My Manchurian Candidate

One of my biggest boosters has been Bill Ott, reviewer for the pre-publication review Booklist. Here's his review of my forthcoming THE FOURTH ASSASSIN, which is out in the US and the UK on Feb. 1:

"Road-trips in crime series have the built-in problem of removing their heroes from the landscapes that define them. Rees’ Bethlehem history teacher and occasional sleuth Omar Yussef is a strong enough character to survive a temporary transplant to New York, but that’s not to say we don’t miss the vividly evoked Palestine setting. Yussef has agreed to attend a UN conference in Manhattan because it will give him a chance to see his son Ala who is living in Brooklyn’s Little Palestine neighborhood. The reunion is spoiled, however, when Yussef finds one of Ala’s roommates dead, the victim of what appears to be a ritual killing. With Ala a suspect, Yussef attempts to find the killer. Could the history lessons that Yussef once taught Ala and his friends have been corrupted into a contemporary suicide-assassination plot? Although the setting and the high-concept thriller plot—the finale evokes The Manchurian Candidate—take us too far away from the small human dramas that usually drive this series, Yussef himself never loses sight of what he calls the life that remains when politics is sluiced away like the filth a stray dog leaves in the street."

I like what Bill sees in the novel--and its predecessors--because I've tried to make Omar Yussef a detective who confronts small aspects of the violence around him, rather than writing the kind of thriller where one guy saves the world. That wouldn't reflect the Palestinian reality.

I moved a little further from that smallness of conflict and locality with this new book. Here's why: while a "road trip" can detract from some detectives, it's in the nature of the Palestinian reality to be taken far from home. Most Palestinians, after all, live outside "Palestine." Omar Yussef is lonely and alien in New York, outside his usual milieu. Encapsulating that diaspora is one of the things about which I'm most pleased when it comes to THE FOURTH ASSASSIN.

4-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians?

My latest dispatch on Global Post -- a week or so after it posted, because I've been in Italy and, well, the Middle East wasn't on my mind...I didn't miss the taste of humus too much either, not with all that saltimboca and gelato...

Palestinians are divided; Israelis too. Not a good basis for negotiation.
By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost
JERUSALEM — The traditional diplomatic formulation for peace between Israel and the Palestinians is the slogan “Two states for two peoples.”

Let’s revise that for the current political situation and posit a solution based on “Four states for two peoples.” Because it’s the only way just now of drawing lines on a map between the feuding parties.

Why not stick with two peoples? Well, the Palestinians are divided in almost every way possible — geographically, politically, financially and with hatred and violence — between Hamas-ruled Gaza and the parts of the West Bank under the sway of the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority.

Israel is doing its best to emulate that self-destructive division. Late last month Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared a 10-month freeze on construction in the country’s settlements in the West Bank. With his customary ability to try placating everyone only to end up displeasing them all, Netanyahu pledged that the freeze wouldn’t apply to synagogues and schools in the settlements. Nor would it hold for Israeli neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, which are viewed by international diplomats as settlements.

The U.S. agreed to bite its tongue about this brush-off of President Barack Obama’s push for a total freeze on settlements. Israeli settlers, however, bit Netanyahu instead. They promise to block major road junctions inside Israel in the coming week and have already started to refuse entry to building inspectors come to determine if construction work is being carried out in their settlements.

Within Israeli politics, the ire isn’t just a matter of geography. At least five ministers from Netanyahu’s Likud Party are opposed to the construction freeze. Three met with Netanyahu to complain that under his plan important sewerage projects wouldn’t be completed. Translation: We’ll have a lot of waste lying about and we’ll just have to throw it at you.

Some Israeli political observers believe that’s just what Netanyahu wants now. They contend that he realizes he can’t make a deal that’d please the settlers, the Palestinians and the U.S. — and certainly not one that’d get by his right-wing Likud activists.

In this reading, Netanyahu wants to push the most right-wing members of his party out, forging an alliance with political blocs tied more directly to the settlement movement. That would leave Netanyahu free to take the somewhat less right-wing elements of his party and to form either a new party or an alliance with the Labor Party. Historically the most powerful of Israel’s parties, Labor has gradually diminished and now is merely the fourth-biggest party.

Oh, and guess what: It’s divided. There are five, sometimes six, of the 13 Labor parliamentary members who oppose the government of which their party is a part.
That might change if a new Likud and Labor joined forces — particularly as some of those “Labor rebels” would be aware that in the next election their party’s showing is likely to be even worse, leaving them out of a job.

