However, there are many benefits to living in a country where the Jewish and Muslim calendars predominate. Right now, for example, I’m reaping one of those benefits, wishing my Jewish pals a “shana tova,” or happy New Year, while outside the weather is balmy to bloody hot.

The Jewish New Year is a time, as a friend of mine mentioned yesterday, for praying. It’s followed a few days later by Yom Kippur, which is a time for asking God not to kill you in the forthcoming year. It’s not a time for getting wasted, trying to random kiss women in the street, vomiting in Trafalgar Square, or punching some bloke because he looked at you the wrong way.

Those, of course, are the traditions of December 31, and I never much enjoyed them. It’s very pleasant to wish someone Happy New Year without slurring your speech – an experience I never had before the age of 27. It’s also great that the Jewish New Year starts at sundown, rather than at midnight. I’ve got a seven-week-old baby. Why should I stay up until midnight to watch people get drunk and sing the nonsensical words of an old Scottish ballad?

The last time I “celebrated” the New Year’s holiday with which most of you are probably familiar, it was 1993 and it was New York. I had an eventful night. I was jostled by a police horse in Times Square, shortly after which the horse appeared to have a seizure and collapsed right next to me. I swallowed so many Jell-o shots I couldn’t stand up. When I made it to my feet, I hailed a taxi and got out without paying underneath the Williamsburg Bridge, thinking it was where I lived. (I lived 90 blocks away.) I got very cold and slept in a dumpster. I woke up early, went to my girlfriend’s house for a day we had planned to spend together, and shivered in bed until the afternoon, retching every quarter of an hour. (She’s married to a Wall Street bond trader. Which means she must be retching every fifteen minutes now.)

Happy New Year, eh?

By contrast, I’m not compelled by peer pressure to celebrate the Jewish New Year. On Yom Kippur, I’ll take a walk with my family through Jerusalem’s streets, which are entirely free of traffic on that day.

My friends here will be going through the torment of family holidays. Of three straight days filled with the proscriptions of the Sabbath. Mothers all over the country will suffer nervous breakdowns as they strive to provide meals for the whole holiday period without actually cooking once the holiday starts. And then they have to run around apologizing to anyone they might have affronted in the last year, for fear God might not sign them into the book of life for the next year. For them, it’s pure craziness.

But for me it’s a great holiday. And I can completely ignore December 31! Happy New Year.

The comparison is between: a delightful radio chat on the BBC in 1958 between Raymond Chandler and Ian Fleming; and a load of paranoid weirdness from Henning Mankell.

First, Chandler and Fleming. Listen to their talk. I rarely bother listen to
an entire half hour of anything online, but I’m telling you this is
beautiful. Both of them are unpolished as all hell. For anyone who’s been to
a book fair and seen the well-honed wisecracks and calibrated personae of today’s authors, this’ll be refreshing.

When Fleming asks Chandler to explain how a hit is done in America (which
surely seemed like a very dangerous place to the average BBC listener of
half a century ago), gruff old Ray puffs on his pipe and spins an unlikely tale of gunmen brought to New York from that den of iniquity, Minneapolis. It
impresses Fleming so much that he refers to it in summing up the broadcast
as something very enlightening and shocking and underground that Chandler
has given us.

But most of all from Chandler’s side there’s the news that he intended
another Marlowe novel in which the great shamus would be married (see the
end of “Playback”) and, though he’d love his wife, he’d be frustrated by her
friends and the ease with which he lives.

Fleming, meanwhile, is very British and self-deprecating, pointing out
several times that his novels are pale shadows of what Chandler writes. In
turn, Chandler is amazed that Fleming writes a novel in two months during
his annual Jamaica vacation, having never written one faster than three
months himself. He then opines that “you starve 10 years before even your
publisher knows you’re any good.” Amen to that.

This truly beautiful conversation – hearing the voices of these fellows is
priceless in itself – was in stark contrast to Henning Mankell’s appearance
in an Israeli newspaper last week.

The starting point for Mankell’s piece was his deportation from Israel a
year ago. He was among the pro-Palestinian activists aboard a flotilla of
ships headed for Gaza, which was intercepted by Israeli commandoes. Aboard one of the ships, the commandoes and activists fought and nine activists were killed. Mankell was among those brought back to Israel on the boats and then deported.

His article in Ha’aretz last week goes through the story of a Facebook page
opened in his name. It declared support for the Lebanese Islamists of
Hezbollah and other positions he claims not to share. Facebook took the site
down twice at Mankell’s request. Mankell wonders who was behind the Facebook page.

To anyone who’s been in the Middle East, the most obvious answer is: a
Palestinian supporter saw that Mankell was on their side and decided to
hijack his name for some other causes to which he or she thought Mankell
might be inclined. Or at least that they’d be causes to which readers might
assume Mankell was inclined, knowing his position on Palestine.

But no. With a circuitous logic never apparent in his plodding Wallander
novels, Henning tells us that he heard the Israeli government wanted to use
social media to attack its enemies. Is this behind the “Henning Mankell”
Facebook page? Twice he writes: “Who would benefit from this?”

“Obviously I cannot and will not claim that it is either the Israeli regime
or the Israeli embassy in Sweden that is responsible for my kidnapped
identity and the attempts to spread lies in my name. But the question
remains: Who would benefit from this?”

In other words, he said it was the Israelis.

Well, now that you mention it, Henning, of course Israel is so threatened by
Henning Mankell that its agents spread active propaganda in favor of
Hezbollah, which kills Israelis and may indeed benefit from the propaganda
on the HM FB page, just so that they can neutralize the danger of HM.

Anyone who reads my blog or my Palestinian novels will see that I’m no shill
for Israel. But Mankell’s article is the kind of paranoid crap that makes me
see why he was attracted to the Middle East in the first place. It’s a place
where conspiracy theories abound.

