But the detective story was a solace to those who lived in such ugly times. In the model employed by Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, the story ended with one criminal fingered by the detective. Everyone else turned out to be innocent. Order was restored. It was as if the writers were saying, Don’t worry about what you read in the newspapers; everything can be fixed and only a small minority are making the trouble.

In my Palestinian crime novels, the opposite is true. Everyone’s guilty. That’s the reality I found in Palestinian society, as disaster befell it in the last decade – an intifada, a civil war, and now a horrible stand-off between rival factions. Not any one person’s fault.

I believe that’s a better reflection of the world in which we live. My novels are entertainments, but they aren’t layered with the conservative perspective of the “Golden Age.” I don’t want readers to think that there’s nothing wrong out there, so long as the detective nabs the sole bad guy in the library.

Crime novels today are grittier than the work of Christie. They tend to be closer to the atmosphere of Raymond Chandler, who wrote that the Golden Age stories “really get me down.” But the Chandler ethos of a lone knight facing an utterly corrupt world is largely ignored.

That’s why there are so many novels these days about pedophiles and psychopaths. Such characters are beyond the pale of behavior in which we could imagine ourselves participating. To commit a crime in such novels is to mark oneself out as a deviant. As soon as the deviant is nabbed, the society can go back into its usual calm manner.

I think this is why Scandinavian crime novels have been so popular. Readers like the fact that, while the detective wrestles with the psycho, the society depicted is clearly not so very flawed. As soon as the psycho is nabbed, Sweden will return to its pleasant, polite way of life—something that’s easier to envisage than it would be in a novel set in, say, Bangkok or Gaza. Even in his recent novel, “The Worried Man,” Henning Mankell describes his detective as being no more than “worried about the direction of Swedish society.”

Worried! Can you imagine Omar Yussef, my Palestinian sleuth, being no more than worried? He lives in a society that’s engulfed in disaster. He knows everything’s going to hell and he’s aware that nabbing a single bad guy won’t change that.

The golden age method ought to have been overtaken by reality in a post-Holocaust age. Hannah Arendt wrote of the banality of evil, meaning that people don’t choose good or bad, they just go along. We’d like to see bad guys as pure evil, deciding firmly to commit horrible acts, while the truth of the Holocaust and many other dreadful events is that people are much more likely to operate in a kind of malleable denial.

It’s a vital insight. Yet so many crime novels are still written as though Hitler never happened—as if one wicked man can be blamed for what millions of others simply went along with. History makes it clear that every one of us is guilty; everyone needs to do a reckoning with their past. It can’t just be resolved by a cunning detective who spots a few clues and thus sets the world to rights.

This perspective is, I think, not only more realistic, but it’s also more respectful of the characters and the reader. If I were to suggest that a single detective could fix Palestinian society, I’d be saying that real Palestinians could do just that if they’d only speak up. I know it isn’t that easy.

That’s why in my books everyone’s guilty. In my third novel, THE SAMARITAN’S SECRET, I had in effect three endings. Omar thinks he’s found the culprit. Then in the next chapter, he sees that there was another dimension, with someone else responsible. Then in the final chapter, he sees even greater breadth to the deception and wrong-doing.

I did that partially to provide the twists that readers enjoy. But I also wanted to reflect the complexity of the Palestinian situation. It could, of course, just as easily be done in a novel set in Idaho, where no doubt there are contradictory dimensions to reality that I could only guess at. Just because US political commentators divide the country into Red and Blue states doesn’t mean places can be so easily categorized.

Some readers have told me that my novels are depressing or pessimistic. That shows that some people come to crime novels—books about killing—to be uplifted, or to be shown that everything is right in the end. What these readers respond to is the sense in my books that once the bad guy is gone, everything remains in a dangerous state of turmoil. They find that depressing; I think it’s as enlivening as a dip in a freezing cold mountain stream, refreshing and letting you know what it is to feel the world around you.

