Matt Rees's Blog, page 31
December 20, 2009
Big Mouth recommends my debut as "bloody good but a little bit different" for Christmas
Scott Pack, controversial publishing guru and self-declared big mouth (I can tell you he's rather more charming in person than such a description would imply), recommends my debut novel THE BETHLEHEM MURDERS (US title THE COLLABORATOR OF BETHLEHEM) for a Christmas gift on his blog. Writes Scott, as he roasts his chestnuts over an open fire at his home office in Windsor, "If you like crime novels and are looking for something that is bloody good but a little bit different then see if you can sneak one of these into your stocking." Seasons greetings to you, too, Scott, as I look over the dusty hillside toward Bethlehem from my office window -- where the only thing roasting in the Middle East's so-called winter is me...
PW stars new Omar Yussef novel
Publishers Weekly, the pre-publication review, stars my new Palestinian crime novel THE FOURTH ASSASSIN, which will be published Feb. 1 in the US and the UK. Here's the PW review: "The relentless cycle of violence and retribution follows Palestinian detective Omar Yussef to New York City, where he must deliver a speech at the U.N. on schooling in the Palestinian refugee camps, in Rees's excellent fourth mystery (after 2009's "The Samaritan's Secret"). When Yussef's son, Ala, is arrested after a decapitated body is found in Ala's Brooklyn apartment, Yussef's search for the real killer leads him from Atlantic Avenue to Coney Island and back to the U.N. Secretariat. In the process, he discovers that he's not quite the cosmopolitan man he thought himself to be, a realization shared by many Arab immigrants in the story. In truth, the residents of Little Palestine are caught between its subterranean mosques and the lure of Manhattan, where forbidden pleasures are ready for the plucking. Yussef remains reliably human and compassionate toward human fallibility, while raging openly at the corruption of his own leaders."
December 4, 2009
Best Mystery Books of Year
The Samaritan's Secret, the third of my Palestinian crime novels, was named one of the Best Mystery Books of the Year for 2009 by Deadly Pleasures, the crime fiction magazine with the best read on websites and what fans like. The cover you see here is from the US paperback edition of The Samaritan's Secret which'll be out in the New Year. The Deadly Pleasures list includes some of my personal favorites too--it's great to be in the company of James Ellroy, whose "Blood's a Rover" was a fitting culmination to his Underworld USA trilogy. Thanks to Deadly Pleasures. Read the rest of the list here and let me know what you think of it. Did they miss anything good?
December 3, 2009
Ass-backwards on Gays
When it comes to homosexuals, Palestinians have it all ass-backwards.
That led me to introduce homosexuality as a theme of THE SAMARITAN’S SECRET, my most recent Palestinian crime novel. I wanted to show how negative attitudes toward homosexuals function in the Muslim world, demonstrating the bloody consequences for gay Muslims and the struggles it causes the people around them. I’m glad I did, particularly after the recent shocking story of a Turkish man living an openly gay lifestyle who was tracked down and murdered by his own father—an honor killing with a difference.
As a novelist who writes about people of a different culture, it’s important not to have the members of that culture think as we’d somehow like them to think, in the West. To have them simply accord with our values.
But I’ve known Palestinian homosexuals and seen their suffering at keeping their real selves secret. Enough to be able to portray those sufferings, as it were, from the inside.
In my novel, the subject also gave me a bit of a conundrum in terms of style.
In each of my novels I’ve translated directly some of the more poetic phrases of local Arabic, as well as slang. So “Good morning” becomes “Morning of joy.” “Get lost” becomes “Fuck your mother’s cunt, you son of a whore.” You get the idea.
The slang word for homosexuals among Palestinians is a little more difficult to translate. Not the word itself, but the negative meaning of it.
Palestinians call homosexuals “Loutis.” “Lout” is the Arabic name for Lot, the brother of the biblical Abraham who was the one good man in the city of Sodom. The man God allowed Abraham to save.
The problem for me was that I couldn’t simply translate the name. To have someone say, “Yes, he’s a Lot-type.” You, dear reader, would wonder what that meant. You might think, “You mean, he’s like Lot, the righteous man. The one man in Sodom who wasn’t sodomizing the other…Sodomites?”
So I had to add a subtle explanation (I hope it’s subtle) that wouldn’t interrupt the conversational flow in the narrative. Here’s the first time the term turns up in THE SAMARITAN’S SECRET, when my detective Omar Yussef is talking with a local sheikh who is of a fundamentalist bent (if you’ll pardon the pun…):
“But I also don’t condemn some of the illogical things people do when their bodies demand it of them,” Omar Yussef said. “For them to do otherwise is to court depression and suicide, and that’s certainly against Islamic law.”