When you listen to Chandler and Fleming, you hear them thinking through
their positions and ideas as they speak. Fleming is clearly altered as a
writer after half an hour with Chandler. If only Mankell had as open a mind.

It got me thinking about all the guff that tourists have to swallow. How often do visitors stream to must-see attractions which are actually unattractive – and which are only worth seeing so you can tell other people you’ve been there. I decided to apply this theory to Jerusalem, a city that’s a major tourist attraction and where I’ve lived 15 years. Here’s the Honest Tours guide to a selection of sites all of which are listed in most guides as delightful spots for tourists:

The Israel Museum: Just completed a $100 million renovation. Ho-hum. Makes you wonder what at least $90 million of the budget went on. But the donations included a major one from the Marc Rich Foundation, so perhaps the whole thing was just a money-laundering scheme. Though the museum has some interesting archeological bits and pieces, give the art galleries a miss unless you thinks a pile of old school desks nailed together in a white room ought to be called contemporary art.

The Old City: I felt deep sympathy for businessmen who suffered during the economic deprivations of the second Palestinian intifada during the last decade. Except for the nasty traders of the Old City. They’ve been fleecing tourists in a particularly mean manner for years and it was time they got a dose of karma. If you like bad hummus and surly service, try the couple of hummus restaurants listed in all the guides as “the best hummus in Jerusalem.”

The Western/Wailing Wall: Prepare to have your mystical communion with the ancient stones interrupted by a guy who looks like he stepped out of Vilna circa 1822. He’ll shove his hand in your face and ask for charity. Not for nothing does Yiddish (which many of these guys speak) have the best word for “sponger” in any language (“schnorrer”). The place is a Mecca for them.

Yad Vashem: Who doesn’t want to relive the Holocaust when they’re on vacation? A relatively new addition to the site of Israel’s “Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Authority” has made it at least an interesting museum. But unless you’re determined to shed tears the eternal flame and the older elements aren’t worth schlepping out to Mount Herzl.

Dome of the Rock: Now this is a genuinely unmissable experience. Too bad you’ll have to miss it, unless you’re a Muslim. At the start of the intifada in 2000, the Muslim authorities closed the Temple Mount to all non-Muslims. A big yah-boo to the whole world, which they thought was ganging up on them, like a bawling kid taking his ball home to spoil everyone’s game. Some years later they opened the platform of the Temple Mount during certain hours. But non-Muslims can no longer enter the Aqsa Mosque or the golden Dome of the Rock. Of course, you can hang out at the doors to catch a glimpse inside and be told (often rudely, as if your intention was to burst inside and desecrate the place) that you mustn’t enter.

Mea Shearim: Talking of rude, Jerusalem’s main ultra-Orthodox neighborhood has become increasingly a law unto itself. One Israeli newspaper reported that yeshiva students have been chasing the police out, thus making it a no-go district patrolled by gangs of weedy little men in black hats who think that spitting on a woman because they can see her shoulders is a good way to protect the Torah.

Jerusalem Forest: If the Norwegians knew that the hardy Norwegian pine would one day spread across the hills of Jerusalem and destroy all the natural undergrowth, they’d surely have chopped down every last one. Don’t worry, though: Yad Vashem is expanding its “campus” and eating into the forest, and there’s a housing/land shortage in Jerusalem, so this particular “attraction” won’t be around much longer.

If you have suggestions for the Honest Tours Guide to World Travel, drop me a note. I’d like to formulate a post featuring all the top worthless or disappointing sites in the world. I think it’d be a very popular feature. Let me know.

DAMASCUS TRANCE
An Omar Yussef story
By Matt Rees

The crowd started to clear the wide, covered arcade of the Souk Hammidiyye even before the first shot. Omar Yussef saw a dread deeper than mere terror on the faces of the people hurrying out of the Ottoman market and into the alleys around the Ummayyad Mosque. They look disgusted with themselves, he thought. They had started to believe they had the courage to walk toward trouble, not to flee from it.

Three reports from a rifle out beyond the old Hejaz Railway Station and a rustle of distant outrage, as if the crowd were an old man bothered by his grandchildren during a nap.

“It’s going down.” Khamis Zeydan caught Omar Yussef’s elbow and pulled him out of the sudden stream of the crowd. They sheltered on the step of a store that sold seeds and roots which promised to make a man potent.

“All these years it was we Palestinians who did the rioting,” Omar Yussef said. “Our first day in Damascus and it’s happening here.”

A shot, this time closer, from al-Thawra Street, and one of the yellowed glass panes in the vaulted roof of the arcade shattered. Every face was stern and still, but someone must have been shouting because it seemed the crowd was born aloft and accelerated on a tide of noise.

The storekeeper reached for his shutter with a long hook. “I have to close, ustaz.” Omar Yussef moved off the step and the metal rolled down. He glanced at the merchant. He was about Omar Yussef’s age, nearing sixty, and something about his high cheekbones was familiar despite his frothy white beard. As the storekeeper knelt to snap the padlock, the edge of the crowd jostled him, and as soon as the key was out he was on his feet and swept away.

A whirlpool of panic broke around Omar Yussef and Khamis Zeydan, pressing them between the chests and backs and shoulders of the men around them so that their feet barely connected with the ground. They slipped powerless from one set of bodies to another, exchanging the scents of different sweats and wondering at the pointless projection of angry voices like dogs joining a starlight chorus.

When the crowd spat them out into an alley, Khamis Zeydan lit a Rothman’s. “I haven’t run that far since we were in University.”

“Let’s hope it’s the only part of our student life that’s repeated at this reunion,” Omar Yussef said. “You know how I was back then.”

“Relax. You don’t drink anymore.” Khamis Zeydan blew gray smoke from his nose. “We can’t stay here. The mukhabarat might chase the protesters down this way.”

