Synopses & Reviews
In this gripping, in-the-trenches account of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, award-winning journalist Matt Rees takes us deep within Israeli and Palestinian societies to reveal the fractures at the core of both. While the world focuses almost exclusively on the violent clash between the two camps, Rees steers our gaze toward their centers, exposing the internal rifts that drain each society of its ability to act cohesively. The Palestinians focus on the occupation of the West Bank, the Jewish settlers, and other Israeli actions, while the Israelis see only the intifada and the suicide bombings -- and both overlook their bitter infighting. This dazzling, groundbreaking narrative goes behind the familiar moves of the big players to reveal the individuals who are at war not only with the enemy, but also with their own people.
Beginning with the astonishing story of a Hamas member who is targeted both by Israel for his hand in attacks against Jews, and by the Palestinian Authority for the revenge killing of a police officer who murdered his brother, each chapter concentrates on one or two individuals with whom Rees has personal contact, and whose stories uncover the chaos at the hearts of these two warring groups. From Palestinian car thieves and filmmakers to Israeli settlers and Holocaust survivors, Rees traces the minute and numerous ways that Yasser Arafat betrays his people and the Israeli leadership veers between placating and abusing its clashing factions.
Rees has unparalleled access to groups and people on both sides of the conflict, as well as an extraordinary talent for looking beyond the usual stories. In Cain's Field, he suggests that the world has been looking in the wrong place to explain the unending battles and in the wrong place for a solution. With heartbreaking detail, incisive revelations, and terrible and often moving stories of the human beings behind the intractable attitudes and violence, Rees offers a bold new perspective on this tragic and seemingly insoluble situation. In so doing, he also offers hope -- the hope that by turning the spotlight inward, these societies might heal their internal wounds and move toward a peaceful future.
Review
Jeffrey Goldberg, Middle East correspondent,
The New YorkerMatt Rees is a particularly able foreign correspondent who knows the Middle East better than almost anyone. His writing is free of cant and oversimplification, and in Cain's Field he has looked past the clichés and sureties of the hundred-year war between Arab and Jew and come up with a story that is as original as it is compelling.
Review
Matthew McAllester, author of
Blinded by the Sunlight: Emerging from the Prison of Saddam's IraqCain's Field is a simply extraordinary book. Matt Rees is alone among journalists covering the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians in taking a new perspective as he examines the tensions within the two peoples, convincingly arguing that those internal battles must be resolved before progress can be made between the peoples. Rees's writing is as enthralling as his thinking is original: he turns wonderful human stories into important political fables. In the literature of the conflict, Cain's Field is unrivaled.
Review
Christopher Dickey, Middle East editor of
Newsweek and author of
The SleeperCain's Field is the rare book that turns over old stones and discovers new truths about the Middle East. In elegant detail, Matt Rees reveals the inner battles of those intimate enemies, the Israelis and Palestinians, and searches for ways to break out of their emotional stalemate. It's a disturbing, absorbing story, and ultimately a hopeful one.
Review
Michael Elliott, editor of
Time AsiaCain's Field is exactly what those who have come to know Matt Rees's reporting from the Middle East over the years would expect -- a finely observed, meticulously written account of the darkness that inhabits the soul of the Holy Land, produced by one of the journalists who knows the story best.
Review
Joe Klein,
Time magazine political columnist
Matt Rees is a terrific journalist who really knows the Middle East and, more important, really knows how to get to the emotional heart of the matter -- through individual lives, through remarkable stories of heartbreak, hope, and redemption. If there is wisdom, and healing, to be gleaned from this ongoing tragedy, surely it will come from books like this one.
About the Author
Matt Rees is the Jerusalem bureau chief for Time magazine. In 2003 he won a Henry Luce Award for Reporting for his coverage of the battle in Jenin during the current intifada. He has also written for Men's Journal, Newsweek, The Scotsman, and The Jerusalem Post. He lives in Jerusalem.
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction"Camels, Sand and Shit"
Part I: The Palestinians
Chapter One Kissing the Dead
Arafat and Hamas
Chapter Two Saladin's Gate
Gunmen Rulers of Palestinian Towns
Chapter Three The Heroic Scum
Arafat's Fractious Henchmen
Chapter Four Nizar's Resistance
Citizens of an Occupied Homeland
Part II: The Israelis
Chapter Five The Dark Refuge
Holocaust Survivors and Native Israelis
Chapter Six Yudel's Candle
Ultrareligious and Secular Jews
Chapter Seven Adamah
Settlers and the Israeli Left
Chapter Eight Matatya's Café
Arab Jews and the European Elite
Afterword"Every One That Findeth Me Shall Slay Me"