Matt Beynon Rees's Blog

I went back to the spot where I killed my first man yesterday. I killed him four years ago. I return every few months. Each time I arrive, it’s so peaceful I can’t believe anyone really died. But, even though I’m a writer of crime fiction, someone really did.

I walked across a dirt lot, puddled with the afternoon rain, past the empty reservoir at the head of the valley. Below me the village of Irtas drifted down toward the convent where they hold the annual lettuce festival. The buildings fingered the bare hillsides. Beyond the pines and a silent olive grove: the scene of the murder.

A cabbage patch. In 2003, a young gunman from the Fatah faction of the PLO was creeping home to be with his family for the Ramadan breakfast. Just as darkness was falling. The very time I was there yesterday.

I imagined the trees closing above him, the dim glow of the fluorescent lights inside the house calling him. Then, if he noticed it, the red dot of a laser pointer, used by a local collaborator to alert the Israeli snipers on the hill above to their target. The crack of a distant rifle—the snipers would’ve been 800 metres away—and nothing, or at best a few struggling breaths.

His body was gone when I arrived there the day after his death. I stood in that spot with his wife and mother, as they told me about the moment when they heard the shot, saw the body in the twilight, recognized his clothing, touched his blood. They told me with such vivid detail I knew it had to be part of a novel—it was simply too vibrant, too full of the emotions of life in extreme circumstances, for me to limit it to my weekly report for Time Magazine.

So I made that death the first one in my debut crime novel THE COLLABORATOR OF BETHLEHEM (UK title: THE BETHLEHEM MURDERS). When I re-read those pages, it always makes me want to drive the few miles from my home to this place on the southern tip of Bethlehem, drawn by the real death, the fictional death, my memories and my prose.

When it’s dank and raining and the same time of year as that first killing, the draw is too strong. So I stood in the olive grove watching the outside of the house across the cabbages.

I stared up at the hill where the Israelis had waited. I’ve been in situations as a journalist, where I’ve looked about and wondered if I was in someone’s sights. I knew that, now, there were no shooters around. Still I felt the dryness in my mouth that comes with pondering whether a man with his finger on the trigger will object to your taking a step into the open.

I edged backward, disturbing the rain from the branches of an olive tree. It always seemed to me most likely that the collaborator had waited here, watching. Angry, hating himself for what he had been trapped into doing, wondering if he’d get away this time or be caught and slaughtered in the street.

He might be dead by now. So many Palestinians, particularly those who collaborate or are suspected of collaborating with Israel, are.

But he’s also my collaborator. I don’t pretend to be free of the damage of the intifada that I covered as a journalist. I’m not Israeli or Palestinian. It doesn’t draw me back into its violent clutches as seems to be happening to them once more.

Still, when I wait among those olive trees, I’m somehow nervous and unsure of myself, like the collaborator who waited for his mark to emerge from the silent darkness. Though the target, the real man and the character in my book, is long dead, I find myself whispering to him: “Come on. Come on out of the trees. Let me see you.”

One day, I expect him to come.

(I posted this earlier today on International Crime Authors Reality Check, a joint blog I write with three other crime novelists. Take a look.)

I was invited to appear on a BBC World Service programme last weekend. If you’ve ever wondered how radio producers feed their on-air people interesting information about their guests (thus enabling them to create a breezy “chemistry” and to relate the day’s news stories to the knowledge or experience of the guest), here’s the questionnaire sent to me for The World Today by Affan Chowdhry, along with my responses. If you try to imagine what your answers would be to some of the questions, I think you’ll see the unorthodox angles the producer is looking to wheedle out of you.

NAME
Matt Rees

PREFERRED TITLE
Author of a series of crime novels about a Palestinian detective.

WHAT NEWS-RELATED EXPERTISE DO THEY HAVE?
I’ve covered the Middle East as a journalist since 1996 for Time Magazine, Newsweek, The Scotsman, and some American news sites. I’m the author of a book of nonfiction about Israel and Palestine, three novels about Palestine, and a fourth which is coming out in February.

GEOGRAPHICAL BIOGRAPHY?
Grew up in Wales. I worked in Washington and New York from 1989 to 1996, mainly covering Wall Street. Since then I’ve lived in Jerusalem and have worked in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt. My books have been translated into 22 languages and I’ve visited a lot of those places to promote the books.