I don’t intend to leave readers feeling cosy. I want them to look at themselves and consider how they’d respond to such an extreme situation. We encounter so few extremes in our Western lives these days. It’s good to face such things, even if only in a fictional context.

Since the publication of “The Name of the Rose,” in 1980, the genre has gained gradual legitimacy. Much snobbishness still abounds, however, over the commercial success of historical fiction and the perceived tendency of genre writers to simplify bygone eras. Still, though Umberto Eco’s book has sold 10 million copies, it undoubtedly takes some brains to appreciate it, and no one could accuse Eco of writing simplistic books. Literary highbrows came down to mix with the hoi polloi long enough to award last year’s Man Booker Prize, the most notable British book award, to Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall,” a wonderful evocation not just of Tudor England but of the contrast between a steely self-made man and a bunch of spoiled, weak upper-class brats. The legitimacy of the genre progresses this year with the deification in both the United Kingdom and the United States of David Mitchell, whose novel about Japan in 1799, “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet,” is a candidate for the Booker and who, even before this latest work, has routinely been referred to as a genius by reviewers.

In this upward trajectory for the genre, Mitchell James Kaplan’s “By Fire, By Water” must take its place as one of the most important contemporary historical novels with a Jewish theme. One could also argue that its portrayal of religious and ethnic hatred in the Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella (or, as Kaplan calls them, Fernando and Ysabel ) is a better way to understand the Jewish world today than the work of many of the hip, hyped young Jewish novelists clawing to the top of literary New York.

The novel, Kaplan’s first, is set in Spain in the period around the expulsion of the Jews. He takes as his main character a real figure from that time, Luis de Santangel, Ferdinand’s chancellor and the descendant of converted Jews. As a converso, he must always be on the alert for the city of Zaragoza’s local inquisitor – and that’s the plot point that gets the book rolling.

For the inquisitor is indeed on the trail of Santangel. He interrogates one of Santangel’s friends, with whom the chancellor has been secretly learning about the culture of his forefathers under a Jewish teacher. Fearing that his friend has given him away, Santangel covers his tracks, and in doing so he inadvertently becomes involved in the inquisitor’s murder. As with many of the best historical novelists, Kaplan takes the seeds of his story from actual history. The inquisitor of Aragon, Pedro de Arbues, was assassinated in that city’s La Seo Cathedral in 1485. The blame fell on New Christians, including the real-life Santangel.

From the moment of the murder, Kaplan gives us a very compelling sense of the constricted life of a hunted man. He makes it a convincing metaphor for the dislocation and pain that must have dwelled in the souls of many a converso. “Each night as [Santangel] closed his eyes to sleep, Pedro de Arbues’s last cold stare greeted him, reminding him that wherever he traveled, his deeds traveled with him.”

Santangel fears the Inquisition and fears the fundamentalist nutcase Queen Isabella. Amid all this danger and hatred, he finds he’s too scared to follow his heart when he meets Judith, a beautiful Jewish woman in Granada. The greatest stroke in the book is to make this – the failure to act on love – the central point in the plot. What looks at first like a tale of revenge, skullduggery and religious cruelty turns out to be a bittersweet love story.

Santangel’s dramatic – and ultimately rather sad – tale is interwoven with the tragedy of the Jews of Andalus, the vicious scheming of Tomas de Torquemada (based on the real-life first grand inquisitor of Spain ) and the somewhat more benign calculations of Christopher Columbus, who introduces an element of danger into Santangel’s life by trying to draw from him what he believes is secret Jewish knowledge that can aid him in his expeditions. (The real life Santangel did much to convince Isabella to finance Columbus’s voyages, which ultimately made Spain rich. ) The period was one of turbulent events and, though that description seems more appropriate to a movie trailer, it makes for a compelling novel.

That Santangel – along with Ferdinand and Isabella, Torquemada and Columbus – was a real personage, grounds the book. It gives grittiness to the drama and the love story, and it highlights some parallels with our world today. After all, the decade just passed was driven by friction between the very cultures clashing in Kaplan’s book. Muslims, Christians and Jews are not on much friendlier terms than they were when Columbus sailed west to look for the East. The conflict of the time of Santangel is very much alive.

