Cain's Field : Faith, Fratricide, and Fear in the Middle East

Rating:
Summary: A Fresh Look at an Old Problem
Review: Amazon - Matt Rees book

When a subject like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been covered extensively in the daily press for decades, when numerous biographies and memoirs exist already on the major political players in the conflict, writing another book on Israeli-Palestinian relations seems a daunting task. Accordingly, Matt Rees deserves a great deal of credit for figuring out new things to say and new ways of looking at the conflict, and making all of us involved in the Middle East look at the conflict with new filters. Rees' premise - that Israelis and Palestinians have to learn to live with themselves before they can live with each other -- is indeed a fresh and welcome approach to problem-solving in the conflict. For years it was always taken for granted on the Israeli side that the religious and social differences of the Israelis would have to await solution until the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was resolved. Rees turns that premise on its head and shows why on both sides people have to end their own internal conflicts first before they can have any hope of reaching a lasting peace settlement. The most compelling aspects of Rees' well-written, deeply-researched book are the series of portraits he provides on both the Palestinian and Israeli sides. These portraits are so rich, and highly-textured, and his narrative moves so briskly, that one has the feeling of moving through a novel, not a piece of non-fiction. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants an engrossing and accurate picture of the most perplexing of the world's conflicts.

Robert Slater
Jerusalem, Israel


Rating:
Summary: Misleading anecdotes
Review: I didn't like this book. I found it misleading. The author told plenty of anecdotes about Israel. But these were not very sympathetic to anyone.

There are Arabs and Jews living in the West Bank. That's disputed land. I was interested in seeing how the author treated them. Did he admit that the Jews on the West Bank were mainly natives living in their homeland? No, instead he implied that they were there for not entirely legitimate religious reasons. And he concentrated on questions of revenge, as if that made it legitimate or illegitimate for people to live in their homeland!

Rees also spent quite some time discussing the grave of a Jewish murderer, Baruch Goldstein. I think this was to show a false and misleading symmetry between the West Bank Jews, a people who simply want the rights of human beings, and some of the Arabs who are trying to deny them the rights of human beings.

If you read this book, you'll probably come away with the impression that both sides are wicked aggressors. And that is simply false.

Rating:
Summary: The stories you don't hear - And I thought I knew it all,...
Review: I had considered myself well read about the Israeli/Arab conflict in general and then I heard Matt Rees speak two months ago about this new book. He told me quite a few things I never knew before (mostly about the Palestinians). I bought his book on the spot and don't regret it. He is a good story teller and delves into issues and people that I don't read about in both the general and special interest media that covers this part of the world. I now have a better understanding about the issues that each side deals with internally (and especially about the Palestinian side).

Highly Recommended!

Rating:
Summary: Must read!
Review: I have a deep interest and knowledge of Israel and I am not interested in reading repitious material, of which there is so much. However, "Cain's Field" is original. The first time I went to Israel, I read several books in advance, and in one, every person interviewed had a story. There were compelling stories of their backgrounds and how they got to Israel. "Cain's Field" was, for me, a continuation, a weaving together of stories of people of different backgrounds, each story wrapped up with the story of the country, young people figuring out where they fit into this world, the land of conflicts. The book is full of good drama, meticulously researched, shows authority and sensitivity. Most of all it is excellent reporting and not judgmental. It is fair and balanced and gives everyone equal time, four chapters each. I found the stories penetrating and provocative and Rees seems to have an understanding of the colliding cultures not available to ordinary readers and newscasters. I recommend "Cain's Field", it will entice you, pull you in during the first chapter with the intrigues of conflicts and betrayals. I could not put it down and read it in three sittings! Good gift idea!

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating.
Review: It's been a while since I have read anything new about the Arab-Israel conflict. Cain's Field is a great read that tells the real-life story of eight different people. Each story highlights a different internal conflict either on the Palestinian side or the Israeli side. Much of what I read here suprised me and I feel like the book goes deeper than what I have previously read on the subject. What I liked best about this book, though, is that the characters come alive. Each person comes off as a complex human being and the genuinely stories touched me.