COUNTRIES VISITED IN 2009?
Denmark, Norway. Germany. France. Switzerland. (Israel, West Bank). Austria. Italy. Malta.

HIGHLIGHTS FROM LAST FEW MONTHS OF THEIR LIFE - PERSONAL OR
PROFESSIONAL?
I took my first holiday for nearly two years—a trip to Swiss wine country (yes, that’s right “Swiss” wine country, on the banks of Lake Geneva), with my wife and son. I completed the manuscript for my fifth novel, which is a historical mystery set in Vienna in 1791.

PLANS FOR THE NEXT MONTH?
In December I’ll be going to Rome, Naples and Malta to research my next novel, a historical novel set in 1610.

WHAT RECENT STORIES IN THE NEWS HAVE HAD DIRECT RELEVANCE TO THEIR LIFE/WORK?
Well, anything to do with Israel and the Palestinians. Although, frankly, nothing much’s really happening on that front…

WHAT ISSUES ARE PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT WHERE YOU LIVE THAT DON'T MAKE THE INTERNATIONAL HEADLINES?
Tarantino’s film, “Inglourious Basterds” is creating quite a stir in Israel over its portrayal of Jewish revenge against Nazis. Many Israelis cheer during the scenes of violent death for the Nazis, while some are disturbed that anyone should be so turned on by killing—even if the victims are the persecutors of Jews. I believe the film is actually quite “Israeli,” in that the Israeli establishment has long been ashamed of the way so many Jews went to their deaths without a fight and, in turn, treated them poorly when the survivors came to Israel.

BRIEF ENCOUNTER – (an interesting, funny or just plain weird anecdote
about meeting someone famous.)
I was the last journalist to interview Salman Rushdie before Khomeini’s fatwa. Unfortunately I was drunk. It was after an awards dinner. He looked rather disgusted with me, and considering that he looks disgusted even when he’s not, you can imagine that it was rather a withering glare he gave me as I tried to string a few sentences together. To be fair, I was only 22 and it was the first time I’d been to an event where all the booze was free.

QUIET ACHIEVER – (one person they have met who does important work with
little recognition)
My friend Caryn Greene immigrated to Israel from Texas and set up Crossroads, a home for at-risk youth who are the children of English-speaking immigrants. They often fall through the cracks of the Hebrew social services. With very little funding, Caryn has run this service for a decade. Most of my son’s babysitters turned out to be kids who’d gone through her doors and came out no longer rebellious but really rather lovely.

SECRET PASSIONS/HIDDEN TALENTS?
I play bass guitar in Jerusalem’s (justifiably) least well-known garage rock band, Dolly Weinstein.

FAVOURITE PIECE OF RADIO EVER?
The “Mornington Crescent” game on “I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue”.

NEW FACT THEY'VE LEARNED THIS THE WEEK (important or trivial, but an interesting "i-never-knew-that" factoid)
I met the man who recently came to live in Israel and whose mother introduced the “pooper-scooper” law in New York (forcing dog owners to pick up their dogs’ poop). I suggested he get a similar law going in Jerusalem, because the city’s streets and parks are fuller of canine poop than a grass verge on a 1970s British pavement.

STORY OF THE WEEK (something that's intrigued them or has not received as much coverage as it should have done in their eyes)
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu almost falling in the water when he went to inspect an Israeli navy boat which recently intercepted a big Hizballah arms shipment.

CRYSTAL BALL (what will they be watching in their field of expertise over the next
six months/year?)
Will Mahmoud Abbas really quit as Palestinian president? He says he will. I say, No.

<span style="font-weight:bold;">Latent shame over the Jews' failure to stand up to the Nazis is cited as a reason for the success of "Inglourious Basterds."
</span>By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost

JERUSALEM, Israel — Quentin Tarantino’s "Inglourious Basterds" is the definitive Israeli movie.

The bloodthirsty revenge fantasy of Jewish soldiers crushing German skulls with baseball bats and scalping dying Nazis has been a big hit here since its release in mid-September and, unusually, has been reviewed in every big newspaper or magazine.

