalist to concentrate on his fiction.
"I'm not interested in politics at all," he said. "I
really dislike politicians. Perhaps that's why I stay in the Middle
East – because the politicians here are so worthy of contempt."
Will Rees's character, Omar Yussef, withstand the challenge of the
Middle East's rapidly changing reality of life?
"Unless peace is made, the essential circumstances of Palestinian
society won't change," warned Rees.
And given present trends, he opined that, in 10 years, the books
will still be equally relevant.
The publishing world seemingly agrees about the dim prospects for
peace and hence the book's abiding insight into the Palestinian
question. Rees recently signed contracts with publishers seeking
to translate The Collaborator of Bethlehem into Hebrew and
half a dozen European languages.
Gil Zohar is a Jerusalem freelance writer.
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