For example, I was once in the home of Abdel Aziz Rantisi in Gaza, and the Hamas chief was explaining why Israel could never be signed over to the Jews by Muslim believers. The land that’s now Israel had once been Muslim land, he said, and therefore it was the duty of all Muslims to make it Muslim once more, no matter how long it took. “The same is true of Spain,” he said.

“He’s just joking,” said a Palestinian journalist who was there with me.

“No, I’m not,” Rantisi said. A few months later, he was killed by a missile from an Apache helicopter. The Israelis weren’t joking, either. Unless it was the Spanish who killed him …

Kaplan, who has previously worked as a Hollywood scriptwriter, moved his family to Mount Lebanon, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, so he could write his novel without the financial worries that would’ve nagged at him in a more expensive locale. (Most novelists – even those writing popular genre fiction – earn considerably less from their work than bus drivers, it may surprise you to learn. )

The seed for his novel was planted, according to Kaplan’s website, on a family visit to Granada, Spain, where a local tradesman showed him a medieval lock in an old door. It had been opened by a key brought from Morocco by a family of Jews only a few years before. The family had guarded the key and passed down memories of the exact location of the house for 500 years before returning. It sounds incredible, but then it was astonishing enough to make Kaplan write an entire novel about it. One wonders how long the rusty keys in Palestinian refugee camps will be treasured.

This flabbergasting (if, to residents of the Middle East, somewhat cliched and even enervating ) tale of obsession with return was Kaplan’s starting point. But his wisest move was to place Santangel’s love for Judith at the heart of the novel. As a high government official and a converso, he ought to steer clear of the beautiful Jewish woman whom he comes across in Granada. But the attraction he feels is too strong.

Kaplan never makes it clear if Santangel’s love transcends the dangers he faces in a relationship with a Jew. It could just as easily be that he’s attracted to the fact that she’s Jewish, he’s curious about his ancestry, and in any case knows he’ll never be un-Jewish enough to satisfy the Inquisition and thus may as well indulge himself. As their personal tragedy unfolds, Judith sees most clearly that Santangel’s religious compromises are hollow. After a brief stay in jail, he tells her that it’s “better to have no power, and some security – or at least, an illusion of security.” She responds: “What good is an illusion?” She’ll take exile with her people rather than the hunted, haunted life of a converso.

That’s not to say that Kaplan idealizes Judaism or urges all Jews to return to their faith and to eschew the things of the world. Rather, the point of the novel seems to be that the things of which one is uncertain are the most important. An inquisitor could never contemplate such a thought, and neither, one assumes, would many of the rabbis who wield power in Israel today. For Kaplan, Columbus’ belief in the existence of an unknown route to unknown lands is the measure of this. As Columbus crosses the Atlantic with Judith’s adoptive son toward the end of “By Fire, By Water,” the youngster questions him about the mutinous crew’s doubts that they’ll ever find land. Columbus is determined to go on. “How can you be so sure about things no one has seen?” the boy asks. Columbus responds, “I never claimed I was.”

By Fire, By Water
by Mitchell James Kaplan. Other Press, New York, $15.95

(This review ran in today’s issue of Ha’aretz newspaper.)

Bielefeld (population 330,000) is a town in North Rhine-Westphalia. Or is it?

Since the 1990s, there has been a widespread internet campaign to convince Germans that this town doesn’t exist. It began as a light-hearted battle over computer codings between some fellows in Bielefeld and others elsewhere (who took a different view of the coding and decided to fight back.) Even though most of them know it exists (or do they?), Germans often respond to mention of Bielefeld with the words, “Bielefeld doesn’t exist.”

This is because the town is rarely visited, doesn’t have a regional accent of its own, isn’t mentioned in the news very often, and had for a long time a railway station that looked boarded up. There are also few monuments or great buildings there, because…well, you can thank the USAAF and the RAF for that. (Bielefeld isn’t far from the Ruhr and was heavily bombed in World War II.)