“You can’t mean you see nothing wrong in homosexuality? The holy Koran condemns homosexuals as /Loutis/, the people of Lot from Sodom.”
“Homosexuals suffer enough in our society without me hating them, too.”
“What if you learned that one of your sons was such a pervert?”
Omar Yussef gave a rasping laugh. “I’d blame his mother. But he’d still be my son.”
Of course part of my introduction of gay characters into THE SAMARITAN’S SECRET, which is set in Nablus, was an in-joke that only Palestinians would get. You see, whenever a Palestinian tells a homophobic joke, it’s always about a guy from Nablus who likes to be buggered.
Nabulsi men maintain that their reputation should belong to a group of Iraq soldiers who were stationed in Nablus during the 1948 war with Israel. The Iraqis, according to the men of Nablus, were the true “Loutis.” They raped many young boys from Nablus. So the idea that Nabulsi men tend to homosexuality, they claim, isn’t true.
Recount that “defense” to Palestinians from Jerusalem or Hebron and they’ll laugh that the Nabulsi boys enjoyed the visit of the Iraqi soldiers, which is why the reputation stuck…and on the joking will go.
Life for homosexuals in Nablus or anywhere else in the West Bank is dangerous. Some Palestinians used to sneak into Jerusalem to attend the city’s one gay night club (Israel’s gay culture is centered in Tel Aviv, and most Israeli Jerusalemites are hardly more gay-friendly than the Palestinians, as the man stabbed by a religious gay-baiter during the city’s gay parade four years ago could attest). The Palestinians were the most prominent among the drag queens at the club, which was close to the Jerusalem Municipality.
But the club’s closed now. Palestinian homosexuals simply can’t come out, because their families or neighbors might take a dreadful revenge upon them.
And that’s no joke.
November 29, 2009
In Bethlehem, the Third Intifada approaches
Rain on the streets of Bethlehem can't cool simmering tension. By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost
BETHLEHEM, West Bank — A writer seeks the surprise of a “man bites dog” story. The most violent times of the Second Intifada, which took place under the leaden winter skies of early 2002, gave me mine. I wrote about Arabs in the rain.
It was raining in the city of Jesus’ birth throughout “The Collaborator of Bethlehem,” the first of my Palestinian crime novels. I set the story during the brief Middle Eastern winter because it makes the place look different, not as one might expect.
That’s what I wanted to do for the Palestinians — to make readers look at them as real people, not as the stereotypes we’re accustomed to seeing in the news. Not as violent types rioting in the baking sunshine. But slouching through the drizzle, sitting in their overcoats on their living room couches with no heat.
As I crossed the checkpoint and went through the gate in the Israeli wall around the town, the skies darkened, flat and gray this week, too. By the time I greeted my friend Walid, a former bodyguard to Yasser Arafat, the sky was pouring already.
“The city seems a bit livelier than it was the run-up to last Christmas,” I said.
"Yes,” said Walid, who also happens to be a Palestinian weight-lifting champion (he dead-lifts 680 pounds). “But underneath, it’s very dangerous and everyone fears a Third Intifada.”
Again, not what you'd expect. Palestinians are supposed to be on the way to a better life, with the security and economic improvements pushed by U.S. diplomats and advisers. Stutteringly, without much help from their Israeli counterparts or their own civil strife, but getting there. Still like the rain in this desert town, that view warrants another look.
Palestinian newspapers have reported in the last week that the Fatah Party is preparing for new demonstrations against Israel, which it will dub the “Third Intifada.” (The First Intifada, from 1987 to 1993, was considered a success among Palestinians, because the abiding image was of young boys throwing stones at Israeli tanks. The Second Intifada, 2000 to 2005, failed, because it turned quickly to armed violence and brought the wrath of the Israeli army fully onto Palestinian civilians.)
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is reported to have given his support to a new intifada, provided it eschews firearms. Disappointed with the U.S. failure to force an absolute freeze on Israeli settlement construction, Fatah wants to unleash protests of the kind that take place every Friday at the Israeli “separation barrier” near the villages of Bilin and Na’alin. Stone-throwing and tear gas are the order of the day there.
But Hamas would be unlikely to stick to stones. In Bethlehem, Palestinian officials say Hamas has been working underground to rebuild its power — the West Bank is under Fatah’s control and many Hamas men have been jailed. A Third Intifada would be an opportunity for the Islamist group to come into the open, to confront Israeli soldiers and, more worrisome for many Bethlehem residents, to take on the Palestinian Authority and perhaps win control of the city.