Omar Yussef braced a trembling hand against the old stone of the wall. He wondered if he had touched this very place when he was a student at Damascus University. He may have planted his fingers right here in 1969. It looked like just the kind of quiet place where he would have stopped to throw up the alcohol.

If only the other things that poisoned me through those years had been as easily voided.

He groaned with the sciatica in his right leg and followed Khamis Zeydan along the covered alley. His friend’s cigarette made him cough, but he tracked its odor as he stumbled into the dark.

They returned to their hotel by the Suleimaniyye Mosque, taking a wide loop to the north. They skirted the tomb of Saladin and the great porticos of the Ummayyad Mosque. The Iranian pilgrims, their women swathed in black, took refuge from the stampede beside the shrine to Hussein, son of the Caliph Ali, first among the Shia, whose head was buried there. Beyond the Paradise Gate in the wall of the old town, they crossed the narrow Barada River. Omar Yussef looked down. The water dribbled, thick and muddy, through its concrete course. His blood felt as viscous and his tongue as parched.

In the lobby of the Semiramis, the message board read: “Welcome, Damascus University Class of 196 Reunion. Evening Program Dinner w/Sufi Dancing.” Omar Yussef wheezed and shivered in the air-conditioning. Khamis Zeydan lit a cigarette and bent to pick up the number that had dropped from the board. He plugged it into their graduation year.

“Nineteen sixty-nine,” he said. “Do you remember, you had curly black hair, like Charlie Chaplin?”

“You’ve reminded me about that before.” Omar Yussef patted at the white strand he combed over his bald scalp. His hand came away damp with sweat. “I’m not the only one who’s changed.”

“I’m sure you’re not. I’m no prize either. I’m missing a hand from a grenade, I’ve got fragments of shrapnel in various parts of my body, and I’m a diabetic. I bet when we see the other guys, there’ll be some fat bellies bursting through their little business suits.”

“That isn’t what I meant.” Omar Yussef poked his finger at the word Sufi on the message board. “I saw Tayyib al-Jamali in the souk.”

Khamis Zeydan’s pale blue eyes widened. “By Allah, where?”

“We sheltered in front of his shop when the shooting started. He was the one who shuttered the place. I knew his face, but he was gone so quickly.”

“It makes sense, I suppose. The store’s just around the corner from the Sufi mosque.”

“The Mawlawiyye.”

“The one with the little Fez on top of the minaret, instead of the crescent. That’s the one. Let’s have a coffee.” Khamis Zeydan went up the steps to the lounge. He sat on a long, square sofa of a design Omar Yussef thought might have been favored in Europe back when the PLO was still feted by famous film actresses. “Tayyib al-Jamali. Well, he won’t be coming to the reunion.”

“Obviously not. He didn’t graduate.” Omar Yussef sank into the sofa. He felt as though his backside was descending all the way to the floor. His knees creaked and a sharp flame of pain burned up his stiff leg.

Khamis Zeydan lit a smoke. “He graduated from somewhere else.”

“He did?”

“Mazzah Prison. I met him there, when Assad’s father put me away for a while in the early ‘Seventies. Poor bastard.”

“They put you in with the Sufis?”

Khamis Zeydan held up two fingers to the waiter for coffee and gestured at Omar Yussef. “He’ll have his bitter.”

“Surely you were––”

“More dangerous than him? Well, I was on the wrong side for a while, because Assad was mad at the Old Man. But the guards knew I’d work with them again as soon as that quarrel was patched up. Tayyib was different.”

“What’s so dangerous about Sufis, in the name of Allah? It’s ridiculous.”

“When the ruler comes from a minority like the Alawwi, any other group is a threat. Even if all they want to do is spin around in circles and recite poetry, like the Sufis.”

“He’s not in jail anymore.”

“Selling hard-on medicine in the souk? I’d rather rot in a boiling cell than spend my days in such humiliation. Anyway, Sufis are all right these days, it seems. We’re even going to watch them dance tonight.”

“Yes, I’m looking forward to that.”

Khamis Zeydan tensed. Omar Yussef followed his eyes and saw a thin man with sparse black hair slouching into the lounge with a grin like a gravedigger’s secret.

“Is that––?” Omar Yussef said.

Khamis Zeydan stood. “Son of a whore.”

“––Laith al-Atrash?”

The man stood above Omar Yussef. He smelled of medicated soap and brandy. Omar Yussef struggled, but the spongy sofa sucked him down. Laith al-Atrash shoved him gently on the shoulder and laughed. “Don’t get up, Omar. It’s good to see you.” He held out his hand. Omar Yussef shook it as if he were wary of a trick electric-shock ring.

The waiter brought their coffees and set them on the table. Khamis Zeydan looked down at the tiny cups and stroked his nicotine-stained mustache as though he had been presented with an emetic.

Laith took Khamis Zeydan’s lapels between his ghostly fingers and kissed him three times. “Abu Adel, welcome to Damascus. May it be as if this were your home and you were with your own family.” His cheek was a bluish white and the dark stubble along his jaw looked as if it had been pricked out with charcoal.

He pulled an upright chair to the sofa and sat, leaning over Omar Yussef. He reached down and touched Omar Yussef’s knee. He slid his fingertips back and forth, so that it felt as though they moved beneath the skin. “It’s been so very long, Abu Ramiz.”

“Not long enough.” Khamis Zeydan remained on his feet. He seemed to quiver with barely repressed energy.

Laith laughed and wagged his finger at Omar Yussef’s friend. “Don’t be like that. Let’s catch up. Tell me, what have my old university comrades been doing in the many years since we last met?”

“Why don’t you just check your files?” Khamis Zeydan rattled some phlegm.
Omar Yussef waved for his friend to calm himself and sit. “Abu Adel is police chief in Bethlehem,” he told Laith, “and I am the principal of one of the UN schools there in the Dehaisha Camp.”