The city council once released a statement titled “Bielefeld does exist,” but they released it on April Fools Day. So it looked as though the city council even was saying Bielefeld didn’t exist.

But I went there. And it does exist. In fact, it’s quite nice.

I did a reading before a good crowd at the Beit Tikwa Synagogue. Which used to be a church until the congregation grew too small. (A year and a half ago, there was a protest against the conversion of a Christian place of worship to a Jewish one. The protest was lead by a fellow named Riefenstahl, nephew of Hitler’s favorite filmmaker Leni, and frankly someone who ought to, shall we say, avoid Jewish issues, just as a matter of good taste.) Beit Tikwa is beautiful, as is Katharina Lustgarten, who organized and introduced my reading.

If a synagogue seems like a good use for an old church, a restaurant is even better. A one-time church in Bielefeld is now Gluekundseligkeit, a swanky Asian restaurant with a long bar down the aisle. In armchairs on the altar, you can drink wine where the pastor used to bless the holy wine. I had a very fine stewed duck.

I dined there with Andreas Schnadwinkel, a pal who writes for the Westfalenblatt newspaper, and Thomas Wolff, an imposing actor at Theater Bielefeld, who read from my work at the synagogue and at another reading in nearby Bad Oeynhausen the previous night.

Thomas and I repaired to the old part of town and a bar, where we chatted about the kinds of things only writers and actors would find interesting or useful (how to tap into spirit energies to create a character and to experience an emotion…) That central area also was quite lovely.

Then I was on to Cologne. On a local radio station, I mentioned during my interview that I had been to Bielefeld the previous day. “You know,” said the hostess, “Bielefeld doesn’t exist.”

Maybe I was tricked.

Naturally I’ve been doing a lot of reading in historical fiction. It’s part of what made me want to write about Mozart and Caravaggio, rather than Omar Yussef, my Palestinian sleuth. Mostly I find those historical works inspiring. From the class of Hilary Mantel’s French Revolution novel “A Place of Greater Safety” to the brilliant grittiness of “Libra,” Don Delillo’s Lee Harvey Oswald story.

But there are times when I see flaws in the way history is used by some writers in the genre. Instead of digging deep for the drama of a historical period, they go for the most obvious kind of drama.

Take Jews, for instance.

A few months ago, I was reading a rather flabby novel about the Great Siege of Malta in 1565. The arch-Catholic Knights of the Order of Saint John are engaged in a death struggle against the hordes of the Ottoman Sultan. Then suddenly into the midst of the book sails a subplot about crypto-Jews hiding in a cave on the island. They befriend a Maltese girl who, in turn, tries to persuade the Grand Master of the Knights to save the Jews. In reality, the Knights would’ve imprisoned the Jews and ransomed them to the Jewish community of Venice, but that isn’t what got on my nerves.

Rather it was that Jews make for an easy hit of emotion and drama for writers of historical fiction. Just as contemporary writers go for 9/11-related themes when they want to invest their bland narratives with broad, inspirational impact. It’s reaching for a topic that isn’t yours, that doesn’t touch you, just because it’ll make your work seem important and weighty. Instead of delving deeper into their spiritual reservoir, these historical novelists toss in a Jew, spin a few quotes from the Talmud, and face the Jews off against some averagely seething anti-Semite. Bingo, a plot with vim.

What’s more, the Jews of these novels are entirely flat. That’s because they aren’t there due to any burning connection felt by the author. They’re just plot twisters tossed in for cheap drama. In combination with today’s political correctness, that’s why the Jews in these historical novels come across as such absolute good guys. After hundreds of years of the reverse treatment, maybe it’s time Jews got an angelic rap. But they can’t all have been nice guys who only wanted to study the holy books and keep kosher, can they? Yet most contemporary historical fiction shows them that way. (I’ve lived in Jerusalem 14 years, and I’ve met a few who weren’t quite such prizes.)

