MattRees.net » Matt on Palestine

Intifada Bethlehem 3: Omar’s school

Matt Rees — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 06:58:56 +0000

At one of the Bethlehem locations from my first novel The Collaborator of Bethlehem (UK title The Bethlehem Murders) with a group of Norwegian visitors who posted some brief videos. This one is in Dehaisha Refugee Camp outside the UN school where my fictional sleuth Omar Yussef teaches.

Intifada Bethlehem 2: Dehaisha’s hero

Matt Rees — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 06:43:30 +0000

At one of the Bethlehem locations from my first novel The Collaborator of Bethlehem (UK title The Bethlehem Murders) with a group of Norwegian visitors who posted some brief videos. This one is in Dehaisha Refugee Camp and we’re talking about Marwan Barghouti, a Palestinian leader.

Intifada Bethlehem 1: Beit Jala violence

Matt Rees — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 06:35:40 +0000

At one of the Bethlehem locations from my first novel The Collaborator of Bethlehem (UK title The Bethlehem Murders) with a group of Norwegian visitors who posted some brief videos. This one is in Beit Jala, looking across the deep wadi at Jerusalem and talking about the gunbattles that used to take place there.

Why I set my first novel in Bethlehem

Matt Rees — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 12:05:13 +0000

Why I came to write my first novel, which is called The Collaborator of Bethlehem in the US and The Bethlehem Murders in the UK, where it won a CWA Dagger award.

Nablus: City of ‘The Samaritan’s Secret’

Matt Rees — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 18:56:11 +0000

Nablus is my favorite Palestinian town. Yet when I set my third novel The Samaritan’s Secret in Nablus, I discovered many Westerners had never heard of it. Here are some of the locations I used for the book.

In 1997, I went to Nablus to investigate the theft of a historic Torah scroll from this Samaritan synagogue. I knew about the parable of The Good Samaritan, but I had no idea the people still existed. The Samaritan’s Secret begins with Omar Yussef visiting this synagogue because of the theft of a scroll.
The Samaritans moved out of in Nablus in the 1980s to escape the violence of the first intifada. They built this village on the ridge high above Nablus. In the foreground are the stones of their ancient Temple. There’s a profound quiet on the mountaintop. That, I thought, makes it a very good place for a murder.
The first time I visited Nablus in 1996, I quickly completed my reporting for the news article that brought me there and took time to wander the casbah. Most of The Samaritan’s Secret takes place in these mysterious, vaulted pathways.
I used this Hamas mosque in the casbah as the basis for the one featured in The Samaritan’s Secret. I first met its imam when I went to report on a big wedding Hamas put on. Nablus men found they often couldn’t pay the dowry required to marry. So Hamas paid for dozens of brides and grooms to wed – to show that Hamas was looking out for ordinary people in a way that the PLO wasn’t.
A Hamas poster on a mosque in the casbah for a celebration of the group’s anniversary. The divisions between the Palestinian factions always fascinated me. On my first visit to Nablus, I reported on the torture death of a young activist at the hands of Palestinian police in the city’s Juneid Prison. It was a different focus from most reporters, I guess.
The plaza around the clocktower features in The Samaritan’s Secret as the location of a Hamas rally. On a research trip for the book, I met a gunman wandering past it in the middle of the afternoon with his M-16 across his chest. Israeli soldiers had invaded the casbah only a few days before to arrest him. He evaded them and felt safe enough among the afternoon shoppers, when I saw him. Two days later he was killed by Israeli soldiers near here.
These tombs from the Ottoman period have been enclosed by a building as the casbah expanded over them. Buried here are members of the influential Touqan clan. The bars surrounding them were blown away by Israeli troops searching for an arms cache. It’s the kind of thing you find all over the casbah – traces of a time when power was in other hands, alongside signs of the struggles that go on today. In The Samaritan's Secret, Omar hides here.
This center of the casbah, the Yasmina neighborhood. I’ve often stood in these shadows watching people pass. There’s a spice shop in the dark door on the right and the smell of cardamom from the grinders is delicious. One of my main characters lives in Yasmina and has a nasty exchange on this spot.
Samaritans celebrate Passover on Mount Jerizim. They maintain ancient Jews once observed Passover this way. Their High Priest says their Torah and that of the Jews are the same, “except for 7,000 errors in the Jewish one.”
There are two old Turkish baths in the casbah. This is the biggest and it’s also a social center where men come (except Tuesday, which is ladies’ day) to smoke a water pipe. I'm no clean freak, but Omar Yussef’s distaste for the large amount of mold growing thickly all over the showers is based on my reaction.
On the summit of Jerizim beside the ruins of the Samaritan temple stands a Byzantine fortress. Many times I’ve looked out over the hills toward the Jordan Valley. It’s a peaceful, beautiful place and hard to imagine the violence that surrounds it. I set part of the concluding action of my novel in this fortress.
Nablus is famous among Arabs for its qanafi, hot goat’s cheese covered in syrup. The less serious element of The Samaritan’s Secret is the question of whether Omar Yussef -- who doesn't like sweets -- will eat any during his visit.