But that’s not just because Israelis, like audiences elsewhere in the world, seem to enjoy seeing Hitler’s henchmen meet grisly pulp fiction ends.

There’s something deeper at work in Israelis’ responses. It’s tied to the way their country has dealt with the very concept of the Holocaust. More particularly, the way Jews died in the Holocaust.

The response of critics has been almost uniformly positive. One of Israel’s most respected and thoughtful critics, Uri Klein, wrote in the leading newspaper Ha'aretz that "what Tarantino does in 'Inglourious Basterds' seems to me more valid and more decent than what Spielberg did in 'Schindler's List.'"

Instead of trying to recreate the horror that was the Holocaust as Spielberg did, Klein wrote, Tarantino simply made up an alternative reality, dealing with Jews and the Nazis on his own terms. That, in fact, is what Israel did, too.

In that context, the most revealing review was by Avner Shavit in Achbar Ha’Ir, a Tel Aviv weekly. “The truth is that [Tarantino:] is on our side. … Like a typical Yankee who has been raised on stories about Ari Ben-Canaan, Moshe Dayan and other Mossad agents, he describes the Jew as the only one capable of kicking the bad guy's ass for humanity's sake.”

In other words, Shavit believes Tarantino’s portrayal of Jewish fighters during World War II is determined by the image created of Israel since then. Ari Ben-Canaan was the hero of Leon Uris’ “Exodus,” which is set during Israel’s founding struggle. Moshe Dayan was Israel’s army chief and the country’s Defense Minister during the victory in the 1967 Six-Day War. Mossad agents crop up in almost every popular thriller with inside information and a magical ability to rub out the bad guy.

But what appeals to Israelis about Tarantino’s portrayal of these fantastical Jewish avengers is that they bear little relation to the great bulk of Jews who died in Hitler’s camps without making any attempt to resist.

That gets at the heart of the issue, because the Israeli establishment is, in many ways, still ashamed that so many Jews went to their deaths without a fight. The implication is that Israel created a new breed of Jews who’d have stood up to the Nazis, rather than being herded onto cattle cars.

Israel commemorates the victims of Hitler’s depredations with Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Day — the relatively few “heroes” of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising get as much prominence in the naming of that memorial day as the millions of “martyrs.”

After World War II, Israel’s founders didn’t want to acknowledge that most Jews had gone powerless to their deaths. They lauded those “heroes” who fought back, no matter how hopelessly, over those who simply survived. The survivors never overcame that taint in the eyes of those who had arrived in Israel before the war. Many survivors have told me they were called “soaps” when they came to what was then Palestine — a callous reference to the rumor that the Nazis used the bodies of their victims to make soap.

Israel’s founders built a myth around the Holocaust. But the myth was like the repression that an individual places upon the unthinkable moments buried within his own subconscious.

Even to be recognized as a survivor in Israel requires a long battle with red tape. Then the government does its best to hold onto money that’s due to the survivors. New allegations emerged this week that lawyers hired to wrest that cash from the bureaucrats continue to take extortionate commissions from survivors, in violation of recent laws forbidding it.

Of 240,000 survivors in Israel, 20,000 receive compensation from Germany, and 40,000 get an Israeli stipend of less than $300 a month. The rest have nothing but their scarred memories. About 80,000 survivors live below the poverty line in Israel. The worst place in the developed world to be a Holocaust survivor is Israel.

So cheering Tarantino’s bloodcurdling re-imagining of history is an easy way out.

It’s also something which casts an unpleasant light on current Israeli politics.
On the Israelity blog, leading Israeli cultural writer David Brinn described how the crowd at the theater where he watched Tarantino’s movie cheered the demise of each German. In a reference to a banned political party that advocates the forced expulsion of Palestinians and has a reputation for violence, Brinn wrote that it “felt like I was at a Kach rally.”

“On the one hand, it was liberating to be the avengers of the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis,” Brinn wrote, “but on the other hand, maybe we shouldn’t have been so happy about it.”

I was on the BBC World Service's The World Today chatting about my Palestinian crime novels today. Because of the nature of the show, I also was asked my opinions on Cairo's muezzins, Ethiopian distance running and the value of Michael Jackson's rhinestone-encrusted white glove (you remember, the one he wore at the Motown Awards the first time he ever did the moonwalk). Haven't you always wanted to know what I thought about such issues? Well, there are some well-informed characters on the show too, so it's worth a listen.