“And you’re still a mukhabarat bastard,” Khamis Zeydan said.

“If I’m a secret policeman, how do you know?” Laith opened his arms wide and turned his smile through a one-eighty, as if he were playing to a big audience. “Unless you’re mukhabarat too.”

“That’s how it works in Syria. The secret police are out in the open, so everyone worries that there must be other agents in their family or at work doing the real informing.”

Laith clapped his hands like a man hearing a fine joke. Khamis Zeydan cursed under his breath and walked fast toward the elevators.

“He should forget about what happened.” Laith frowned and spoke to Omar Yussef in a sad, confiding tone. “It was a long time ago.”

“What do you mean?”

The Syrian shrugged under his ill-fitting blue suit. “You know, it was about nineteen seventy-one.”

“And?”

“I shot him in the back.”

Omar Yussef knew Khamis Zeydan had taken a bullet after he left the Syrian jail, on his way to meet up with other PLO fighters in Beirut. It had been part of the infighting among all the resistance groups and Arab intelligence services that followed the expulsion of the Palestinian organizations from Jordan. “That was you?”

“They sent me to get him. They knew I’d recognize his face. As an old university comrade.”

“Were you supposed to kill him?”

Laith lifted his hand, palm downward, and wiggled it. “Maybe, maybe not. But I’m pleased to see you’re more forgiving, Abu Ramiz.”

“Actually I just can’t get out of this chair, or I’d have gone with my friend.”

Laith stood and hauled Omar Yussef from the sofa with a surprisingly strong grip on his thin wrist. “You’re out of shape, my dear old friend. May Allah bring you good health.”

Omar Yussef walked away.

“Aren’t you worried I might shoot you in the back?” Laith smiled.

“You did your damage to me a long time ago.” Omar Yussef gestured to the street, where groups of young men were jogging away from the demonstrations. “Besides, today you and your mukhabarat have other targets.”

“These criminals? They won’t last long.”

“The criminals are the ones opening fire on people who only want a better life.”

Laith shook his finger and leered. “I should’ve taught you a lesson long ago, too. You’re the same impetuous bigmouth I knew back in our politics seminar. And look what happened then.”

Omar Yussef returned to the coffee table. He felt the uncontrollable rush of adrenaline that signaled one of his fits of anger. He knew it would course through him long after he had left Laith and that he would regret whatever he might say, but it had always been beyond him to control it.

“You blackmailed me when we were students, but you’ve got nothing on me now,” he said.

“Once you’ve been blackmailed, the blackmailer has you for life. You know what you did. But do you want your angry old friend, the police chief, to know?”

Omar Yussef recalled the feeling of constriction that used to come upon him as a young student, each time Laith demanded information on the other political factions. He tried never to give much away, but he had to satisfy him. Laith had been a mukhabarat informant even then, and Omar Yussef had not long been released from a Jordanian jail. The threat of expulsion from the university and deportation to the West Bank had been real. “The charges against me in Jordan were trumped up by political opponents back in Bethlehem.”

“I knew that, but it didn’t mean I couldn’t use it to make you work for me then. Since when does the truth have anything to do with Arab politics.”

A gunshot sounded down near the Suleimaniyye Mosque.

“Not then. But perhaps it does now.” Omar Yussef went to the elevator. He turned toward the café to tell Laith that he wasn’t afraid of him, but the intelligence man had already gone to another table to greet some old schoolmates.

Another shot and the youths on the street went into a run. The elevator doors closed on him.

As the elevator climbed to Omar Yussef’s floor, the silence chilled him.

Maybe it isn’t only because Laith wasn’t listening that you lost your tongue, he thought. You’re still afraid.

Night came down over Mount Qasioun. Omar Yussef knotted his tie and looked from his hotel window at the sandy crag in the moonlight. He strained his eyes to see the saints that Muslims believe prayed on the mountain in a vigil each night, and he smiled. They also say it’s the place where Cain slew Abel, he thought. I only need to look in the street below to see that reenacted.

The presidential palace was low and square on the ridge. Omar Yussef imagined the young President watching the city from high above in the place where murder was invented. Does he look down with fear or hatred? he wondered. No, with calculation. He’s playing a game of backgammon with every Syrian, but he’s the only one who counts the numbers on the dice.

He went to Khamis Zeydan’s room. The Bethlehem police chief swung the door open. He was drinking whisky from a plastic tooth mug. A Gulf news channel blared from the television. “Why’re you dressed up?”

“The reunion. You can’t have forgotten?” Omar Yussef shut the door.

Khamis Zeydan emptied the cup and pointed to the television screen. “Surely it won’t be going ahead. There are two dozen people dead today alone.”

Omar Yussef flushed with shame. Khamis Zeydan laid a hand on his wrist. “It’s okay. So you didn’t consider it. We came a long way for this, but it’s best if we just eat downstairs.”

“I didn’t think about––” Omar Yussef stammered. “I wanted to watch the Sufis dance at the restaurant tonight.”

“If you’d like to see someone spin around in circles, I’ll refill my hipflask.”

They came out of the elevator into the lobby. The other dozen men from their graduating class were gathered by the revolving doors, discharging cigarette smoke and cologne. One of them waved to Khamis Zeydan and pointed urgently at his watch.

“It seems you aren’t the only one who likes to watch dancing,” Khamis Zeydan said.

The mention of so many dead was sour on Omar Yussef’s tongue. He stood at the edge of the group, ignoring the boisterous conversation, as they moved to the minibus.

They drove past the Hejaz Station. Omar Yussef sought signs of the day’s shooting. Every twenty yards, a slim soldier of the Revolutionary Guard stood on the kerb. Their red berets angled to their brows, they held assault rifles across their chests.

“I was here when the president’s father died in 2000,” Khamis Zeydan said. “They brought the Guard out then.”

“What does it mean?”

