Matthew Clayfield is a journalist, critic and screenwriter.
Recent Posts
Walking the streets of Hebron, a city cleaved in two
I meet Shehada at his home early in the morning and we set off with his friend and neighbour, Isa, in the direction of Hebron, the West Bank’s largest city. It should by rights be ...
Visit Fabulous, Bloody Grozny
The first-time visitor to Grozny has to be reminded that, until recently, the Chechen capital was often called “the most destroyed city on Earth.” Today, Grozny rises out of the plain like the Emerald City ...
Palestine’s Street of Martyrs paved with anger and regret
I return to Ramallah from Taybeh, beer and wine in tow, to find Shehada, the Palestinian violin maker from bus 18, waiting for me outside the Al-Wehdeh hotel. He is here to take me to ...
‘Making beer is a form of resistance’: brewing West Bank tensions
The most famous section of the Israeli-West Bank separation barrier is also the shortest: the eight feet tall concrete slabs festooned with anti-Zionist graffiti, the vast majority of it written, somewhat tellingly, in languages other ...
‘What is a Jewish state?’ The view from the Golan Heights
Reuven Shalev is round, balding and deeply fascinating: one of those voices that betray the complexity of the Arab-Israeli conflict, that hint at a too often unreported-upon willingness to compromise and a tendency towards self-criticism, ...
Blogging between the Blue and Purple lines an uneasy Middle East
At the bottom end of Metula’s HaRishonim Street, where old men on tractors cart fruit into Israel’s northernmost building and boxes of fruit out of it again, Hadar Sela and I stand leaning on the yellow fence ...
Tel Aviv and the bomb squad makes a guest appearance
Israel knew I was coming. Within seconds of disembarking Aegean flight 928 from Athens to Tel Aviv, on the darkened tarmac between the boarding stairs and the terminal shuttle bus, I find myself beset by ...
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