In this gripping, in-the-trenches account of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, award-winning journalist Matt Rees takes us deep within Israeli and Palestinian societies to reveal the fractures at the core of both. While the world focuses almost exclusively on the violent clash between the two camps, Rees steers our gaze toward their centers, exposing the internal rifts that drain each society of its ability to act cohesively. The Palestinians focus on the occupation of the West Bank, the Jewish settlers, and other Israeli actions, while the Israelis see only the intifada and the suicide bombings -- and both overlook their bitter infighting. This dazzling, groundbreaking narrative goes behind the familiar moves of the big players to reveal the individuals who are at war not only with the enemy, but also with their own people.
Beginning with the astonishing story of a Hamas member who is targeted both by Israel for his hand in attacks against Jews, and by the Palestinian Authority for the revenge killing of a police officer who murdered his brother, each chapter concentrates on one or two individuals with whom Rees has personal contact, and whose stories uncover the chaos at the hearts of these two warring groups. From Palestinian car thieves and filmmakers to Israeli settlers and Holocaust survivors, Rees traces the minute and numerous ways that Yasser Arafat betrays his people and the Israeli leadership veers between placating and abusing its clashing factions.
Rees has unparalleled access to groups and people on both sides of the conflict, as well as an extraordinary talent for looking beyond the usual stories. In Cain's Field, he suggests that the world has been looking in the wrong place to explain the unending battles and in the wrong place for a solution. With heartbreaking detail, incisive revelations, and terrible and often moving stories of the human beings behind the intractable attitudes and violence, Rees offers a bold new perspective on this tragic and seemingly insoluble situation. In so doing, he also offers hope -- the hope that by turning the spotlight inward, these societies might heal their internal wounds and move toward a peaceful future.
David K. Shipler, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land No matter how much you think you know about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Matt Rees's masterful reporting will reshape your perceptions. He burrows deeply into each side's internal struggles, taking you inside people's minds. This will change the way you see news from the battleground.
--This text refers to the
Kindle Edition
edition.
I'm an award-winning British crime novelist. Major authors have compared my writing with the work of Graham Greene, John Le Carre, Georges Simenon and Henning Mankell. The French magazine L'Express called me "the Dashiell Hammett of Palestine."
WHERE: I live in Jerusalem. I came here in 1996. For love. Then we divorced. But the place took hold. Not for the violence and the excitement that sometimes surrounds it, but because I saw people in extreme situations. Through the emotions they experienced, I came to understand myself.
BEFORE THE WRITING: There was never really a time before I wrote. I've been at it since I was seven (a poem about a tree, on the classroom wall with a gold star beside it.) But I arrived in the Middle East as a journalist with only a couple of published short stories to my name. First I wrote for The Scotsman, then Newsweek, and from 2000 until 2006 as Time Magazine's Jerusalem bureau chief. I won some awards for covering the intifada. Yasser Arafat once tried to have me arrested, but I eluded him and decided to focus on fiction. I'd learned so much about the Palestinians - and about life - that didn't fit into the limited world of journalism. So I wrote my Palestinian crime novels.
BEFORE JERUSALEM: I was born in Newport, Wales, in 1967. That's my mother's hometown; my father's from Maesteg in the Llynfi valley. We moved around, to Cardiff and Croydon, then I studied English at Wadham College, Oxford University with Terry Eagleton as my tutor. Contemporaries may remember me as the fellow with bleached blonde hair at the bar of the King's Arms in the company of the Irish porters from All Souls College. I did an MA at the University of Maryland and lived in New York for five years before I hit the Middle East.
WHERE THE BOOKS CAME FROM: I wrote a nonfiction account of Israeli and Palestinian society called Cain's Field: Faith, Fratricide, and Fear in the Middle East in 2004 (Free Press). I'm proud of it, because it really gets to the heart of the conflict here - it isn't one of those notebook-dump foreign correspondent books.
I was looking for my next project and came up with the idea for Omar Yussef, my Palestinian sleuth, while chatting with my wife in our favorite hotel, the Ponte Sisto in the Campo de'Fiori in Rome. I realized I had become friends with many colorful Palestinians who'd given me insights into the dark side of their society. Like the former Mister Palestine (he dead-lifts 900 pounds), a one-time bodyguard to Yasser Arafat (skilled in torture), and a delightful fellow who was a hitman for Arafat during the 1980s. To tell the true-life stories I'd amassed over a decade, I decided to channel the reporting into a crime series. After all, Palestine's reality is no romance novel.