When Netanyahu isn’t figuring out how not to be held hostage to Israel’s extremist right, he’s focused on cutting a deal to free the Israeli held hostage by people even more extreme: Hamas. Though a deal to swap hundreds of Palestinian prisoners for the Israeli soldier held captive in Gaza was said to be imminent a week ago, it remains only imminent.

Hamas officials say they’ve narrowed the gap with Israel over the prisoner swap. Of the 450 prisoners Hamas wants released, Israel is believed to have agreed so far to all but 15. Those include some prisoners that most Israelis will find it hard to stomach releasing — several were behind lethal suicide bombings, and another was the woman whose email flirtation with an Israeli youth was designed to lure him to a sexy assignation at which he was murdered. There are a number of cabinet ministers who continue to oppose the deal.

Which is one point of agreement between those rightist Israeli ministers and a man they deride — Mahmoud Abbas. The Palestinian president maintains that a prisoner release like this would be a gift to Hamas, making the Islamist group more popular before elections scheduled for January.

Of course, Abbas doesn’t really intend to hold those elections. Still he has to show that he’s as tough on Israel as Hamas. That’s why he’s refusing to go back to peace talks, despite urging from his paymasters in Washington.

In the absence of four corners in which to send all these recalcitrant kids to stand with their faces to the walls, four states might be the only way to keep them from fighting in the playground.

Big Mouth recommends my debut as "bloody good but a little bit different" for Christmas

Scott Pack, controversial publishing guru and self-declared big mouth (I can tell you he's rather more charming in person than such a description would imply), recommends my debut novel THE BETHLEHEM MURDERS (US title THE COLLABORATOR OF BETHLEHEM) for a Christmas gift on his blog. Writes Scott, as he roasts his chestnuts over an open fire at his home office in Windsor, "If you like crime novels and are looking for something that is bloody good but a little bit different then see if you can sneak one of these into your stocking." Seasons greetings to you, too, Scott, as I look over the dusty hillside toward Bethlehem from my office window -- where the only thing roasting in the Middle East's so-called winter is me...

PW stars new Omar Yussef novel

Publishers Weekly, the pre-publication review, stars my new Palestinian crime novel THE FOURTH ASSASSIN, which will be published Feb. 1 in the US and the UK. Here's the PW review: "The relentless cycle of violence and retribution follows Palestinian detective Omar Yussef to New York City, where he must deliver a speech at the U.N. on schooling in the Palestinian refugee camps, in Rees's excellent fourth mystery (after 2009's "The Samaritan's Secret"). When Yussef's son, Ala, is arrested after a decapitated body is found in Ala's Brooklyn apartment, Yussef's search for the real killer leads him from Atlantic Avenue to Coney Island and back to the U.N. Secretariat. In the process, he discovers that he's not quite the cosmopolitan man he thought himself to be, a realization shared by many Arab immigrants in the story. In truth, the residents of Little Palestine are caught between its subterranean mosques and the lure of Manhattan, where forbidden pleasures are ready for the plucking. Yussef remains reliably human and compassionate toward human fallibility, while raging openly at the corruption of his own leaders."

Best Mystery Books of Year

The Samaritan's Secret, the third of my Palestinian crime novels, was named one of the Best Mystery Books of the Year for 2009 by Deadly Pleasures, the crime fiction magazine with the best read on websites and what fans like. The cover you see here is from the US paperback edition of The Samaritan's Secret which'll be out in the New Year. The Deadly Pleasures list includes some of my personal favorites too--it's great to be in the company of James Ellroy, whose "Blood's a Rover" was a fitting culmination to his Underworld USA trilogy. Thanks to Deadly Pleasures. Read the rest of the list here and let me know what you think of it. Did they miss anything good?

Ass-backwards on Gays

When it comes to homosexuals, Palestinians have it all ass-backwards.

That led me to introduce homosexuality as a theme of THE SAMARITAN’S SECRET, my most recent Palestinian crime novel. I wanted to show how negative attitudes toward homosexuals function in the Muslim world, demonstrating the bloody consequences for gay Muslims and the struggles it causes the people around them. I’m glad I did, particularly after the recent shocking story of a Turkish man living an openly gay lifestyle who was tracked down and murdered by his own father—an honor killing with a difference.

As a novelist who writes about people of a different culture, it’s important not to have the members of that culture think as we’d somehow like them to think, in the West. To have them simply accord with our values.

But I’ve known Palestinian homosexuals and seen their suffering at keeping their real selves secret. Enough to be able to portray those sufferings, as it were, from the inside.