By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost

JERUSALEM — Donald Bostrom, a freelance Swedish journalist who wrote an article this summer accusing Israeli officials of trading in Palestinian organs, came to Israel late last month to defend his piece at a conference on the media.

Neither Bostrom, who needed a bodyguard because of the stir his article has caused, nor the media came out looking good.

At the conference in the southern Israeli town of Dimona, the 55-year-old Swede argued that he did what any reporter would do in airing the suspicions of Palestinian families whose sons’ cadavers were returned to them post-autopsy. It’s up to Israel, he said, to investigate the claims cited in his article, specifying that he had no proof that the organ trade went on.

“If you’re a journalist, you always interview, you ask questions, and get answers,” he told the conference.

True, but journalists generally make further investigations to verify if the answers they got were based on anything but speculation. In Bostrom’s case, he appears to have put two and two together and got five, linking the dead Palestinians with an organ-stealing scandal at Israel’s forensic institute and the arrests of several New York Jews last summer who were accused of organ trading.

“It is absolutely bad journalism, and it’s influenced by anti-Semitic opinions,” said Dina Porat, head of Tel Aviv University’s Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism and Racism. “Without checking his facts, he perpetuates the historical attitudes toward Jews — that they will do any nasty deed.”

He isn’t the only one. The media (not only newspapers in Israel and abroad, but also bloggers of ill-defined association and international television stations broadcast over the internet) misread Bostrom’s article, perhaps deliberately, so as to suggest that he wrote something far worse — namely that the Israeli army killed Palestinians deliberately to harvest their organs. Both pro-Israeli and anti-Israeli media have cited that nonexistent element of Bostrom’s article as evidence to back their particular animus over the case.

The reason Bostrom’s accusations have created such a stir isn’t just that they’re a lot more speculative than would pass muster at most American news organizations. It’s that, on the one hand, they seem to Israelis to confirm the anti-Semitism of the international media, while also appearing to justify the virulent anti-Israeli sentiment that has spilled across the internet since Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza at the turn of the year.

Israeli government minister Silvan Shalom refused to attend the Dimona conference (and cancelled its public funding) because of Bostrom’s presence, saying he was “a person who created a blood libel against the State of Israel and its soldiers,” referring to anti-Semitic accusations over the centuries that Jews used the blood of gentile children for sacred rites.

Meanwhile, an Iranian website picked up the ball and ran with it, reporting that the scandal wasn’t limited to Palestinians, but alleged that Algerian children were “falling prey to [a:] Jewish organ harvest.”

The spread of such stories isn’t merely a political problem for Israel. It justifies people’s historical hatred for Jews and, in turn, causes anti-Semitic attacks, said Tel Aviv University’s Porat. The university’s annual reports on anti-Semitism show the number of violent attacks on Jews around the world rising steadily — to 651 last year, from 78 in 1989.

Bostrom argues that he was posing a question that the Israeli government needs to address. But in these internet days speculative musings are soon converted into concrete fact in the minds of many people around the world, whether they concern Barack Obama’s birthplace or Israel’s misdeeds.

Bostrom’s article appeared in Aftonbladet, a left-of-center tabloid, last summer, having previously been turned down by Dagens Nyheter, another Swedish newspaper. Under the headline “Our sons are plundered of their organs,” Bostrom wrote a story similar to one which had appeared previously in a book he wrote in 2000 (the book was reprinted five times in Sweden).

To summarize, Bostrom says that in 1992 U.N. personnel suggested he investigate the return of bodies of Palestinians killed by Israeli troops, after autopsies that were often against the will of the family. Bostrom says he witnessed the return of one such body to a village in the northern West Bank. He saw a long autopsy scar on the torso.

The dead youth’s family, he said, told him, “We are sure they took our son’s organs.”

Israel has, indeed, investigated the taking of organs against the will of families of the deceased by Prof. Yehuda Hiss, who was director of the Abu Kabir Institute of Forensic Medicine. The probe began after the heart of a Scottish tourist who died in Israel was discovered to be missing. Hiss was found to have taken organs or body parts from 125 corpses, including Israeli soldiers, and providing them to universities and medical institutions for research purposes.