The Jerusalem Post: Murder of Yasser Arafat from D4 is ‘compelling’

Matt Rees — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 08:37:59 +0000

The Jerusalem Post highlights the investigation by my new alternative news venture DeltaFourth into Yasser Arafat’s murder. JPost writer Rachel Marder interviews me about The Murder of Yasser Arafat and writes that Matthew Kalman and I have a “compelling explanation [for] the 75-year-old leader’s death near Paris in November 2004 based on years of reporting in Ramallah, Bethlehem, Gaza and Jerusalem and interviews with senior Palestinian officials.” Indeed, we do. So compelling, in fact, that we’ve already heard from people inside the PLO to whom we hadn’t previously spoken about the ra’is‘s demise words to the effect that “Yeah, you got it right…”

The Post’s Marder adds that “The Murder of Yasser Arafat takes readers inside the Palestinian territories and Arafat’s government and considers officials’ motivation for killing the leader…The Murder of Yasser Arafat provides a clear context for understanding the vengeful Arafat and the current Palestinian leadership, who could all have blood on their hands and who know that if Arafat could be assassinated, they, too, are vulnerable.” …Did I mention that this was in The Jerusalem Post? You’d never have guessed, he wrote with a smile.

Secret Mossad Hit List Revealed

Matt Rees — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 18:21:58 +0000

My partner at new alternative news venture DeltaFourth Matthew Kalman wrote on The Times of Israel about our ebook The Murder of Yasser Arafat, in which we show that a senior Palestinian from the leader’s inner circle poisoned him. One of The Times’ other columnists responded with a piece in which he said Arafat was offed by the Israeli Mossad.

The Israelis may – or may not – have provided the polonium used to wax Arafat. But they didn’t put it in his tea. That, we discovered, was left to one of his close advisers.

Still the Mossad is thought of as pretty much having a finger in every nasty pie, by everyone from Palestinian coffee vendors to British newspapermen to thriller writers the world over. So here it can be revealed for the first time, the tally of secret Mossad hits:

The Mossad killed Monty Python’s Graham Chapman. But it didn’t kill Yasser Arafat.

The Mossad killed Michael Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and Roger Rabbit. But it didn’t kill Yasser Arafat.

The Mossad killed Che Guevara, JFK, Lee Harvey Oswald and Reinhard Heydrich. But it didn’t kill Yasser Arafat.

It assassinated Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, and King Xerxes I of Persia. But it didn’t kill Yasser Arafat.

The Mossad killed Meir Kahane, Aldo Moro, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Vlad Dracula. But it didn’t kill Yasser Arafat.

It joined forces with video to kill the Radio Star. But it didn’t kill Yasser Arafat.

The Mossad killed Snorri Sturluson, Lord Mountbatten, and Vlad Dracula again, this time for good with a silver bullet. But it didn’t kill Yasser Arafat.

It killed Olof Palme, Jill Dando, and Dick Cheney (though having used its silver bullet on Dracula that one didn’t stick.) But it didn’t kill Arafat.

The Mossad killed Thomas a Beckett, Simon Bocanegra, and Old Hamlet. But it didn’t…

There are more, but they’re far too dangerous to name. Naturally DeltaFourth will be delighted to hear if there are others you think we’ve missed.

Podcast: Journalism’s Special Forces

Matt Rees — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 07:02:24 +0000

This podcast is about my new alternative news project DeltaFourth. I read from THE MURDER OF YASSER ARAFAT, the first explosive ebook from DeltaFourth. The ebook reveals how Yasser Arafat was murdered by people in his inner circle. It’s the prototype for DeltaFourth’s forthcoming series of long-form journalistic ebooks — stunning breaking news written in a hard-boiled novelistic style that responds to the excitement of the events it describes.

Download the Podcast: (Download the MP3)
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‘The Murder of Yasser Arafat’ interview

Matt Rees — Sun, 20 Jan 2013 18:59:59 +0000

Israel tv highlights THE MURDER OF YASSER ARAFAT in this interview. I wrote the book with Matthew Kalman for our alternative news venture DeltaFourth.

‘The Murder of Yasser Arafat’ is ‘racy and provocative…page-turner’

Matt Rees — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 18:27:50 +0000

The Murder of Yasser Arafat, the first book from my new alternative journalism venture DeltaFourth, is “racy and provocative,” according to a write-up in The Times of Israel. Elhanan Miller, the news site’s Arab affairs correspondent, calls the book “quite the page turner.” Miller also picks up on something very notable about our treatment of the subject: “The book emerges in an intellectual environment accustomed to painstakingly tedious accounts of the Oslo years, focusing primarily on the Israeli-Palestinian trajectory. But Rees and Kalman say that the internal dynamics of both societies provide a much better explanation for the failure of peace.” That’s an approach I’ve used for some time. My first book of nonfiction focused on issues within Israeli and Palestinian societies. My Palestinian crime novels have almost no Israelis in them: the Palestinians are the good guys and the bad guys. Miller goes on to note that we’re certainly not tedious. That’s also a long-time theme of mine. Stay tuned, Elhanan, because DeltaFourth plans on getting wilder still.