“Either they think they’re about to lose control, or they’re about to remind us all that such a thing is impossible.”

“How would they do that?”

Khamis Zeydan mouthed the word Hama. The President’s father had killed twenty thousand people there three decades ago. To suppress a revolt, and to discourage any future uprising.

Omar Yussef watched the silent streets and the soldiers shifting from foot to foot, and he whispered the name of that wretched city to himself.

They descended from the bus at the entrance to the Medhat Pasha Souk and went into the narrow streets, reminiscing about each corner as they passed.

“Down there,” Omar Yussef said, “was the café where the hakawati used to tell their fables.”

“The storytellers are still there,” Khamis Zeydan said. “But it’s just for the tourists these days. Syrians prefer the television.”

In the Moawiyye Palace, they took their places on low divans along the walls of the black stone vault. A waiter, wearing white pantaloons and an embroidered vest, lowered a brass tray onto a wooden frame before them. It was spread with salads of eggplant and parsley, with hummus and labaneh, and with fried cheese.

“Muhammara.” Khamis Zeydan reached for the red paste of hot peppers, ground walnuts, garlic and olive oil, tasted it on a wedge of flatbread, and passed it to Omar Yussef. His mouth full, he said: “It’s good, very good.”

Omar Yussef waved his hand. He wasn’t sure his appetite would come back at all tonight.

The last guests arrived, the locals, the men who had remained in Damascus after graduation. Laith al-Atrash went along the divans shaking hands and kissing everyone on the each cheek. When he got to Khamis Zeydan, he saw that the shake was withheld, so he grabbed for the prosthesis that had replaced his left hand when a grenade took it in the Lebanese Civil War. “I’ll just shake this,” he whispered, resisting Khamis Zeydan’s efforts to withdraw his arm. “It has about as much life as you’d have in you, if I’d been able to shoot straight.”

Khamis Zeydan went limp with shock. He never knew that it was Laith who shot him in the back, Omar Yussef thought. The Syrian caught Omar Yussef cheek between his thumb and forefinger, squeezed it, and moved on to greet the men reclined on the next set of cushions. Omar Yussef touched his friend’s elbow to reassure him.

“I should’ve killed that bastard when we were students,” Khamis Zeydan murmured.

Omar Yussef withdrew his hand. “Is that all we’ve got?”

Khamis Zeydan twitched his brows, a question.

“That guy represents something rotten, and our only answer is to kill him?”

“What do you want from me? You know the life I’ve lived.”

“I thought you did all your assassinations in the ‘Eighties.”

“I’d rub him out just for old time’s sake.”

Omar Yussef shoved the little plate of muhammara across the tray. “Eat some more and calm down.”

Khamis Zeydan took his hip flask from his sport jacket and tipped it to his lips.

“To your doubled health,” Omar Yussef said.

Khamis Zeydan sneered at his friend’s sarcasm. “You’re telling me to calm down?”

The room filled with cigarette smoke and the echo of conversation. The waiters took away the salads and brought platters of barbecued meat, lamb kebabs on skewers and delicate strips of shish tawouk, chicken dripping olive oil and lemon juice. Omar Yussef sat silently, wondering at the mirth of his old companions. Have they forgotten the slaughter on the streets today, just as I did for a while? he wondered. Perhaps it’d make no difference to them. I always expected something better from the world around me than these men did. They’re content to prosper amid the imperfection.

Three dancers entered and the conversation flagged. Four musicians followed wearing brown camel-hair robes and sat on cushions on a low dais by the wall. Each Sufi was dressed in a white jerkin and a long white skirt tied at the top with a broad scarlet sash. On their heads, each wore a tall brown Fez.

The dancers had neat mustaches and placid faces. They stood at the points of a triangle and moved their hands into position, arms across each other to show that they renounced the things of the world, grasping for nothing.

One of the musicians started the sema, his metal fingerpieces picking the jangling strings of the qanoun that lay flat before him. The others joined him, the oud, the tabla drum and the shebabah flute.

The dancers shut their eyes and, as if revolving on a pole, spun on the spot. Their skirts rose with the motion, spreading wide so that the men appeared to float above the ground. They raised one hand with palm up to accept Allah’s love and directed the other toward the ground, representing their spiritual connection with the people of the earth to whom they passed on whatever they received from heaven. Their heads dropped to the side, resting on their shoulder in the posture that signified the dancers had begun to converse with the angels.

Omar Yussef had always loved the Sufi dance. It seemed they had conquered all the physical limitations that circumscribed his every moment. They turned with their eyes shut, they were calm and unperturbed by the sound of conversation returning to the room, they stepped through the rotating motions with gentle, sure movement, their right feet rotating them and their left feet pivoting in place.

He glanced across at the musicians. They were older than the dancers. No doubt they had danced in their younger days.

I’ve lived in a trance like these spinning Sufis, Omar Yussef thought. I’m devoted to history and books. I forgot about the poor boys shot dead today, because I wanted to have a good time tonight. Just as I’ve so often closed my mind to the dreadful things going on around me in the Arab states. I’m dancing in the dirt.

With a shock, he noticed that the musician who played the tabla was Tayyib al-Jamali. The thick white beard and the clear skin and high cheekbones, just as he had glimpsed outside the store in the souk that afternoon. Tayyib’s fingers rippled over the stretched goatskin in perfect time. His eyes were shut.

Omar Yussef touched Khamis Zeydan’s hand. He directed his eyes toward the musicians. “That’s him. That’s Tayyib.”

“Son of a whore. That’s a coincidence.”

Laith al-Atrash’s laugh pierced the calm of the dance. Tayyib opened one eye and watched the mukhabarat man with reluctant cruelty. He missed a beat and seemed to return his focus to the music with an effort. Laith slapped a loud handshake on the man next to him, sharing a joke.