In my novel, the subject also gave me a bit of a conundrum in terms of style.

In each of my novels I’ve translated directly some of the more poetic phrases of local Arabic, as well as slang. So “Good morning” becomes “Morning of joy.” “Get lost” becomes “Fuck your mother’s cunt, you son of a whore.” You get the idea.

The slang word for homosexuals among Palestinians is a little more difficult to translate. Not the word itself, but the negative meaning of it.

Palestinians call homosexuals “Loutis.” “Lout” is the Arabic name for Lot, the brother of the biblical Abraham who was the one good man in the city of Sodom. The man God allowed Abraham to save.

The problem for me was that I couldn’t simply translate the name. To have someone say, “Yes, he’s a Lot-type.” You, dear reader, would wonder what that meant. You might think, “You mean, he’s like Lot, the righteous man. The one man in Sodom who wasn’t sodomizing the other…Sodomites?”

So I had to add a subtle explanation (I hope it’s subtle) that wouldn’t interrupt the conversational flow in the narrative. Here’s the first time the term turns up in THE SAMARITAN’S SECRET, when my detective Omar Yussef is talking with a local sheikh who is of a fundamentalist bent (if you’ll pardon the pun…):

“But I also don’t condemn some of the illogical things people do when their bodies demand it of them,” Omar Yussef said. “For them to do otherwise is to court depression and suicide, and that’s certainly against Islamic law.”

“You can’t mean you see nothing wrong in homosexuality? The holy Koran condemns homosexuals as /Loutis/, the people of Lot from Sodom.”

“Homosexuals suffer enough in our society without me hating them, too.”

“What if you learned that one of your sons was such a pervert?”

Omar Yussef gave a rasping laugh. “I’d blame his mother. But he’d still be my son.”

Of course part of my introduction of gay characters into THE SAMARITAN’S SECRET, which is set in Nablus, was an in-joke that only Palestinians would get. You see, whenever a Palestinian tells a homophobic joke, it’s always about a guy from Nablus who likes to be buggered.

Nabulsi men maintain that their reputation should belong to a group of Iraq soldiers who were stationed in Nablus during the 1948 war with Israel. The Iraqis, according to the men of Nablus, were the true “Loutis.” They raped many young boys from Nablus. So the idea that Nabulsi men tend to homosexuality, they claim, isn’t true.

Recount that “defense” to Palestinians from Jerusalem or Hebron and they’ll laugh that the Nabulsi boys enjoyed the visit of the Iraqi soldiers, which is why the reputation stuck…and on the joking will go.

Life for homosexuals in Nablus or anywhere else in the West Bank is dangerous. Some Palestinians used to sneak into Jerusalem to attend the city’s one gay night club (Israel’s gay culture is centered in Tel Aviv, and most Israeli Jerusalemites are hardly more gay-friendly than the Palestinians, as the man stabbed by a religious gay-baiter during the city’s gay parade four years ago could attest). The Palestinians were the most prominent among the drag queens at the club, which was close to the Jerusalem Municipality.

But the club’s closed now. Palestinian homosexuals simply can’t come out, because their families or neighbors might take a dreadful revenge upon them.

And that’s no joke.

In Bethlehem, the Third Intifada approaches

Rain on the streets of Bethlehem can't cool simmering tension. By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost

BETHLEHEM, West Bank — A writer seeks the surprise of a “man bites dog” story. The most violent times of the Second Intifada, which took place under the leaden winter skies of early 2002, gave me mine. I wrote about Arabs in the rain.

It was raining in the city of Jesus’ birth throughout “The Collaborator of Bethlehem,” the first of my Palestinian crime novels. I set the story during the brief Middle Eastern winter because it makes the place look different, not as one might expect.

That’s what I wanted to do for the Palestinians — to make readers look at them as real people, not as the stereotypes we’re accustomed to seeing in the news. Not as violent types rioting in the baking sunshine. But slouching through the drizzle, sitting in their overcoats on their living room couches with no heat.

As I crossed the checkpoint and went through the gate in the Israeli wall around the town, the skies darkened, flat and gray this week, too. By the time I greeted my friend Walid, a former bodyguard to Yasser Arafat, the sky was pouring already.

“The city seems a bit livelier than it was the run-up to last Christmas,” I said.
"Yes,” said Walid, who also happens to be a Palestinian weight-lifting champion (he dead-lifts 680 pounds). “But underneath, it’s very dangerous and everyone fears a Third Intifada.”