I’ve written a historical novel set in Vienna in 1791 which will be out next year. It’s about Mozart. There are no Jews in it. I’m completing the manuscript of another Jewless historical novel even as I write these lines. It’s about Caravaggio. Believe me, I could’ve taken the easy way out and dropped in a suffering Jew—after so many years in Jerusalem I know a few things about Judaism and the sufferings of the Jews who live here today. But it shouldn’t be hard work to find drama in wild historical times, often with more depth, once you look beyond the obvious torment of the Jews.

I like to make it hard for myself. That’s also what makes it real.

Chandler knew what he was talking about. His great noir novels, such as “The Big Sleep” and “The Long Goodbye,” are must-reads for anyone who wants to know how to build a sentence and a voice, how to create an image that won’t fade a few pages on, how to make people want to read it all over again. His contemporaries in the “literary” field who were more favored by the highbrow critics of his time are these days consigned to the dustbin of college literature courses. (If you don’t believe me, tell me when was the last time you reached for a volume by Upton Sinclair or Pearl Buck?)

But historical fiction is back. Ever since “The Name of the Rose” (published in English in 1983), the genre has accrued greater legitimacy. Last year’s Booker Prize went to a historical novel (“Wolf Hall”) and this year’s looks likely to go to “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet” (do an internet search for its author David Mitchell and “genius,” and you’ll see why.)

Even poor old Alexandre Dumas and the swashbuckler have been returned from their long-ago burial under a mound of critical invective. In the last decade or so, Dumas has found his way into the title of a novel by Arturo Perez-Reverte, one of the most notable historical novelists of our time. Perez-Reverte can buckle a swash in the form of his Dumas-derived Captain Alatriste series, but he also has enough modern perversity for one of his novels to have been adapted for the screen by Roman Polanski. (That novel, “The Club Dumas,” even included a reference to Eco, “the professor from Bologna,” in a nod to his role in legitimizing the genre.)

Crime readers who want something with a bit of a cosmopolitan, intellectual slant often go for the World War II-period mysteries of Alan Furst. There have been other successful evocations of old Vienna in the books of J. Sydney Jones, and likewise for New York with Caleb Carr. My blogmate Barbara Nadel alternates between contemporary Turkey and historical London to great effect.

Each of these books, in their way, does what historical fiction alone can do. They take contemporary issues, place them in a historical context and thus let us see them anew. One of the best novels of the last two decades was Barry Unsworth’s heartbreaking evocation of the slave trade in “Sacred Hunger.” You’ll never see race and class the same way once you’ve read that book.

That’s partially why I’ve turned to historical fiction for the books I’m working on right now. Earlier this year my fourth Palestinian crime novel came out. Before I return to my West Bank sleuth Omar Yussef, I’m going historical.

My New York editor is working on MOZART’S LAST ARIA now. It’ll be out in the UK in late winter, in the US in early fall. I’m writing a novel now about the last years of Caravaggio’s life. Both take a real historical mystery as their starting point. But I also think they’ll tell us a great deal about what it is to live the life of an artist, and more than that they’ll focus on the nature of love. That’s something that isn’t limited to any historical period.

Testimony last week revealed the lack of responsibility at the top of the Israeli government. Before a committee investigating a fouled up military operation, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak have both said they take responsibility for the attempted takeover of a Turkish boat May 31 which left nine of the protesters aboard dead. Of course, they immediately added that “taking responsibility” doesn’t mean they were actually “responsible” for what happened.

That was someone else.

Netanyahu said it was Barak’s fault. Barak said it was the army’s fault, and also Netanyahu’s fault. On Aug. 11, the army chief of staff, Gabi Ashkenazi, testified. He said he “takes responsibility” for the operation, and then argued that it wasn’t a failure. In fact he was “proud” of the soldiers who took control of the boat, which was steaming toward Gaza to break the Israeli blockade.

So that’s all cleared up then. Nobody was responsible for the failures of the raid. But the raid was also a good thing. Even if it did result in the broadest international vilification of Israel for some years.