Hiss was forced to step down as director of the institute in 2005 as a result of these investigations, though he retains his post as Israel’s chief pathologist.

With the Hiss case in the background, Bostrom made the leap to the arrest of several dozens of men in New York and New Jersey in July. The group, which included five rabbis, were accused of money laundering, public corruption and organ trafficking.

It’s this unverified link in Bostrom’s article that suggests anti-Semitism, according to Porat. “If someone told him Palestinians were trading organs, he’d have checked it upside down,” she says. “But with Israel he doesn’t need to check. Israel has become a symbol for evil and any accusation against it is somehow believed on its face.”

The Middle East tends to thrive on conspiracy theories. Perhaps Bostrom just caught a little of that bug. Certainly his article flirts with the fringes of journalistic ethics. (In a television interview posted on the internet, he says “it’s not up to me to have any evidence” to back up his story. That, he says, is a role that should be taken up by an Israeli inquiry.)

Maybe Bostrom’s having second thoughts about the effect of his article. He was reported to have cancelled plans to attend an anti-Israel conference in Beirut.

In any case, each of the stories he linked is, individually, bad enough. Autopsies without family consent, Hiss’s illicit trade, the shady U.S. rabbis. Bostrom’s willingness to link them made his story controversial and irresponsible.

Novelists aren’t journalists. Research for a novel isn’t the same as researching a journalistic article.

I’d have thought that was too obvious to need stating. But then I became a published novelist, and I realized that people thought the two things were rather the same.

I was a journalist for almost 20 years before my first novel was published. THE COLLABORATOR OF BETHLEHEM is a crime novel set in Bethlehem during the intifada, and I’d spent over a decade covering the Palestinians by the time the book came out in 2007. No need for new research there.

Much of the next two books, A GRAVE IN GAZA and THE SAMARITAN’S SECRET, were based on stories I had covered as a journalist. Though I returned to the places many times before I wrote the books, these visits were mainly to record details of place, smell and weather. It wasn’t to interview people, as a journalist must.

That’s because I wanted the books to have their basis less in the political moment at which I had covered those stories, and more in the emotional response I had observed in other people and in myself as those events unfolded.

Things were different when I came to research my new novel, THE FOURTH ASSASSIN, which will be published in February.

THE FOURTH ASSASSIN is set in Brooklyn, New York, where there’s a growing community of Palestinian immigrants. I lived in New York in the 1990s, when I covered Wall Street for some US newspapers and magazines. I was a Greenwich Village type, with forays to Soho, Tribeca and the Lower East Side. I used to go months without leaving Manhattan. Brooklyn wasn’t exactly one of my regular haunts. So last year I went out to Bay Ridge, where most Palestinians live, and met a couple of people. I toured the neighborhood with a kid in his late teens and learned about the gang culture.

I specifically didn’t want to do what a journalist does. I didn’t want to sit down and pull out my notepad, though I can see why novelists may feel the urge to do so. I wanted to walk the streets as my detective Omar Yussef would – a little alienated, not knowing quite where I was, out of place. I know Omar Yussef – the real man and his fictional manifestation – well enough to make my way through Bay Ridge as though he were with me.

During my visit to New York, I stopped in at the home of some friends who had been correspondents for a US newspaper in Jerusalem. One of them said: “So who’re you talking to in Brooklyn?”

It was a journalist’s question—who you’re talking to will determine the depth of information you garner and therefore will signal the worth of your article. I felt a stab of defensiveness. It was as though she had accused me of not doing my job. Of course, I wasn’t doing my job, because I no longer had a job. Journalism was my job. Now I’m a novelist. Most definitely not a job.

But the twinge I felt at her query alerted me to the difference in my new “métier” (let’s see how many ways I can find to avoid referring to my writing as a “job”).

I recently finished writing the manuscript of a novel about Mozart. When I began it, various friends suggested I talk to “experts” on the subject. I didn’t. Because they weren’t experts on what I was writing about. They were experts on the known facts about Mozart. Well, I can read as well as they can.

What I needed were musicians, who could tell me how they get inside a Mozart piece, how they plot out their performance emotionally. I needed friends in Vienna who could take me to little-known places that would give me the atmosphere of the eighteenth century in that city. I needed to learn to play the piano, to feel the extent of Mozart’s genius and to be moved with (rather than just “by”) his music.

