Cain's Field: Faith, Fratricide and Fear in the Middle East
by Matt Rees.
New York: Free Press, 2004, $26
Matt Rees, former Jerusalem bureau chief of Time magazine, has met
many Palestinians and Israelis and gives a voice equally to all, be
they fundamentalists, politicians or "ordinary" people. Taking the
theme of the biblical brothers, Cain and Abel, and weaving into his
narrative the fratricide that has become a powerful yet simplistic
myth, Rees shows that neither society can lay sole claim to victim
status: "Each exists in a fantasy world of blamelessness, shifting
guilt to a distant enemy... each wishes to see himself as Abel, no
matter how much he might in reality be Cain, lashing out
resentfully at his own."
The first four of eight chapters focus on the Palestinians. The
first chapter opens with a meeting with Imad Akel, a leader of the
military wing of Hamas. In a traditional greeting, Akel kisses Rees
five times on the cheeks and, ominously, Rees feels "death electric
on [Akel's] lips." Akel tells him about the death of two young
boys, one a relative of his, killed after the head of the
Palestinian Authority's (PA) riot police unit ordered his men to
fire on an anti-US demonstration. The corruption within the PA and
its inability to rein in factions causes Rees to reflect that "the
story that I heard... stripped another layer of my own innocence...
the PA's only remaining function was the oppression of its own
people." After a stand-off between the boys' families, the riot
police head and the PA lasting nearly two years, Imad Akel executed
the head of the riot police to avenge the families' honor.
Bloodshed begets bloodshed.
Over the next three chapters, this corruption at the heart of
Palestinian governance is minutely picked over. Most of the
responsibility leads back to the late Chairman Yasser Arafat whom
Rees accuses of "a trail of shiftiness." Zakaria Baloush is an
example of a high-ranking PLO officer (at the time of publication
he was deputy head of General Intelligence in Gaza) who, in trying
to stop the activities of the terrorist factions, found himself
squashed by Arafat who "promoted corrupt mediocrities." Rees meets
12-year-old Fadi selling tea in Gaza who tells him: "Hamas is
good... the Authority is corrupt and dirty. But Abu Amar [Arafat]
is the shit on my shoe."
Ordinary Palestinians are mired in "internecine viciousness," says
Rees. Much is revealed in the descriptions of "inside" and
"outside" leadership within the PLO, and how the outsiders,
returning to Palestine from Tunis, Europe and Lebanon and taking
for themselves the best jobs, have lost the respect of the
population. Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) is among the latter group,
and this reveals the background to his current weak position as
leader, battling against embittered insiders.
In the second half of the book, Rees turns his eye on the cliques
that characterize Israeli society. In Chapter five, which I found
the saddest and most shocking, he tells of a significant number of
Holocaust survivors who, after coming to Israel, were forgotten by
society and have become a marginalized and unrepresented group.
Drs. Henry Szor and Yoram Barak, of the Abarbanel Mental Health
Centre, talk about the survivors being treated as if they were
mentally ill rather than deeply traumatized by their experiences.
Some are left to languish in mental hospitals. They suffered in
silence for so long that they have now lost the use of their voice,
says Rees: "Slowly their vocal cords had atrophied from lack of
stimulus after their decades in the hospital... this ghostly quiet
was a mirror of the silence that greeted these people when they
came [from Europe]... an entire society refused to listen to these
patients, until they eventually stopped talking." If this was not
enough, Rees is shocked to discover that the government withheld
payments due to survivors. He quotes Szor on the treatment of
Holocaust survivors: "There has been a conspiracy of silence, a
moral problem in the whole country."
The explorations within Israel continue: Rees finds a seam of
hatred that creates polarized factions and follows it. This takes
him to the grave of Baruch Goldstein, the murderer of 29
Palestinians at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, and face to
face with those who believe he is a martyr. He also meets Avraham
Pesso, an artist who tried to highlight the error of worshipping
Goldstein by desecrating the grave with oil and paint. In Chapter
six, Rees meets Elhanan Ben-Hakoun, a secular Israeli whose
photography shop in a semi-religious district of Jerusalem was
fire-bombed by an extremist ultra-Orthodox group. "They hated him
because he was secular, more than Israelis hated Palestinians,"
writes Rees. They feared that "modern life - in the form of its
technology and liberalism - would infiltrate young religious minds
and draw them away from the study of Torah and into sin."
Rees writes so fluently that the emotion and hatred he documents
burst out of this compelling book. The stories stayed with me long
after I put down the book. Rees' message is clear: he urges the
readers of Cain's Field to look deeper and confront the
"skein of fraternal hostility" within both societies. He brings us
the stories of those ignored by the local and international media.
He ends on an optimistic note: "There are Israelis and Palestinians
who show that it is possible to erase some of that ancient
bloodstain... there are people who see Cain's Field as a place in
which crops may grow beside Abel's flock."
These voices are small and few, but let us hope they have the power
to make themselves heard.