Walid and I headed to Dehaisha Refugee Camp. It’s home to 16,000 people, including the fictional character in my books, schoolteacher-detective Omar Yussef (and the real-life figure on whom I based him). I always love being in Dehaisha. It isn’t what you’d expect from the city of childhood Christmas carols.
It’s densely packed, clinging to a hillside. Buildings in poured concrete and cinder block rising to four stories. Colorful graffiti about the dead of the intifadas and about hope for a kind of freedom that seems far off. In the rain, water floods down the steep streets, because there’s inadequate drainage.
In the long, narrow alley where the Akhras clan lives, there was the taint of urine in the damp air, as the drains backed up. On the shuttered front of a small workshop, posters marked the death in March 2002 of Ayat al-Akhras. She was 18. She witnessed her cousin’s death, killed by Israeli soldiers. She decided to take revenge. She became the third female suicide bomber of the Second Intifada. She killed a supermarket guard and an Israeli girl almost her own age. Now she’s a faded poster and, outside the school where my fictional Omar teaches, she’s a large stencil painted black onto a pedestrian bridge, brandishing a pistol.
Her uncle Lutfi al-Akhras hobbled along the street. He greeted me with a left-handed shake. His right hand is a paralyzed fist, since he took a bullet in 1990. You could say he should’ve got the message before that blow. Earlier in the First Intifada, in 1988, an Israeli bullet shattered his left knee and another took away part of his head. Beneath his thinning black hair, a quarter of his skull is plastic. He lets me touch it, from time to time.
Lutfi led me up the cold stairs to his apartment. A bare room, a couple of couches, a television tuned to a Japanese cartoon with Arabic voice-over on a Jordanian channel, a spartan kitchen and a simple bathroom. His wife was back in the bedroom and, though Lutfi is not particularly religious, she stayed there until I left, out of modesty.
His daughter came out to say hello. She’s 10 years old, but she looks 7 at most. I assume it’s the lack of nutrition. After all, Lutfi can’t work with his disabilities. He gets an allowance of 1,350 shekels a month from the Palestinian Authority. That’s about $375. “It isn’t much,” he said. “Well, it isn’t really anything.”
With his good hand, Lutfi shakily cooked some coffee on the stove. Flavored with cardamom, it was thick and good. He was hopeful German mediators could do a deal between Hamas and Israel to free Palestinian prisoners in exchange for an Israeli soldier held in Gaza. Perhaps, he said, the deal would be done by the end of the week, when Muslims celebrate the festival of Eid al-Adha, marking the new moon that ends the Hajj pilgrimage.
I asked him what he thought of the talk among Palestinian leaders of a Third Intifada. “God willing, it won’t happen.” With his good hand, he lifted his useless arm and was quiet. It was as though he were thinking about his crippling in a time of intifada, his niece’s dreadful sacrifice, and wondering how many more lives would be ended or ruined by a new round of violence.
His train of thought seemed to flash from his own disaster and its consequences to those of the Palestinian future. “Thirteen hundred shekels, it’s really nothing,” he murmurs. “God willing, this thing won’t happen. God willing.”
BETHLEHEM, West Bank — A writer seeks the surprise of a “man bites dog” story. The most violent times of the Second Intifada, which took place under the leaden winter skies of early 2002, gave me mine. I wrote about Arabs in the rain.
It was raining in the city of Jesus’ birth throughout “The Collaborator of Bethlehem,” the first of my Palestinian crime novels. I set the story during the brief Middle Eastern winter because it makes the place look different, not as one might expect.
That’s what I wanted to do for the Palestinians — to make readers look at them as real people, not as the stereotypes we’re accustomed to seeing in the news. Not as violent types rioting in the baking sunshine. But slouching through the drizzle, sitting in their overcoats on their living room couches with no heat.
As I crossed the checkpoint and went through the gate in the Israeli wall around the town, the skies darkened, flat and gray this week, too. By the time I greeted my friend Walid, a former bodyguard to Yasser Arafat, the sky was pouring already.
“The city seems a bit livelier than it was the run-up to last Christmas,” I said.
"Yes,” said Walid, who also happens to be a Palestinian weight-lifting champion (he dead-lifts 680 pounds). “But underneath, it’s very dangerous and everyone fears a Third Intifada.”
Again, not what you'd expect. Palestinians are supposed to be on the way to a better life, with the security and economic improvements pushed by U.S. diplomats and advisers. Stutteringly, without much help from their Israeli counterparts or their own civil strife, but getting there. Still like the rain in this desert town, that view warrants another look.