A journalist collates the impressions and assertions of others. As a novelist, I’m focused on my own impressions. If there’s anything to be asserted in my books, it ought not to be a digest of someone else’s thoughts.

I’m starting this process again. The novel I’m researching now will be set in Italy in 1600 and will be about an artist. I’m off to Rome in a few weeks, and already friends are asking me which experts I’m intending to interview. I may talk to some art historians, but they won’t be the most important factor in my research. That’ll come when I put some oil on canvas.

I don’t expect to show anyone the results of my daubings (just as I don’t want anyone except my two-year-old son to listen to my rotten piano playing). But the sensation of working with paint is going to be much more important than hearing someone’s assessment of how it was for someone else long dead to muck about with oils.

(I posted this earlier today on the International Crime Authors Reality Check blog, which I write along with Christopher G. Moore, Barbara Nadel and Colin Cotterill. Check it out.)

Michael Anthony is the author of MASS CASUALTIES: A Young Medic’s True Story of Death, Deception and Dishonor in Iraq (Adams Media, October 2009). His book is drawn from his personal journals during the first year he spent serving in Iraq. You can read my interview with him here. In this guest post, he highlights an issue we all ought to give more thought.

President Obama recently stated that sending more troops into harm’s way in Afghanistan is a solemn decision—one that he would not rush. As a veteran, I find the decision to send troops into harm’s way without an effective military mental health program in place beyond solemn. It’s deeply disturbing. Keeping soldiers mentally fit should be as important as keeping them physically fit.

Since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq started, nearly 2,000 active-service soldiers have killed themselves, according to a report by the San Antonio Express-News earlier this year. Even more alarming is the fact that every day, five active-duty service members attempt suicide. In the past eight years, that means up to 14,000 have felt their life is not worth living.

The government doesn’t want you to know this. In spring of 2008, CBS news journalist Armen Keteyian exposed a Veterans Administration cover-up of suicide stats. The reporting revealed that every day, eighteen veterans kill themselves and roughly 1,000 attempt suicide each month. The VA’s head of Mental Health had claimed there were only 790 attempts in all of 2007, a far cry from the reality.

Among all veterans, over the eight years we’ve been at war in the Middle East, the statistics point that roughly 50,000 have committed suicide, with upwards of 44,000 attempting suicide. These figures only represent data gathered since 2001; this has been an ongoing and persistent problem since Vietnam—and the numbers go up each day.

Recently, the Army made a big deal about giving $50 million to fund a five-year research project on military suicide. In their book, The Three Trillion Dollar War, Linda J. Bilmes and Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz figured the cost of the Iraq war at $12 billion a month. That means we spend more than $16 million an hour. If you do the math, the $50 million that went to suicide research is what we spend every three hours in Iraq.

The day after Christmas this year will mark our 3,000th day at war. At this point, we’ve heard a lot about suicide bombers, but what about suicide? Regardless of anyone’s feelings about our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, these soldiers deserve much more than three hours of our time.

Worn out has-been or drama queen? Interpretations of the Palestinian president's threat to quit vary greatly. By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost

JERUSALEM — Sometimes a quitter really does quit for good.

The Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, announced last week that he wouldn’t run for re-election in the proposed January elections. Back when he was Yasser Arafat’s deputy in the Palestine Liberation Organization, Abbas sulked off to his home in the Persian Gulf several times. As Arafat’s prime minister, he quit in the middle of the intifada, accusing the Palestinian leader of undermining him and slamming the U.S. for failing to back him fully.

Each time, he slipped back from exile, until he took over from Arafat on his death and was elected to office, in January 2005. But the 74-year-old now says that he’s exhausted by the political events of this past year, particularly the failure of the Obama administration to pressure Israel on continued settlement-building in the West Bank.

At first, Abbas’s announcement was interpreted as a ploy to press Washington and the Israelis. Israeli, European and Arab leaders called Abbas to beg him to stay on. The West has long banked on Abbas, one of the formulators of the Oslo Peace Accords, as the best hope for a deal with Israel. If he were to go, things might look bleak for peace. (Not that they don’t look bleak right now.)

