Matt Rees

Website: www.cainsfield.com
Jerusalem, Israel

Biographical information

Matt Rees is the Jerusalem bureau chief for Time magazine. He was born in Wales in 1967 and studied English literature at Oxford University and journalism at the University of Maryland. He has worked as a correspondent in London, Washington, New York, and the Middle East. His posts have included: Middle East correspondent for The Scotsman, Scotland's national newspaper, and Middle East correspondent for Newsweek. Since June 2000, Rees has been the Jerusalem bureau chief for Time Magazine, where he has written award-winning stories about the violence of the Aqsa intifada. Rees has traveled extensively for all these publications, particularly in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria, where he was the only Western correspondent in Damascus on the day President Hafez Assad died. He has also written for Men's Journal, The New York Daily News, The Johannesburg Star, London's Daily Mail, The Jerusalem Post and Tikkun. He has been a frequent commentator on CNN including Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, BBC Radio, National Public Radio and numerous other U.S. radio stations. Before moving to Israel, Rees worked in New York for The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Bloomberg News, for whom he won a Society of Professional Journalists award. In 2004, he won a Henry Luce Award for Reporting for his coverage of the battle in Jenin during the current intifada. He has published short stories and non-fiction in Nerve and Keltic Fringe. Matt Rees published Cain's Field: Faith, Fratricide, and Fear in the Middle East in November 2004 with Free Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.

Discussion topics

• The Palestinians: Inside the Rotten Authority

  In my book I uncovered the corruption of Arafat's regime in a way never before done by an independent journalist. Since the book's publication, the corruption hasn't ended and I haven't stopped following it. From my sources close to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and inside the senior echelons of his security forces, I'll lay out the infighting that makes the Palestinian leadership their own worst enemies and show how their squabbling and corruption feeds support for Hamas.

• Watching the Sparks: How Journalism Focuses on the Wrong Conflict in the Mideast

  All schoolchildren conduct physics experiments with a contraption that sends sparks zapping across the gap between two electrodes. Mideast correspondents view the Israeli-Palestinian conflict the same way--watching the eye-catching sparks that fly between the two sides, but failing to notice the wires and mechanics that lead away from the electrodes. Those wires represent the complex workings of Israeli and Palestinian society. Over nine years reporting from Israel, I've discovered that it's these internal battles that actually drive the big conflict. I'll lay out these internal conflict and show how, until the divisions within the societies are healed, there'll be no peace.

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