Matt Rees and His Palestinian Detective

Paul M. Foer

Omar Yussef is a West Bank history professor turned reluctant detective, a middle-aged Palestinian everyman who holds Palestinian and Jewish extremists in equal disdain. He is the brainchild of Matt Beynon Rees, a Welshman and former Time Jerusalem bureau chief who has published four mystery novels featuring Yussef. In the first, The Collaborator of Bethlehem (2007), Yussef is drawn into the dangerous world of sleuthing when his favorite student, a Palestinian Christian, is implicated in the murder of a Palestinian Muslim. He faces down new challenges in A Grave in Gaza (2008) and The Samaritan’s Secret (2009), then ends up in New York in Rees’ latest novel, The Fourth Assassin, investigating a case in which his own son is the murder suspect. Paul M. Foer interviews Rees at his home in the San Simon neighborhood of Jerusalem where the author resides with his American wife Devorah and their young son.

After covering the Middle East for 13 years as a journalist, why did you leave the news business to become a novelist?

Journalism is focused on the worst elements of life. It turns everything into a stereotype, which you can then write in shorthand: “Here is the Palestinian terrorist” or “here is the Palestinian victim” instead of “here is a real person.”

So fiction frees you?

When people read the news they think it must be so depressing to be a Palestinian—they are so oppressed, there is so much violence, their society is so messed up. In my novels, there are actual Palestinians who are living the way Palestinians live. Some of them are irritable and some of them are likable, but they all have some reason for going on with their lives. Yussef knows that the politics of the Palestinians is bloody, ridiculous, flawed and corrupt. He doesn’t need to read an article every day about what a mess it is. He needs to make some sense of his own life. Journalism, at least as foreign correspondents do it, is political science. This is something that happened. Is it good or is it bad for the peace process? What do the Americans think about it, what do the Israelis or the Palestinians think about it? Who cares? No one does. Editors are now saying, “Readers are tired of the Middle East.” They are not. They are just tired of the way it appears in journalism. Fiction is a kind of anthropology where you have the time to review the society and try to understand the people in it. Fiction answers the questions that journalism is supposed to be answering because it answers them on a human level.

Who was the inspiration for Yussef?

The basis for Yussef is a friend in the Dahaisha Refugee Camp. He is not a teacher, but I disguised his identity just in case. He is a guy I admire for being very vocal and critical even when it is dangerous to step out of line. He says that our society is falling around us, and we can’t just blame Israel for everything.

Is Yussef like you in any way?

There is a lot of him that is me. As I was writing the second book, A Grave in Gaza, I would quite often be crying. I eventually realized I had experienced certain traumatic events as a journalist. I had seen dead bodies or bits of bodies. I had been shot at. I had been threatened. I had been stoned.

By both sides?

Mainly by Palestinians, but I had Israeli soldiers point their weapons at me. There was a tank that turned its barrel around on my car once. Lots of foreign correspondents have Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. I have journalist friends who cry without knowing why, who have nightmares. I used to get them. I used to get sudden rages. And I realized that my traumas were coming out onto the page into the head of Yussef. There are times in the book where things happen that if I hadn’t experienced those traumas, I would have described them much differently. For example, at one point in the second book Omar is being stoned by some kids.

For political reasons?

No, just for a riot. These things are rarely very organized, it is more just blowing off steam. So he is being stoned. If you were someone who had never been stoned, what would you write? “Omar was frightened,” maybe? I have been stoned and what you actually feel is a very determined sense that you want everyone around you to die. You don’t care who dies; you are going to get out safe. And so that’s what I wrote.

Would it be safe to say that you are writing about two traumatized peoples who haven’t figured out how to get beyond their traumas?

