(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
[crime] In the book Cain´s Field – Faith, Fratricide, and Fear in the Middle East, Matt Rees tells the story of how two men with balaclava caps kill the Palestinian Adnan Shahine with a neck shot while his mother is watching. Adnan has provided information to the Israelis, the two hooded men say, and must therefore be executed to set an example.
Later, Rees meets a man with close ties to Fatah who tells how punishment and judgment work in Palestinian society. The Israeli security service Shin Beth is ubiquitous and has a well-developed network of informants and collaborators. But the Palestinian death squads often do not know who they are. Instead, they are looking for men who have no protection in the large Palestinian clans, and who can thus be more easily sacrificed.
An unlikely hero
In the sequel to The Collaborator of Bethlehem, Rees returns to this theme, but now in the form of fiction. The author's latest book is as suspicious as a crime novel, with heroes and criminals located within a Palestine that is in no small part consistent with the victim mythology created by the Israeli occupation. Instead, we meet a society where a collected and destructive energy is directed inward. The fight against the occupiers and the hope of peace lies in ruins, and the Palestinians have gone to war against each other.
The old elites have disappeared and the corrupt and brutal al-Aqsa brigades have taken over. Kills that are basically about money and power are being redefined as part of the fight against occupation. Rape and abuse are defended and justified by the necessity of moral cleansing. Cynical manipulation of pure martyrs is justified as recruiting soldiers in an asymmetrical war.
The book's crime scene is simple enough. Christian Palestinian George Saba is accused of providing information to the Israelis, which has led to the murder of a member of the brigades and his young wife. The hero of the book, who eventually slides into the role of self-appointed detective, is not at all sure that his old student is guilty. Instead, he looks at the al-Aqsa brigades himself, which brings him into life-threatening situations where both he and his family are in the firing line.
It's a somewhat unlikely hero. As an aging history teacher at UNRWA's girls' school in Bethlehem, Omar Yussef represents traditional, clan-ruled Palestine. He is old enough to remember what it was like before, when the great clans glued the people together in a common vision. Now he is struggling to counter the ideological flattening he sees among his young students. The war has emptied society of Yussef's old values. Outside of school, it's just a matter of surviving in a powerless, and at times blunt, society.
A distant presence
Matt Rees is no judge. Nor does he make his hero do it. The reader walks along the deserted Palestinian streets and alleys with Yussef and sees the same things he sees. Humans are not either good or evil, but carry a sadness over what they have become and what they were before. A corrupt police chief has resorted to the bottle to erase the memories of the executioner inside him. An al-Aqsa leader becomes a reservoir of etiquette when he meets a man from one of the larger clans, although he will almost certainly have to kill him afterwards.
It is elegantly done. The Israeli occupation has been pushed to the fringes of attention, and hangs only loosely over the roofs like a random thunder from helicopter propellers, or like a distant sight where the tanks boast over the horizon. Only occasionally does it come close, such as when Israeli excavators destroy a water main outside Yussef's house, or when Israeli security police raid across the street. Otherwise, it is quiet from the occupying power while the story unfolds and ends in a shooting drama in the birth church itself.
In other words, this is not "just" a crime novel. Matt Rees does the same in The Collaborator of Bethlehem as he did in Cain's Field, namely exploring the internal conflicts in Palestine and Israel. He found two societies that were so ethnically, religiously and socially divided that they were about to burst. Both were characterized by religious fanatics who chewed on their secular identity and who did not allow themselves to be stopped by moral principles or legal frameworks. None of them hesitated in front of the threshold of brutal violence.
Describes what he sees
It is this preparatory work that forms the basis when Rees has decided to launch his writing in a new format. It's a genre that suits him. As a novelist, Rees can more easily curb the demands for objectivity and balanced case presentation that are embedded in his role as a journalist in the news magazine Time.
Rees is not objective in the classical sense of the word. He has an opinion on the forces that have brought Palestine to the brink of collapse. He knows who they are, where they come from and the historical circumstances that enabled them to hijack and abuse power.
But he does not pretend to have the whole answer. Instead, he goes out into society effortlessly and fearlessly and describes what he sees. That makes him something as rare as a fictional local journalist in a controversial political setting. However, he is not political in any direct way, and does not specifically say that it is the occupation that has turned Palestine into an inferno of anxiety and violence. He leaves it to the reader to draw such conclusions.
Cain´s Field, which came before the war between Hamas and Fatah, was a blast of a book in a world that had not yet seen or accepted the decline of Palestinian society. The Collaborator of Bethlehem is also a fist, perhaps precisely because it is so low-key and intense.
This low-key nature is a hallmark of Rees, whether he is writing non-fiction books or crime novels. The authorship has just begun, and it has already been announced that he does not intend to let Omar Yussef end up as a detective with only one mystery behind him. It gives reason for expectation.