Even the leader of the opposition, Tzipi Livni, says she wants to testify before the committee to “take responsibility” for the Gaza blockade, which was initiated while she was foreign minister in the previous government. The policy is good, she says, but Netanyahu isn’t running it correctly, which makes it look bad. So her taking of responsibility is also just a way of showing that someone else is responsible for the thing no one wants to take responsibility for.

When there’s so much talk of responsibility, it usually means somebody must have done something very irresponsible.

Netanyahu testified Aug. 9 before the committee, which is headed by former Supreme Court Justice Jacob Turkel. He described the meeting of his seven “inner cabinet” members before the navy was given the green light to board the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish ship sent toward Gaza by an Islamist organization called IHH. Netanyahu said the ministers mainly discussed the media consequences of a boarding party.

As it turned out, those media consequences were pretty bad. Even though Israel revealed photos of its soldiers being beaten by the “activists” on the boat, most coverage focused on the nine Turks who were shot by the soldiers’ comrades. The first soldiers had dropped from helicopters wearing clumsy gloves for sliding down the ropes and had been armed with paint-ball guns, so sure had they been that they’d face no resistance.

Who had responsibility for the mission, once the ministers gave it the go-ahead? Netanyahu was in no doubt (though the rest of his testimony was hesitant, and he even refused to answer a half dozen questions.) “I left instructions and asked the defense minister to activate me and the top ministers if necessary,” he said. “I wanted there to be one address here in Israel and he was that address.”

Barak appeared at the committee the next day. He took “full responsibility for the directives by the government,” but said the operation was botched because of the unpreparedness of the army, the navy and the Mossad intelligence service. Referring to an initial investigation into the incident by a former general, Barak said: “I only know what the Eiland report says.”

So obviously he’s not the “address.”

Perhaps this shouldn’t be a surprise. Barak and Netanyahu are serial bunglers (a phrase coined by The Economist for Netanyahu during his previous term as prime minister) who can point to few achievements other than that they’ve both been unpopular prime ministers and both got rich on the U.S. lecture circuit, as well as trading on their names and connections to run “consulting companies.”

But the army is a very public institution in Israel, where a large proportion of youngsters serve, many others do reserve duty into their forties, and their failures redound greatly on the already rather shoddy image of the country around the world.

Generals themselves aren’t immune to buck passing. A scandal emerged last week when an Israeli television station reported that one of the generals who hopes to replace Ashkenazi as chief of staff had hired a public relations firm, which prepared a document that cast aspersions on the qualifications and qualities of his opponents. However, that general and the head of the PR firm deny responsibility for the document and suggest that it was one of the other generals in the running who doctored the papers to smear him.

An investigation has begun into that one. But don’t hold me responsible if its conclusions are opaque and meaningless.

(I posted this on Global Post.)

I know this for sure, because when I’m between drafts of a novel I feel the old madnesses creeping up on me. The dark resentments whose origins I can’t quite nail down. The tension around the center of my chest and the heavy breathing and the tight jaw and the voice in my head telling me this isn’t fair, whatever it is. The flickering fantasies penetrating my mind when it lacks the focus that otherwise keeps it calm.

My wife sees all this before I do, at least consciously. “Maybe you ought to work on something else while you’re waiting to start a new draft,” she says, gentle and delicate, as if she were waiting for me to respond with an angry “I’m all right, dammit.”

I have to take a break, you see, because writing a novel requires for me at least 10 drafts. Read a book 10 times straight and see if you don’t get bored with it. Or really pissed off.

So when I get through a draft, I take a week or so before I get back into it. As the end of the draft approaches, I start to fret about that week. I can’t take an actual vacation, because I always tell myself that I don’t know precisely when I’ll reach the end of the draft and therefore I can’t book a trip in advance. I try to line up some reading related to the subject of the book, but sometimes the books turn out to be duds or I’m done with them in a day and a half.