Omar Yussef wondered if it was Laith who had informed on Tayyib, had him expelled from university, or even imprisoned. He beckoned for the waiter and wiggled his wrist as if he were holding an empty cup. The waiter nodded and picked up a brass coffee pot from an inlaid sideboard.

Something white flashed across the edge of Omar Yussef’s vision. He turned from the waiter. Tayyib al-Jamali rose from the musician’s dais, even as the other two men played on.

The old Sufi went across the carpet, moving carefully around the carpet so as not to disturb the spin of the dancer’s skirt.

“By Allah, he’s got a gun,” Omar Yussef said.

Tayyib halted before Laith. The mukhabarat man smiled, enjoying the night with old friends, and turned as if the man in white pantaloons could be of no importance. Then he noticed the gun and fell back, clawing at the embroidered pillows to bury himself in them.

Three times Tayyib shot. The music stopped. Laith’s body jerked briefly, then was still. His thin shoulders slid out of his loose suit jacket as he slipped lifeless down the cushions.

Tayyib tossed the gun at the dead man. His face was as impassive as the dancers’ when they spoke to the angels. He went to the door. The waiter stood aside with the coffee pot, polite, as if the departing killer had merely told him he didn’t want a refill.

The old men around the room froze, staring at Laith’s body as if they were fearful of one last trick from the secret policeman. We were all afraid of him when we were students, Omar Yussef thought. Now he’s dead, are we any less scared?

The steady tread of Tayyib’s footsteps descended the stairs. The dancers halted their spinning. Though their faces were confused and horrified, Omar Yussef noticed their posture. Each of them kept one hand still to heaven and the other toward the ground.

Read more about the Omar Yussef Mystery series.

Copyright © Matt Rees, 2011

Most people are like me, however. The wars sneak up on them. They notice the signs, then they bury them because they think they’re being unduly negative. Or they’re simply afraid to see what’s in front of them.

There might even be a war going on a short drive from where you live and it can more or less escape your attention. For example, over the weekend there were 120 rockets fired into Israel from the Gaza Strip. The Israeli army killed 19 Palestinians. I could’ve been down there in 45 minutes drive. But I was eating chocolate muffins with my son.

I can feel the war coming, just as you might sense someone creeping up behind you. Without hearing or seeing anything. Like an icy hand touching your back.

When a bomb went off in Jerusalem a couple of weeks ago, killing a British tourist, the icy hand had a grip on my guts. This was different to the intifada of the first half of the last decade. Then I was a journalist; I had to be here and I buried whatever trauma I felt under a thick layer of professionalism or duty. Now I’m a writer and a father, and I could be anywhere I want.

I’m still here in Jerusalem. It’ll be 15 years in six weeks. I keep trying to think of somewhere else to go. Somewhere less hostile and aggressive. I haven’t figured it out yet.

For a while, I’ve thought it might end the way it started—with someone else more or less deciding for me. In 1996, I came here because I met a woman who had taken a job here. That got me out of a job in New York I hated but was unable to bring myself to leave.

Maybe this time the impulse will be an increase in violence in Jerusalem. Reading the signs, I’ll take my family right to the airport. (Thankfully, after a lawsuit some years ago, my wife initiated the “two suitcases rule,” under which we should have few enough significant possessions that if we were ever again unreasonable sued, presented with an outlandish tax bill, or just scared of the violence, we could pack a pair of suitcases and head for the plane.)

If the bombs start, we’ll either head out on the first flight on which there are seats available (and which isn’t going to the former Soviet Union; I have to draw the line somewhere) or we’ll receive some other impulse. Last week, for example, my friend Monika Trapp (who runs the Buecherhaus Jansen near Frankfurt with her husband Hans-Juergen Jansen) kindly offered the apartment above their bookshop for me and my family should we wish to get away from the growing trouble in Jerusalem.

To Monika things looked rough here. There was a bomb. On the street. Someone died. Not far away, lots of people were dying. And she was right.

It’s only because I’m unnaturally inured to such things that I didn’t scream in panic and refuse to let my son out of the door. Or just head off to Frankfurt airport with him.

Of course, my mother might like to think we’d go to her before we’d head off to Frankfurt. But she doesn’t have a nice apartment above a bookshop.

However, if your plan is to study how to be a hypocritical, corrupt bastard, then the LSE is for you. There’s money in it, you see.

The LSE, which claims to educate many of tomorrow’s leaders, agreed to take $2.4 million from Qaddafi’s son, Seif el-Islam. For its Global Governance program, of all things. By the time the current murderous civil war engulfed Libya, the LSE had received 300,000 pounds. It now says it’ll divert that donation, presumably to a charity.

Meanwhile, Seif el-Islam Qaddafi received a PhD from the LSE. An inquest may be undertaken, it seems, into accusations of plagiarism by “Dr. Qaddafi.”

I’d have little to say about all this if the LSE had come out and said, “Look, we’ve had government cutbacks. We needed the money. We decided, let’s sell a doctorate to the son of the Libyan flake and use the cash for educating others who’ll go on to great careers like other LSE alumni such as Mick Jagger and Sir Veeraswamy Ringadoo, the first president of Mauritius.”

Like Tennesse Williams, I try to look mildly on the peccadilloes of human beings. And like Ernest Hemingway I believe one should take the money and run.

Hypocrisy and self-righteousness, however, disturb my calm, to put it mildly. Particularly when it’s the hypocrisy and self-righteousness of well-heeled academics who think they can get away with allowing someone else to get away with murder so long as nobody notices.

The university’s head, Sir Howard Davies, told the BBC that “we took a risk and I think it’s right to say that that risk has backfired on us.”

The risk was not that the university would be besmirched by accepting money from a cruel, repressive regime. A regime which has backed terrorism. A regime which has assassinated political leaders elsewhere in the Arab world.