Again, not what you'd expect. Palestinians are supposed to be on the way to a better life, with the security and economic improvements pushed by U.S. diplomats and advisers. Stutteringly, without much help from their Israeli counterparts or their own civil strife, but getting there. Still like the rain in this desert town, that view warrants another look.

Palestinian newspapers have reported in the last week that the Fatah Party is preparing for new demonstrations against Israel, which it will dub the “Third Intifada.” (The First Intifada, from 1987 to 1993, was considered a success among Palestinians, because the abiding image was of young boys throwing stones at Israeli tanks. The Second Intifada, 2000 to 2005, failed, because it turned quickly to armed violence and brought the wrath of the Israeli army fully onto Palestinian civilians.)

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is reported to have given his support to a new intifada, provided it eschews firearms. Disappointed with the U.S. failure to force an absolute freeze on Israeli settlement construction, Fatah wants to unleash protests of the kind that take place every Friday at the Israeli “separation barrier” near the villages of Bilin and Na’alin. Stone-throwing and tear gas are the order of the day there.

But Hamas would be unlikely to stick to stones. In Bethlehem, Palestinian officials say Hamas has been working underground to rebuild its power — the West Bank is under Fatah’s control and many Hamas men have been jailed. A Third Intifada would be an opportunity for the Islamist group to come into the open, to confront Israeli soldiers and, more worrisome for many Bethlehem residents, to take on the Palestinian Authority and perhaps win control of the city.

Walid and I headed to Dehaisha Refugee Camp. It’s home to 16,000 people, including the fictional character in my books, schoolteacher-detective Omar Yussef (and the real-life figure on whom I based him). I always love being in Dehaisha. It isn’t what you’d expect from the city of childhood Christmas carols.

It’s densely packed, clinging to a hillside. Buildings in poured concrete and cinder block rising to four stories. Colorful graffiti about the dead of the intifadas and about hope for a kind of freedom that seems far off. In the rain, water floods down the steep streets, because there’s inadequate drainage.

In the long, narrow alley where the Akhras clan lives, there was the taint of urine in the damp air, as the drains backed up. On the shuttered front of a small workshop, posters marked the death in March 2002 of Ayat al-Akhras. She was 18. She witnessed her cousin’s death, killed by Israeli soldiers. She decided to take revenge. She became the third female suicide bomber of the Second Intifada. She killed a supermarket guard and an Israeli girl almost her own age. Now she’s a faded poster and, outside the school where my fictional Omar teaches, she’s a large stencil painted black onto a pedestrian bridge, brandishing a pistol.

Her uncle Lutfi al-Akhras hobbled along the street. He greeted me with a left-handed shake. His right hand is a paralyzed fist, since he took a bullet in 1990. You could say he should’ve got the message before that blow. Earlier in the First Intifada, in 1988, an Israeli bullet shattered his left knee and another took away part of his head. Beneath his thinning black hair, a quarter of his skull is plastic. He lets me touch it, from time to time.

Lutfi led me up the cold stairs to his apartment. A bare room, a couple of couches, a television tuned to a Japanese cartoon with Arabic voice-over on a Jordanian channel, a spartan kitchen and a simple bathroom. His wife was back in the bedroom and, though Lutfi is not particularly religious, she stayed there until I left, out of modesty.

His daughter came out to say hello. She’s 10 years old, but she looks 7 at most. I assume it’s the lack of nutrition. After all, Lutfi can’t work with his disabilities. He gets an allowance of 1,350 shekels a month from the Palestinian Authority. That’s about $375. “It isn’t much,” he said. “Well, it isn’t really anything.”

With his good hand, Lutfi shakily cooked some coffee on the stove. Flavored with cardamom, it was thick and good. He was hopeful German mediators could do a deal between Hamas and Israel to free Palestinian prisoners in exchange for an Israeli soldier held in Gaza. Perhaps, he said, the deal would be done by the end of the week, when Muslims celebrate the festival of Eid al-Adha, marking the new moon that ends the Hajj pilgrimage.

I asked him what he thought of the talk among Palestinian leaders of a Third Intifada. “God willing, it won’t happen.” With his good hand, he lifted his useless arm and was quiet. It was as though he were thinking about his crippling in a time of intifada, his niece’s dreadful sacrifice, and wondering how many more lives would be ended or ruined by a new round of violence.

His train of thought seemed to flash from his own disaster and its consequences to those of the Palestinian future. “Thirteen hundred shekels, it’s really nothing,” he murmurs. “God willing, this thing won’t happen. God willing.”