Despite the phone calls to Ramallah, most leaders assessed Abbas’s move as a tactic rather than a genuine expression of finality — like an actress pouting in her trailer until the director strokes her ego. After all, Abbas said only that he wouldn’t run in the January elections. It’s far from certain that those elections will be held, because Hamas won’t allow a poll in the Gaza Strip, which it controls. That would leave Abbas in office, in spite of his announcement.

Then Palestinian officials started talking to local and international media about what they claimed were Abbas’ true feelings. To sum up: He’s really had it with the Israeli government’s intransigence, and the way the U.S. backed down over settlements was the last straw.

Abbas’ supporters added that if he were to quit, the entire Palestinian Authority might collapse. It is, after all, fairly unloved among Palestinians. The only politician to have told his aides he would run to replace Abbas, Marwan Barghouti, is serving a series of life sentences in an Israeli prison. There are also plenty of Palestinian leaders who hanker for the old days of backroom political deals and lucrative private trade monopolies, which were nixed by Abbas and his Prime Minister, Salaam Fayyad, a U.S.-trained economist.

Still an institution that receives more than $1 billion in international aid each year is unlikely to just go away. For that kind of money, someone will be found to keep it rolling. The threat of collapse seems like an attempt by Abbas’ friends to demonstrate how peeved he is.

So why is Abbas out of patience?

Early in the year, the new U.S. administration pushed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for a true freeze on building in Israel’s West Bank settlements. Washington insisted the freeze include so-called “natural growth,” which Israel uses to expand its building in the West Bank under the guise of new housing for existing residents.

But Netanyahu didn’t cave. During an Oct. 31 visit to Jerusalem, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised Netanyahu for showing “restraint” on settlement building. Restraint, Arab leaders pointed out, is not quite a freeze.

U.S. diplomats seemed to have been slipping toward this climb down for some weeks. Abbas already called Obama late last month to complain about it. That was when he first broached the idea of quitting.

Abbas had, after all, conditioned the resumption of peace talks on a total Israeli settlement freeze. He edged out onto that high diplomatic branch because he thought the U.S. was behind him. Gradually he saw that he was going to be left on that limb.

Backing down on the settlements isn’t an option for Abbas. He’s already seen as weak and vacillating by ordinary Palestinians. Over the summer, he backed off when the U.S. pressed him not to insist on an International Court of Justice trial for Israel, after the release of a U.N. report into the Hamas-Israel war in Gaza at the turn of the year.

Palestinian public outcry forced him to shift his position. But it was too late. He appeared to have confirmed long-standing suspicions that he lacked strength. Perhaps really quitting is the only thing that will show he can make a plan and stick to it.

When foreign correspondents come to Jerusalem they often ask me for advice on stories and places from which to witness the various conflicts that play out in this city. Next time, I’m going to buy them a ticket to the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo.

I go there every Saturday afternoon with my two-year-old son. But perhaps because our favorite animals (the cute little prairie dogs) have hibernated, I noticed that the zoo is a microcosm of all the things I covered here in a decade and a half as a journalist—conflicts which have turned up in my Palestinian crime novels, too.

Because despite being a writer of fiction, this is stuff you can’t make up. Read on, and you’ll see what I mean.

Conflict number 1: Ultra-religious Jews and secular Jews.

On the enclosure that’s home to the peccaries, there’s a sign in Hebrew and Yiddish. “Das ist nisht a khazir,” reads the Yiddish. “This is not a pig.” That’s because the large number of ultra-Orthodox Jews who cram the walkways of the zoo during the week would freak out if they thought there was a pig running on the sacred earth of Israel. (There used to be a pig farm in northern Israel where the swine were elevated on wooden platforms so they didn’t touch the holy land.)

The zoo’s original idea was to display only animals that appeared in the Bible. A special prize to any reader who can find me a peccary in the Bible. (The Chosen People wandered a long time, but I believe they didn’t claim to have made it to Central America.)

Conflict number 2: Secular Jews and ultra-religious Jews.