The risk was that the university would be shown up. That Seif al-Islam, who had been ludicrously held up by much of the Western media as a modernizer and democratizer, would be caught on video (as he has been) calling for people who oppose his dad to be shot.

The hypocrisy doesn’t stop at the LSE, of course. Last year the UN General Assembly elected Libya onto the UN Human Rights Council. I’m sure all those people suffering at the hands of torturers around the world will have been glad that there’s someone watching over them who understands their pain. Because he knows how to dish it out.

It’s all typical of the hypocrisy of the West in dealing with the Arab world. I wrote about this in my novel THE FOURTH ASSASSIN, in which my Palestinian sleuth Omar Yussef criticizes the willingness of the West to back odious regimes so long as the oil cash is forthcoming. After all, the last UK government couldn’t wait to sweep the bombing of the Pan Am jet over Lockerbie under the carpet, lured by the promise of big-money contracts from Qaddafi.

One of the professors who passed Seif al-Islam’s doctoral dissertation, Lord Meghnad Desai, told a British newspaper that the dictator’s son had his first thesis tossed back at him because “it was full of warm milk. Far too idealistic.” Truly idealism has no place at the LSE. Desai, who used to be chairman of the British Labor Party, claims that “we gave him a very rough ride.” I’ll bet.

It’s a shame the LSE doesn’t have a literature department, because one of its professors might have been able to tell Lord Desai that Shakespeare called hypocrisy a “glib and oily art.” But, then, even if he isn’t familiar with “King Lear,” Desai appears to know that already.

I met a group of just over a dozen 15-year-olds (some of them may have been older than that, so I hope they aren’t offended when they read this, but when you get as old as me even a 25-year-old is a kid), half of them from a Palestinian school just outside the Damascus Gate of Jerusalem’s Old City and the other half from an Israeli school on the campus of the Hebrew University. They’ve been coming together for some years at infrequent intervals to discuss books they read in English. This time, they read my Palestinian crime novel THE FOURTH ASSASSIN.

I was happy to be the first author who’d come along to meet the group, and was doubly pleased with the intelligence and perception they showed.

That’s not only because they all seemed to have really liked my book. Though that, of course, does show great perception. Their group aims to go beyond the politics of the region, to find common ground in literature. Even as journalists exult at the political mobilization of the Arab world, they ought to remember that all this political activity is intended to lead not to some goal that can be summed up in a simple nut-graph (which is what journalists call the “here’s what the story’s all about paragraph,” usually the third one in the story). It’s heading toward the personal fulfillment of every Arab in myriad ambitions and desires – something that’s probably beyond the stereotypical charactertizations and analyses of journalism to contend with.

One of the most impressive elements of the long discussion I had with the kids in a restaurant overlooking the walls of the Old City was that politics was entirely absent. It demonstrates, for me, that if Israelis and Palestinians have some other basis on which to meet – rather than the mutual claims of victimization on which their politicians thrive – they find a great deal in common.

Of course, what I’ve aimed for with my four Palestinian crime novels is an approach that transcends the political clichés of the region where I find myself. So I was pleased that the kids picked up on that, too.

One of them won my heart by telling me that when my Palestinian sleuth Omar Yussef and other characters spoke she felt she was listening to real Palestinians speak. It’s quite the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me about my books, because I’ve tried to capture the rhythms and formalities of Arab speech in the novels.

Our discussion turned to the events across the region. I pointed out that Omar Yussef was ahead of the game when, in THE FOURTH ASSASSIN, he chided the Arab nations and the US for failing to back Arab democracy.

That was as close to politics as we got. Unlike my meetings with journalists who often want to discuss present Middle Eastern diplomacy with me, rather than my novels, the kids asked fascinating questions about the actual writing of a book, the plotting and characterization. Clearly more than a few of them, Israeli and Palestinian, are budding writers, so I made them pose for this photo with the hard-edged expressions of crime writers on book jackets. I look forward to seeing their work on the shelves. (Well, they’re young, so maybe I’ll see them on a Kindle…)

Some people see the Middle East only through a political prism filled with simplistic slogans and obstructive literalism. My books defy that. They’re meant to be instructive, but entertaining — they’re crime novels, after all. These kids showed that they — like the characters in my books – don’t want to be defined and stereotyped by their often-devastating politics. They want to be real, too. And they’re smart enough to understand that fiction, strangely, can help lead them there.

Dudi Cohen, Israel’s police commissioner, told a conference earlier this month that “murder for ideological reasons … could occur in Israel” and that it was “one of the most disturbing topics of these times.”

Cohen added that more than 100 public figures in Israel require police protection, but that courts don’t hand down significant punishments against those who make threats, on average giving only a quarter of the maximum sentence for such crimes.

As if to highlight the danger, Cohen’s warning came on the same day Yona Avrushmi was released from prison. Yona Avrushmi threw a hand grenade at a Peace Now demonstration in 1983, killing a marcher. Though he later expressed regret for the incident, prosecutors maintained a constant battle against calls for clemency by activists on the right.

According to one Israeli commentator, Avrushmi would’ve been released long ago had he been associated with one of the country’s right-wing blocs, such as the settlement movement. Those blocs exercise political power and their rhetoric causes the atmosphere in which such men act, said Yossi Sarid, a former leader of the leftist Meretz Party. It’s wrong to suggest that Avrushmi or the right-wing assassin of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Yigal Amir, truly acted alone, he said.

Read the rest of my article on Global Post.

In THE FOURTH ASSASSIN, which was published exactly a year ago, my Palestinian sleuth Omar Yussef travels to New York for a conference at the UN. While there, he uncovers an assassination plot. But he also has to address the conference about the life of ordinary Palestinians —— and the people of other Arab countries.

Here’s a passage from that chapter of the book, with Omar addressing the delegates from Arab countries and the Americans:

“ ‘It may be hard for you to understand, but what ordinary Palestinians want and what they battle for every day is precisely what’s denied to most of your citizens in the Arab countries: freedom and economic prosperity.’