THE NOVELS: The first novel, The Collaborator of Bethlehem (UK title The Bethlehem Murders), was published in February 2007 by Soho Press. In the UK it won the prestigious Crime Writers Association John Creasey Dagger in 2008, and was nominated in the US for the Barry First Novel Award, the Macavity First Mystery Award, and the Quill Best Mystery Award. In France it's been shortlisted for the Prix des Lecteurs. New York Times reviewer Marilyn Stasio called it "an astonishing first novel." It was named one of the Top 10 Mysteries of the Year by Booklist and, in the UK Sir David Hare made it his Book of the Year in The Guardian.
Colin Dexter, author of the Inspector Morse novels, called Omar Yussef "a splendid creation." Omar was called "Philip Marlowe fed on hummus" by one reviewer and "Yasser Arafat meets Miss Marple" by another.
The second book in the series, A Grave in Gaza, appeared in February 2008 (and at the same time under the title The Saladin Murders in the UK). The Bookseller calls it "a cracking, atmospheric read." I put in elements of the plot relating to British military cemeteries in Gaza in homage to my two great uncles, who rode through there with the Imperial Camel Corps in 1917. One of them, Uncle Dai Beynon, was still around when I was a boy, and I was named after him.
The third book in the series, The Samaritan's Secret, was published in February 2009. The New York Times said it was "provocative" and it had great reviews in places I'd not have expected - The Sowetan, the newspaper of that S. African township, for example.
AROUND THE WORLD: My Omar Yussef Mystery series has been sold to leading publishers in 23 countries: the U.S., France, Italy, Britain, Poland, Spain, Germany, Holland, Israel, Portugal, Brazil, Norway, Denmark, the Czech Republic, Romania, Sweden, Iceland, Chile, Venezuela, Japan, Indonesia, Turkey and Greece.
OMAR'S NEXT TRAVELS: THE FOURTH ASSASSIN, the fourth novel in my series, will be published in February 2010. In it, Omar visits the famous Palestinian town of Brooklyn, New York (there really is a growing community there in Bay Ridge), and finds a dead body in his son's bed...
This review is from: Cain's Field: Faith, Fratricide, and Fear in the Middle East (Hardcover)
I had considered myself well read about the Israeli/Arab conflict in general and then I heard Matt Rees speak two months ago about this new book. He told me quite a few things I never knew before (mostly about the Palestinians). I bought his book on the spot and don't regret it. He is a good story teller and delves into issues and people that I don't read about in both the general and special interest media that covers this part of the world. I now have a better understanding about the issues that each side deals with internally (and especially about the Palestinian side).
Highly Recommended!
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This review is from: Cain's Field: Faith, Fratricide, and Fear in the Middle East (Hardcover)
I have a deep interest and knowledge of Israel and I am not interested in reading repitious material, of which there is so much. However, "Cain's Field" is original. The first time I went to Israel, I read several books in advance, and in one, every person interviewed had a story. There were compelling stories of their backgrounds and how they got to Israel. "Cain's Field" was, for me, a continuation, a weaving together of stories of people of different backgrounds, each story wrapped up with the story of the country, young people figuring out where they fit into this world, the land of conflicts. The book is full of good drama, meticulously researched, shows authority and sensitivity. Most of all it is excellent reporting and not judgmental. It is fair and balanced and gives everyone equal time, four chapters each. I found the stories penetrating and provocative and Rees seems to have an understanding of the colliding cultures not available to ordinary readers and newscasters. I recommend "Cain's Field", it will entice you, pull you in during the first chapter with the intrigues of conflicts and betrayals. I could not put it down and read it in three sittings! Good gift idea!
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This review is from: Cain's Field: Faith, Fratricide, and Fear in the Middle East (Hardcover)
This book is a real eye-opener. It takes readers behind the repetitive and often misleading headlines of Middle East reporting into the human heart of the Israel-Palestine conflict. It's a place where most journalists out there seem never to reach. Rees introduces us to a broad and fascinating cast of real-life characters, who are portrayed in skillfull detail.
I learned more from this book than years of "blow-by-blow" news reports on the intifada. It stands head and shoulders above other journalists' accounts of the intifada, which I have found predictable and superficial. From Cain's Field I finally have some understanding of life in Bethlehem and Gaza, and a real sense of what's been going on out there for the past few years. Perhaps even more crucially, Rees gives us a warts-and-all insight into the internal conflicts which have created the internal divisions within Palestinian and Israeli society, fueling the current conflict.
I left this book with only one question - how come most of the journalists covering the Middle East conflict never told us about all this stuff?
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