Matt Rees's Blog - Posts Tagged "muslims"

Obama presses Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to stop building in West Bank settlements. By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost May 26, 2009

JERUSALEM — One morning late last week, Israeli Border Police showed up at Maoz Esther, an outpost of Israeli settlers in the West Bank near Ramallah. They waited for a Bible study class to finish, tore down the settlers’ five little shacks and ran the residents off.

A few hours later, the settlers returned, nailing together the battered pieces of drywall shunted aside by the government. Maoz Esther rose again.

This kind of half-hearted approach to clearing out illegal outposts is the way Israel has always handled the settlers. Read more...

Everyone comes back to Jerusalem. I don’t know why, for the life of me I really don’t.

It’s much too hot. The people can be offhandedly mean, and they drive as though they want to kill you. It isn’t a very pretty place once you look close. Oh and, yes, sometimes it gets violent. With jaw-dropping self-obsession, it thinks the eyes of the world are turned admiringly upon it all the time.

Jerusalem sometimes seems like that inexplicably popular idiot everyone liked in high school. Exerting a stupefying magnetism over people with otherwise solid judgment.

I’ve been in Jerusalem 14 years. I’m under no illusions as to what keeps me here. I’ve made a good life for myself with good friends, and the place provides me with the material for my writing.

But I’m rather immune to its other supposed charms. It’s no Tuscany.

Yet all my journalist pals have come and gone – and come back again. I’ve been here so long, everyone to whom I’ve said goodbye ends up dropping in for dinner once more. It wouldn’t happen if I went back to live in Wales. No one is drawn there with idealistic visions of its sublimity…

I spoke to a writing group in the center of Jerusalem last week. Lovely people the lot of them. Mostly young Americans or Canadians, Brits and South Africans who’ve immigrated recently to Israel and want to get together with writers of a similar background. All of them so devoted to Jerusalem.

To some degree, each of them has to live here a while to see beyond the newness. They’re experiencing the same happiness I recall when I arrived at university and discovered a kind of freedom and belonging I’d only before imagined. Until then, they’ll write about Jerusalem in the tones of the biblical psalmist, making of the city a personified lover, the object of desire and devotion.

That isn’t how I see the place. I’ve lived through an intifada, seen Jerusalem mangle the bodies of its peoples and accept the spray of hateful slogans on its walls. I’ve been called all kinds of names by all kinds of people and sued by some particularly unreasonable ones. I’ve come close to being run down on crosswalks by angry Israeli drivers and shoved aside in the Old City by angry hashish-raddled Palestinians.

For a while all that made me angry too. Not so angry that it overcame the feelings of creativity it gave me. There’s a certain anger – spun forward and made pro-active, positive – at the heart of Omar Yussef, the hero of my Palestinian crime novels.

Why didn't I keep on getting angry? Because I discovered I liked the hash-tokers of the Muslim Quarter rather better than I enjoyed the company of the politicians or professional classes I met as a journalist.

That’s one of the main reasons I write crime novels about this place. Crime novels are the opposite of idealization. They see “the skull beneath the skin,” as Eliot wrote of John Webster (a playwright I recommend to anyone who likes a bit of morbid, cynical straight-talk).

It isn’t that I take a negative view of Jerusalem and its environs. I long ago realized that I continue to live here because there’s something I like about it, and its people. Just not in a romanticized way. It’s simply because I’ve come to understand the ways in which the people and their city push each other to the edge of existence. It’s when they’re on the edge that I find out what really counts for them.

And for me.

(I posted this today on International Crime Authors, a joint blog I do with some other...well, crime authors, obviously.)

Historical novels vie with crime and romance novels for the titles of most derided and most widely read literature. They've had a bad rap ever since the 19th century, when the swashbucklers of Alexandre Dumas looked pretty wooden next to Dickens, and cartoonish in comparison to the depth of Victor Hugo or George Eliot. There have always been marvelous exceptions, such as Mary Renault's amazing novels of ancient Greece, but for much of the last century, historical fiction was seen as pure escapism, barely distinguishable from bodice-ripping romance.

Since the publication of "The Name of the Rose," in 1980, the genre has gained gradual legitimacy. Much snobbishness still abounds, however, over the commercial success of historical fiction and the perceived tendency of genre writers to simplify bygone eras. Still, though Umberto Eco's book has sold 10 million copies, it undoubtedly takes some brains to appreciate it, and no one could accuse Eco of writing simplistic books. Literary highbrows came down to mix with the hoi polloi long enough to award last year's Man Booker Prize, the most notable British book award, to Hilary Mantel's "Wolf Hall," a wonderful evocation not just of Tudor England but of the contrast between a steely self-made man and a bunch of spoiled, weak upper-class brats. The legitimacy of the genre progresses this year with the deification in both the United Kingdom and the United States of David Mitchell, whose novel about Japan in 1799, "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet," is a candidate for the Booker and who, even before this latest work, has routinely been referred to as a genius by reviewers.

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