The Libyan delegate removed his finger from his nose and flicked it angrily. The Syrian strode down from the rear of the hall, dropping his

cigarette. The Lebanese stepped out the butt on the carpet as he followed.

‘How can you, the Arab countries, dictate a solution for the Palestinians, when you suffer from many of the same problems? In fact, you, the governing class, thrive on the lack of democracy, the inequality of wealth. Take away the Israeli occupation and the Palestinians would be closer to freedom and a functioning economy than most of your peoples.’

‘Shame, shame on you,’ the Syrian called out.

One of the Egyptian delegates stood and yelled, ‘Collaborator.’ His colleague hauled him back into his seat with a simpering glance at the Americans.

Omar Yussef hammered the podium. ‘It is not only the Israelis——it is you who drive Palestinians into violence and poverty. You, who take no responsibility for the lives of your Arab brothers.’ He lifted his hand to point at the American delegation and spoke in English. ‘And you, gentlemen of the United States, when you send your money to these corrupt Arab governments, pause to ask yourselves: would I be willing to live there as a citizen? Would I live in a mud-shack raising beets in the Jordan Valley for no reward? Or sit in the heat to sell a few orange sodas for ten cents on a desert highway in Syria?… We Arabs are aimless. We wander like our forefathers in the desert, seeking water, waiting for some fanatic to come and enslave us.’ ”

You may have noticed that Syrian President Bashar Assad told an American newspaper that the reason he didn’t face riots was because he

hadn’t made peace with Israel. The Egyptian regime, he added, made a peace with Israel that was against the desires of its people and was paying the price.

It’s the kind of rot that makes you wonder why journalists even bother to report it. Egyptians living on $2 a day may not be fans of Israel, but it’s their rotten economy and lack of prospects in a corrupt state that got them onto the streets.

Informed is forewarned, as they say. Assad ought to read some Omar Yussef novels.

Barak’s stated logic is this: He wants to stay in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rightist coalition because he believes a stable coalition forces the Palestinians to consider its peace offer. With several Labor Party ministers constantly complaining about leaving the government, Barak believes the Palestinians were waiting around until the coalition fell apart. So by jettisoning the reluctant Laborites, he makes the coalition secure and forces the Palestinians to take steps toward peace.

It’s hard to argue with his perspective — so long as you have no idea who Ehud Barak is.

If you’ve followed the former commando and chief of Israel’s military during his political career, however, you’ll recognize that he sacrificed both party and principle to strike a deal with a government which — nominally, at least — represents everything he was elected to oppose.

Some in the Labor Party think Barak betrayed the party’s traditional pro-peace stance by remaining in a government replete with right-wing nationalists. Barak maintained he was able to exert a moderating influence on Netanyahu, though recent reports in Israeli newspapers suggested U.S. diplomats have lost faith in his power in the cabinet.

Barak and Netanyahu “would do anything to survive,” said Nitzan Horowitz, a legislator from the leftist Meretz Party.

The 68-year-old Barak announced his new faction, Independence, at a press conference Monday. He was backed by four legislators who split from Labor. Each was rewarded Tuesday with a new ministerial or legislative position in the government, nabbing promotions to agriculture minister, industry minister and parliamentary committee head, among other goodies.

Barak said his faction would be “centrist, Zionist.” His alternative, it had become clear, was to be kicked out of the Labor leadership at the party convention in March by a membership increasingly embarrassed to be part of a government whoe right-wing elements, including Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, are treated with polite disdain at best by most Western diplomats. That would have meant no more defense ministry for him, and power is what motivates this former prime minister above all else.

That might seem unsurprising. What politician isn’t obsessed with power? Nonetheless, most are expected to have a tenuous hold on principle. Barak compared himself to Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, and to two previous prime ministers, Shimon Peres and Ariel Sharon, each of whom split their party to create new factions. The difference is that these forebears aimed at new directions for Israeli politics. Barak just wants to keep his job a little longer.

Israeli leftists and many centrists spoke of disgust that Barak’s maneuver — the leading newspaper Ha’aretz called it “filthy” — would bolster Netanyahu’s right-wing government. Here’s the math: The coalition used to have 74 of the 120 Knesset, or parliament, seats, but the possibility that the 13 Labor legislators might leave gave the impression of fragility; now with 66 solid coalition seats, Netanyahu is more secure.

That’s why the prime minister was so smug after Barak’s announcement. He had feared that Labor would quit the government in March, after forcing Barak out of the leadership. That would’ve made his coalition untenable — with a majority of only one — and would’ve robbed him of a defense minister whose leadership of a supposedly leftist party was a valuable international fig leaf for his diplomatic stonewalling.

The deal to form Independence was made at Netanyahu’s villa in Caesarea, a Mediterranean beachfront town, over the last week. Other Labor leaders, however, were in the dark until Barak called them just before his press conference.

“This government will be here for the coming years, and it is with this government that [the Palestinians] will have to conduct the peace process,” Netanyahu said.

The Labor Party, which was descended from the founding movement of Zionism, appeared to be on its last legs, after a couple of decades of steep decline. It paid the price for the failure of its Oslo Peace Accords, which were destroyed by the Palestinian intifada early in the last decade, and for a perceived arrogance and obsession with government jobs, of which Barak was a prime example.

On Tuesday, four of the remaining eight Labor legislators in the Knesset mulled whether to split to form their own faction. Those trying to hold the party together argue that it can rebuild in opposition and reluctantly these four said they agreed. But it’s just as likely that Barak’s “centrist, Zionist” faction has put the final nail in the coffin of the movement that first propounded Zionism as a political cause.

Says Yohanan Plessner, a member of the opposition Kadima Party, “The political culture in Israel [has] reached a new low of filth and loathing.”

I posted this on Global Post.