This time, as I take a break between drafts of my novel about the Italian artist Caravaggio, I find myself sweating it out in the desert heat of Jerusalem. Enervating, indeed. I’m already a little fevered in any case, because I’ve been deep in the psyche of Caravaggio, who was both a brilliant artist and a duelist with an explosive temper.

In fact, when he wasn’t working, Caravaggio was liable to get into tavern brawls and raging arguments with everyone around him. That suggests I’m not alone in my frenetic between-drafts mental state. It’s a good job I can’t carry a rapier around Jerusalem.

I used to think that perhaps I just wasn’t that nice. My theory was that when I’m writing, or when I’m on a book tour talking about my books, I’m a very pleasant fellow, but take away the dope, as it were, of creative writing and I turn into the clenched up ball of resentments and violence that I used to be as a teenager.

I don’t think that any more. I’ve done enough meditation and other self-examinations (I won’t go into them here, but they’d all sound very new agey, I expect; never mind, they’ve been great for me) to know that the “real” me only emerges during periods when I’m working. My concentration at those times is deep. It’s as though I’m listening to my self, without judgment, just as one does in meditation.

When I’m not working, it’s harder to hear the voice of my self. I’m more likely to pick up other sounds, the psychological noise pollution that comes with minor confrontations on the road, annoying emails, vague slights from acquaintances.

So this time I’m writing a play about Gaza, before I go back to my Caravaggio novel. You might think Gaza isn’t a place to find peace, but I’ve always enjoyed a deep concentration whenever I’ve been there. To bring that concentration together with the tranquility of creativity ought to keep me sane until it’s time to get back to my novel.

Either that, or the next time I post to this blog it’ll be from a jail somewhere…

I’m thinking of updating the Romeo and Juliet story and setting it in Bethlehem. In tribute to the Sondheim-Bernstein classic “West Side Story,” it’ll be called “West Bank Story,” of course, and will be the tale of the rivalry between two gangs, one Fatah and the other Hamas. I’ve already scored a couple of the numbers (“Aisha, I just met the mother of a girl named Aisha” and “I feel pretty, Oh so pretty, I feel pretty and witty and…I’d best not talk about it because the Hamas guys won’t like it.”)

I do have quite a track record at developing disastrous failed concepts for musicals. I’ve been driving my wife crazy with these ideas for years. This is inspired by the large number of distinguished writers who’ve penned opera librettos and discovered that writer-turned-lyricists have a special graveyard all their own in Hell. Vikram Seth, Russell Hoban and, most recently, Ian McEwan have turned their hand to it. None of them seem to be rivals to Lorenzo da Ponte, Mozart’s greatest librettist, no matter how hard they’ve tried.

Which is why I’ve always thought it’s a better idea to write a failed musical. After all, did you ever see a musical that didn’t seem like it would’ve been better left in the librettist’s bottom draw – or in this case, his blog? Believe me, I know: I saw “Falsettos” on Broadway.

I’ve particularly enjoyed working on failed musicals which fall into the category first popularized by the Buddy Holly biosical (biography-musical, new word all my own) “Buddy” and recently by Green Day’s “American Idiot,” in which music people already love is jammed into a ridiculous storyline. (Ridiculous storylines are de rigeur in the Middle East, so maybe the Palestinian musical isn’t so silly…)

That brought me the following list of future Tony Award Winners:

BLOOD ON THE CHANTILLY LACE: A detective discovers that Buddy Holly and Richie Valens died when their plane came down only because gangsters wanted to rub out the third, largely unremembered passenger, The Big Bopper.

FUGUE! The life of J.S. Bach, fun-loving father of 20 and writer of the scariest piece of music ever (Toccata and Fugure in D minor for organ).

I’M A BELIEVER: The songs of The Monkees performed in Gregorian plainchant by monks.

SPINA BIFIDA BLUES: The last days of Hank Williams, alcoholic country music star suffering chronic pain from an undiagnosed spinal complaint.

