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He has written about the peace and beauty of Gaza, the likeability and grit of the leader of Hebron's Jewish community, and that height is the only significant difference between Natan Sharansky and Avigdor Lieberman.

In addition to all that, Matt Beynon Rees is the author of an award-winning series of Palestinian crime novels and has two great-uncles who rode to victory in Jerusalem as part of the British Imperial Camel Corps in 1917.

Yet, some have still tried to convince Rees that no one wants to hear about the Middle East.

"It became clear to me when my books were published that that's not true -- people are just not interested in the way the Middle East is usually covered," Rees told The Jewish State. "Because the journalism from the Middle East is so determined to be pareve and to avoid angering anyone that in the end not only does it anger everybody, but also it bores anyone who doesn't have a firm opinion. It's so empty of real content."

The Welsh-born Rees, who lives in Jerusalem with his wife and 20-month-old son, has observed Middle East journalism from the inside; he was Time magazine's Jerusalem bureau chief from 2000-06. He has settled into his first regular reporting gig since then with the new world news site GlobalPost (Globalpost.com), as well as with the popular blog The Daily Beast.

If informality is often raised as a drawback to blogging and other online journalism, Rees believes it can afford writers the advantage of eschewing conventional wisdom and cliche.

"I've tried to inject what I'm doing with GlobalPost and also with The Daily Beast with an element of what you'd call 'bloggishness'; in other words, something that's a little more personal, perhaps a little more satirical, even snarky, about what's going on here," Rees said. "Because one of the things that very often frustrated me as a journalist covering this place for Time and before that for Newsweek, was that as journalists, we had to take seriously things which were obviously ridiculous."

On the new administration in Jerusalem, Rees thinks Prime Minister Binyamin "Bibi" Netanyahu has learned from his first term as premier, as well as from the decade he spent following that in the opposition.

Rees also thinks Netanyahu should embrace his inner pragmatist and lose any ideological posturing.

"The overriding impression I always had of him was a man who is very pragmatic, but pretends to be very ideological, because ideological thinking implies intelligence, and he likes to think of himself as very intelligent, whereas pragmatism implies a politician who will do anything to retain power," Rees said. "Now, I don't see pragmatism as actually such a bad thing, and I think he should be less ashamed of his pragmatism because that's really what's needed here."

Rees' take on Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman -- who has accumulated much negative press -- would likely raise some eyebrows. Rees said foreign correspondents aren't usually in the business of hating Israel, but fall into a familiar pattern of pack mentality.

He said once an idea gains acceptance, to frame an article or a personality in a different way will get a journalist accused of bias by his peers.

"So they tend to follow accepted ways of casting a character," Rees said. "So settlers who live in certain places like Hebron are automatically attached to the adjective 'hardline,' even if they might not actually be that way. Lieberman is a perfect example of this, because due to the fact that he was cast in the more liberal Israeli press as, essentially, a racist, it became automatic that American correspondents would simply portray him as a racist, because he says and does things which if an American politician did them, would simply be racist."

In doing so, Rees said, the public misses two important factors about Lieberman. First, that even if they think he is a racist, they shouldn't ignore him. Second, Lieberman's views are accepted by not only his party -- which gained the third most seats in this year's Knesset elections -- but also Netanyahu's Likud. That means Lieberman wields influence because the Israeli voting public chose for him to have that influence.

Rees also points out that Lieberman endorses the two-state solution, albeit not necessarily one that could be mistaken for that of Shimon Peres, for example, but a two-state solution that may be more realistic.

"Right now, Barack Obama is talking to Iran, who I'm sure he thinks their leading politicians are despicable characters, but he's talking to them," Rees said. "And that's how people have to conduct diplomacy. They have to conduct it with people they might actually find quite offensive, and try to find common ground. So I think instead of writing Lieberman off, people ought to look at him and say well, he's probably not the nicest character to have dinner with, but maybe he's someone who can get things done."

During the last 13 years in Israel, Rees has seen the public focus change from peace negotiations to Iran, which is pursuing nuclear capability while arming and funding terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas. Rees said Israel and the Palestinian territories have become the battleground in a proxy war between Iran and the United States. That's bad news for everyone but Iran, he said, because it means Iran has no desire to see the end of the Palestinian civil war between Hamas and Fatah.

"The Iranians' only real success up until now in exporting Islamic revolution has been Hezbollah, and it's something they're extremely proud of," Rees said. "Now they have a very significant foothold in Gaza, which enables them to pressure Israel and also to needle the Egyptians, which they do with glee."

He said fatherhood has also changed his perspective on the conflict, as when he found himself running for cover in Ashkelon and Ashdod from the Iran-funded rocket fire coming from Gaza.

"And I remember actually driving back from doing that one day, thinking if there's ever a missile fired at Jerusalem I'm just going straight to the airport; I'm not sticking around," Rees said. "Because if it's just me, it's one thing. But now I have a 20-month-old son, and of course that gave me a different, new level of understanding of how it feels to be an Israeli or Palestinian when you can't just go to the airport."

The characters in Rees' crime novels, such as the main character, Omar Yussef, a Palestinian teacher at a United Nations school, are based on people Rees has known during his time in Israel. Yussef is based on a friend of his "who I have admired very much because of his decency and his ability to look at the conflict without hatred, but without being a Pollyanna at the same time."

The villains, too, are based on people he's known, but readers will find the characters are deeper and more nuanced than the labels they have received in the media. The reason for that, Rees said, is that not everyone with a spotty past is pure evil.

"I've looked into their eyes and seen both the violence that they're capable of and the price that they paid for doing it," he said.

The books, which though fiction examine the tensions within the cultures as opposed to between them, are decidedly non-political. Rees said people have told him that they've felt quite differently about the conflict after reading his books.

"And so I think I've made people look again at some of their ideas about the conflict in the Middle East," he said.