Rating:
Summary: Cain's Field opened my eyes
Review: No matter what you think of the players in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict now, it will surely change as a result of reading this excellent book. Matt Rees evokes a range of emotions in the reader, from outrage to empathy, and not always in the direction you might suppose. His human stories of the people effected most by internal struggles on both sides of the conflict paint pictures for the reader that until this book were unavailable to most of us who have followed the larger conflict in the news.

Rating:
Summary: CAIN'S FIELD--A MATTER OF FAITH
Review: Over the past decade or so, I have lived in Jerusalem for extended periods of time working on secular projects. The episodes recounted by Rees are very similar to those I have experienced, so there was nothing new in what Rees has reported. His chapter on the Israeli treatment of the Holocaust victims (5, pages 143 ff) and his expose on Ben-Gurion are provocative in the extreme and certain to raise eye-brows inasmuch as he constantly exposes Ben-Gurion's dark side. One can only hope that Rees has not taken those statements out-of-context and twisted them for his own purposes.

Rees is a reporter and when he sticks to his subject, the narrative is compelling. I do, however, take exception to what I term his "pulp psychology" (especially pages 172 and again 277, but elsewhere as well). His attempt to equate suicide killings with the Holocaust is, in my view, a disservice to the victims of that one horrific episode in human history. The suicide bombers act randomly and are not systematically thorough in their heinous crimes as were the Nazis in their pogrom. To forge such a link as Rees does minimizes, in my view, the enormity of the Holocaust and plays right into the hands of those who would deny its existence. Suicide bombing are a daily occurrence; so are deadly car accidents. To suggest an equation implies that the Holocaust was also just another, similar, but regrettable, tragedy, and that moves it from the realm of horror into the ambit of just another sad event.

But even if one were to disagree with this assessment of mine, Rees' reductive argument runs counter to the premise of his exegesis. Namely, the Israeli-Palestinian issue is nuanced and cannot be reduced to a simplistic bi-polar set of opposites, which is how the press continues to regard the situation. In my estimation, the equation of Rees damages his premise because he reduces that one horrific event to a black-and-white, bi-polar set of circumstances.

In his attempt to distance his presentation from that of a sheer reporting of the facts and elevate it to the level of a more thought-provoking work, Rees ingeniously works his narrative around and constantly returns to the Cain=farmer/Abel=shepherd dialectic which is so critical to his exegesis. My careful re-reading of the Bible (and I candidly admit that it was in English translation and not in the original Hebrew) reveals that Rees has overlooked one significant aspect of that dialectic. Namely that God did not reject that which Abel offered, it was Cain's faith which made his gift acceptable. This is made patently clear in God's questioning and admonition of Cain in which there is no mention whatsoever about the offering:
Yahweh asked Cain, "Why are you angry and downcast? If you are doing right, surely you ought to hold your head high! But if you are not doing right, Sin is crouching at the door hungry to get you. You can still master him." (Genesis 4:6-7)
The dialectic which Rees creates is all about faith, and in the end, it is not individual matters of faith which are the engines driving the disparate parties toward their own goals and objectives in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?


Rating:
Summary: A rare glimpse behind the headlines
Review: This book is a real eye-opener. It takes readers behind the repetitive and often misleading headlines of Middle East reporting into the human heart of the Israel-Palestine conflict. It's a place where most journalists out there seem never to reach. Rees introduces us to a broad and fascinating cast of real-life characters, who are portrayed in skillfull detail.
I learned more from this book than years of "blow-by-blow" news reports on the intifada. It stands head and shoulders above other journalists' accounts of the intifada, which I have found predictable and superficial. From Cain's Field I finally have some understanding of life in Bethlehem and Gaza, and a real sense of what's been going on out there for the past few years. Perhaps even more crucially, Rees gives us a warts-and-all insight into the internal conflicts which have created the internal divisions within Palestinian and Israeli society, fueling the current conflict.
I left this book with only one question - how come most of the journalists covering the Middle East conflict never told us about all this stuff?