NIXON/KING: Taking a cue from Frost/Nixon, we go inside the famous White House meeting between Tricky Dick and The King. Elvis offers to serve as an undercover DEA agent (which is true). Nixon spins his favorite discs. Mayhem ensues…

GAY EDGAR HOOVER: To a score of great disco hits, the cross-dressing FBI chief sniffs out commies.

Rather than just plough ahead with all of these, I’d prefer you to let me know which you’d choose. Or tell me what other subjects would be the least appropriate for a musical and we’ll see if we can get it rolling. I await your suggestions…

Snyder had neat white hair, a trim build encased in a seersucker suit, and a black tie. This, in a land where dressing up means putting on a T-shirt that has sleeves. As I listened to his East Coast drawl, I took one look at him and figured he wouldn’t last.

Devotees of the Israel Museum can be thankful I was wrong. Snyder just completed a $100-million renovation of the museum, transforming a much-loved but confusing jumble into a sleek, user-friendly building.

After three years in which visitors could, more or less, only see the Dead Sea Scrolls and a large model of Jerusalem in the time of Herod’s Temple (still at the full entrance price), the museum reopened its full collection last week. The flashy redesign has attracted masses of Israelis and foreign tourists without making the place seem overcrowded.

The new museum sticks with the general features of the older building, which was designed in the late 1950s and inaugurated in 1965. A series of modernist cubes, the old building was arranged along the ridge above the 11th-century Monastery of the Cross, and beside the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. The original designer, Alfred Mansfeld, intended the museum to blend with its landscape, like an Arab village.

Unfortunately, Mansfeld, a Russian-born, Israeli architect, also had the idea of making visitors walk the entire length of the museum — uphill, a distance equal to four stories, and outside in a city that sits in a desert and is quite hot nine months of the year — before they could enter. The walk was, to say the least, unpopular. Particularly because when you got to the top, you had to go down some stairs to enter the galleries.

You can still make the walk in the desert heat if you want. But after entering through the new admissions hall, which is louvered with terracotta to cut out the sun, visitors may now ascend a gentler slope in air-conditioned comfort. A tunnel, created by James Carpenter Design Associates of New York, takes visitors to the galleries with frosted glass on one side. By a neat geometric trick, it’s designed to make you feel you’re walking downhill whichever end of the tunnel you’re at.

With a series of new buildings added in among Mansfeld’s original pods, the museum’s exhibition space has doubled to 200,000 square feet. But the curators cut the number of items on display to 8,500 from 12,000.

That’s because the three main galleries — biblical archeology, fine arts and Jewish life — were so jammed with treasures in the old museum that it was hard to know what to look at. (It was also near impossible to find your way around, even for people who had worked there for years.)

The collection as a whole is still a hodge-podge, making for strange juxtapositions. I counted 100 steps from the Egyptian mummies to Rembrandt’s “Saint Peter” canvas. I was quite happy to count my steps, because it was better than looking at the twaddle filling the new Israeli Art gallery (there was no gallery devoted to local art before, and now we know why.) But it’s now easier to find your way through the paintings without suddenly emerging into an archeological gallery of Roman artefacts and wondering where you made a wrong turn.

About 10 percent of the new museum is devoted to contemporary art. It’s the kind of stuff that brings out the curmudgeon in everyone except art students and pseudo intellectuals. The instruments of a jazz ensemble suspended by wires. (“Why?” asked my 2-year-old son. Smart lad.) A collection of cubes made to look like a henhouse, each cube with a light bulb inside and all the light bulbs blinking at different times. This was supposed to be a comment on the situation of the Palestinians.

Nevermind. There are more crowd-pleasing art works by Van Gogh, Renoir, Monet and Rodin with which to improve your mind, after you’ve finished laughing at the contemporary art.

It’s clear the museum is much more enjoyable than it used to be. Old friends on the museum’s staff profess themselves to be excited. When pressed, they admit that perhaps the best thing about the new museum is that they now know how to get out of the galleries when it’s time to go home at the end of their day.

(I posted this on Global Post. For more stories, click here.)