Of course, on Saturday afternoon, when I usually hit the zoo, there aren’t any ultra-Orthodox Jews there. They’re either dipping back and forth in prayer at the shtieblach or sleeping off a big Sabbath lunch. The fact that people like me can go to the zoo during the Sabbath is a secret from the ultra-religious. A woman passing through the gate asked about that fact recently. The guard explained, “We’re told to tell the dossim [rather negative Hebrew slang for the ultra-Orthodox:] that we’re closed on the Sabbath.”

So you can violate the Sabbath if you keep it a secret and adopt strange little dodges to stay within the letter of the law. The zoo doesn’t sell memberships on the weekend. It does sell tickets. But not from its regular ticket booth. It sets up a little kiosk a few yards away, so that it can claim that its ticket office is truly closed on the Sabbath. Just in case any of those dossim bother to ask…

Conflict number 3: Israelis and Palestinians

Just down from the elephant enclosure the zoo is preparing a new exhibit. It looks quite exciting. There are pools of carp and water falls. Rumor among the regulars is that we’ll soon be able to stroll among sea lions down there. As I was gazing longingly over the new layout (have you got it by now—I’m even more excited by the weekly zoo trip than my son), I glanced down at the checkpoint.

A small white hut, a raised bar and green-and-white concrete blocks, it looks rather like the old Checkpoint Charlie, except that it’s at the bottom of a deep, dusty valley spotted with olive trees. Checkpoints looked this way when I first came to Jerusalem 13 years ago. Most of the main ones have since been turned into enormous terminals, filled with security gear, designed to prevent potential suicide bombers from walking or driving right up to Israeli soldiers. But this checkpoint hasn’t changed. I sighed with something like nostalgia for the old days.

“That’s the West Bank right there,” said my wife.

“Yeah, this road goes around the back of that hill and into the Sidr checkpoint at the top of Beit Jala,” I said.

It’s a beautiful drive, even if the names signify conflict. This is the way I used to go to Bethlehem during the intifada. It takes you to the Christian village of Beit Jala where I set much of my first novel THE COLLABORATOR OF BETHLEHEM.

I pointed toward the hillside. “That rectangular, cream-colored building. That’s Cremisan, the monastery in Beit Jala where they make wine.”

My wife didn’t ask me if the wine was any good—she’s the one who benefits most from the fact that I’m tee-total, if you see what I mean. But I saw her eyebrows rise. I wondered if she was thinking how nice it is that wine is grown in a town that has Hamas members on its city council.

Conflict number 4: Arabs and Jews

Most of the week the bulk of the visitors to the Jerusalem Zoo are either the black-clad ultra-Orthodox Jews and their crowds of children, or East Jerusalem Arabs, their women’s heads covered. The Arabs bring crowds of children too. It’s one of the few public places where these two groups mix. The city’s hospitals are the others main locations for such frissons. If I was naïve, I’d say it’s a sign that beneath everything there’s hope that these two peoples can live together in peace.

But I’m not naïve, and the hospitals aren’t so nice. I just like zoos.

Conflict number 5: Lemurs and humans.

Lemurland is an enclosure of olive trees at the zoo where you walk through on a path surrounded by the animals. The ring-tailed lemurs are supposed to frolic delightfully while you watch. They don’t seem to have received that message. They keep jumping on people. Lemurland is closed briefly every time the lemurs get into someone’s bag of corn chips.

Are the lemurs mad? Perhaps they’re angry because, though they’re caged up at the Biblical Zoo, they didn’t get a mention in the Bible. Strange, because that doesn’t seem to bother the meerkats.

(I posted this on a joint blog I write with some other crime noveliest. Have a look at the other posts.)

Huffington Post book blogger Jason Pinter has a column about "The State of the Crime Novel." It's a fairly Yankocentric appraisal of current crime writing by a series of top US reviewers. It includes this from veteran mystery columnist Oline H. Cogdill: "One of the main missions of crime novels is to paint a timely portrait of the issues in our times. This doesn't mean these novels have to hit you over the head with a message or make a soapbox with their plots. The more subtle, the better. Crime novels are the social novels of today." I agree with that -- I've certainly tried to have my Palestinian detective novels function as an entertaining way to examine the society of the West Bank and Gaza -- though I don't think it's a necessary condition for a crime novel to be great. It's certainly true that by their nature crime novels are more likely to travel beyond the hallowed halls of the creative writing faculty in their search for material than so-called "literary" fiction. What do you think?