Palestinian newspapers have reported in the last week that the Fatah Party is preparing for new demonstrations against Israel, which it will dub the “Third Intifada.” (The First Intifada, from 1987 to 1993, was considered a success among Palestinians, because the abiding image was of young boys throwing stones at Israeli tanks. The Second Intifada, 2000 to 2005, failed, because it turned quickly to armed violence and brought the wrath of the Israeli army fully onto Palestinian civilians.)
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is reported to have given his support to a new intifada, provided it eschews firearms. Disappointed with the U.S. failure to force an absolute freeze on Israeli settlement construction, Fatah wants to unleash protests of the kind that take place every Friday at the Israeli “separation barrier” near the villages of Bilin and Na’alin. Stone-throwing and tear gas are the order of the day there.
But Hamas would be unlikely to stick to stones. In Bethlehem, Palestinian officials say Hamas has been working underground to rebuild its power — the West Bank is under Fatah’s control and many Hamas men have been jailed. A Third Intifada would be an opportunity for the Islamist group to come into the open, to confront Israeli soldiers and, more worrisome for many Bethlehem residents, to take on the Palestinian Authority and perhaps win control of the city.
Walid and I headed to Dehaisha Refugee Camp. It’s home to 16,000 people, including the fictional character in my books, schoolteacher-detective Omar Yussef (and the real-life figure on whom I based him). I always love being in Dehaisha. It isn’t what you’d expect from the city of childhood Christmas carols.
It’s densely packed, clinging to a hillside. Buildings in poured concrete and cinder block rising to four stories. Colorful graffiti about the dead of the intifadas and about hope for a kind of freedom that seems far off. In the rain, water floods down the steep streets, because there’s inadequate drainage.
In the long, narrow alley where the Akhras clan lives, there was the taint of urine in the damp air, as the drains backed up. On the shuttered front of a small workshop, posters marked the death in March 2002 of Ayat al-Akhras. She was 18. She witnessed her cousin’s death, killed by Israeli soldiers. She decided to take revenge. She became the third female suicide bomber of the Second Intifada. She killed a supermarket guard and an Israeli girl almost her own age. Now she’s a faded poster and, outside the school where my fictional Omar teaches, she’s a large stencil painted black onto a pedestrian bridge, brandishing a pistol.
Her uncle Lutfi al-Akhras hobbled along the street. He greeted me with a left-handed shake. His right hand is a paralyzed fist, since he took a bullet in 1990. You could say he should’ve got the message before that blow. Earlier in the First Intifada, in 1988, an Israeli bullet shattered his left knee and another took away part of his head. Beneath his thinning black hair, a quarter of his skull is plastic. He lets me touch it, from time to time.
Lutfi led me up the cold stairs to his apartment. A bare room, a couple of couches, a television tuned to a Japanese cartoon with Arabic voice-over on a Jordanian channel, a spartan kitchen and a simple bathroom. His wife was back in the bedroom and, though Lutfi is not particularly religious, she stayed there until I left, out of modesty.
His daughter came out to say hello. She’s 10 years old, but she looks 7 at most. I assume it’s the lack of nutrition. After all, Lutfi can’t work with his disabilities. He gets an allowance of 1,350 shekels a month from the Palestinian Authority. That’s about $375. “It isn’t much,” he said. “Well, it isn’t really anything.”
With his good hand, Lutfi shakily cooked some coffee on the stove. Flavored with cardamom, it was thick and good. He was hopeful German mediators could do a deal between Hamas and Israel to free Palestinian prisoners in exchange for an Israeli soldier held in Gaza. Perhaps, he said, the deal would be done by the end of the week, when Muslims celebrate the festival of Eid al-Adha, marking the new moon that ends the Hajj pilgrimage.
I asked him what he thought of the talk among Palestinian leaders of a Third Intifada. “God willing, it won’t happen.” With his good hand, he lifted his useless arm and was quiet. It was as though he were thinking about his crippling in a time of intifada, his niece’s dreadful sacrifice, and wondering how many more lives would be ended or ruined by a new round of violence.
His train of thought seemed to flash from his own disaster and its consequences to those of the Palestinian future. “Thirteen hundred shekels, it’s really nothing,” he murmurs. “God willing, this thing won’t happen. God willing.”
November 26, 2009
Scene of the Crime
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 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.)
November 25, 2009
Where BBC radio producers get their ideas
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.
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.
November 23, 2009
Why Israelis pick Tarantino over Spielberg
Latent shame over the Jews' failure to stand up to the Nazis is cited as a reason for the success of "Inglourious Basterds."
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.”
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.”
November 22, 2009
My Palestinian crime novels, Ethiopian marathoners and Michael Jackson's glove on the BBC
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.
What's behind claims about Israel's organ trade?
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 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.
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 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.