How does a traumatized person react? With over-aggression, defensiveness and a sense of being the ultimate victim. Nobody can see the suffering of the other side. In Lamentations, there is the part of that prayer where it says, “No one’s suffering is like my suffering.” Jews have been, in one generation after another, traumatized by terrible things. The ultimate trauma is the Holocaust. And then you don’t get 60 years of life on the couch in Israel, you get 60 years of being attacked. So you become really traumatized. The world is a traumatizing place, but the Israelis are an extreme version of that. Now in a different sense, Palestinians have built trauma into their next generation. If you ask a five-year-old refugee who lives in Dahaisha, “Where are you from?” he won’t say he is from Dahaisha. He will name a village somewhere near Beit Shemesh that doesn’t exist anymore. Now back when it was easier to move around, the guy I based Yussef on took his three sons to the place where his village had been and said, “That is where it was, but it’s not. Forget about it, get on with your lives.” So many Palestinians and Israelis cannot put the past behind them.

Does being from Wales and not being Jewish impact the way you write about this conflict-ridden region?

It is very useful as a writer to be unconnected to a place because it takes out all the distractions. I don’t look at low cultural things. I don’t pay attention to celebrities. I speak Hebrew but unless someone is talking in my ear, I’m not really aware. So I can sit in a café, and it’s almost as if silence is around me. And now that I am doing very little news writing, I can cut off from this endless, pointless cycle of news events and focus on isolating the emotions that I need.

What is the message that you want your readers to take away?

What I am really getting at is that everyone is the same, that the Palestinians are the same as Israelis. Genetically, in fact. But they are really the same as anybody living in Los Angeles. They have the same spirit we do. If we say it’s us against them, we end up spending billions killing a lot of people. And they hate us more than ever. To acknowledge the suffering of the other is the first step to understanding and overcoming the trauma that is inside all of us.

Are you a political person?

I voted once in my life in the local council elections when I was an undergraduate at Oxford. The longer I live here, the less I care about politics. As a journalist I’ve met a lot of politicians here. I haven’t ever met anyone about whom I thought, “You know, he is an impressive guy—I hope he gets to lead.” I wouldn’t put them in charge of anything. Because, whether they are Israeli or Palestinian, I feel there is something very sleazy about being any kind of politician. There’s something disturbing about someone who says, “I am the person who should lead.” There is also real corruption in Palestinian and Israeli politics. Arafat stole—he eventually gave back a lot of what he stole—$1.1 billion that we know of. Israel has a big problem with corruption in its political system.

Do you believe that there is such a thing as an evil person?

I believe that there are psychopaths. In a lot of crime novels, you have one bad guy, a psycho, who does things with no explanation. But the Palestinian terrorists or gunmen— whatever you call them—I’ve met were not psychopaths. If there is a character that has some political or tribal reason for doing something bad, maybe readers can relate to that. It’s not to say that people will read my book and say, “Hey, I can see how I might be a member of Hamas.” I simply mean that you will see it is a human decision and that those who make it retain human characteristics.

Are you planning to stay in Israel?

I don’t really know about bringing up my son here. I’d like to live in a place where people don’t ask him, “Which side are you on?” I don’t want him to have that as the basis of his existence. It happens in Israel very early, you have to decide: Are you religious or secular? Because when you are two you have to go to a kindergarten that is either religious or secular. So from the age of two, an Israeli’s identity is built on taking sides. I’d like my son to have that same openness that he has now as a little boy when he is older, and I can’t really see how you would have that here.

Why haven’t your books been published in Arabic?

All the biggest-selling books in the West are thrillers or crime novels, but they don’t really exist in the Arab world. The crime novel is a democratic genre. You have a guy who is trying to find out something about a big organization—whether it is the government, the CIA or the mafia. In a democracy you can believe that one man might be able to confront something big and find the truth. That’s not how it is in the Arab world. But I am still hopeful that they will be translated into Arabic because they would show people in the Arab world what the reality is here.

Paul M. Foer is a columnist for The Capital and has a daily radio show in Annapolis, MD, where he publishes the political blog Annapolis Capital Punishment.