Jerusalem journalists point the finger at Arafat’s inner circle

Journalists Matt Rees and Matthew Kalman are feeling a tad smug right about now. The writers of “The Murder of Yasser Arafat” asserted in their early 2013 e-book that the Palestinian leader was assassinated, probably by polonium.

Now that Swiss scientists have found at least 18 times the normal level of radioactive polonium in Arafat’s bones, as reported by Al Jazeera America, all that remains, they say, is to figure out who did it.

Al Jazeera said the primary suspects are “Arafat’s Palestinian rivals or the Israeli government.” But Rees and Kalman say it was Arafat’s close circle of companions who are the prime suspects, not Israel.

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“This polonium story is revolving around different factions wanting the PLO money and his legacy as a political symbol,” said Rees, speaking from his home in Jerusalem. “I think that for this issue to still be alive, it’s not just an issue of principle and an issue of whodunit and bringing justice, it’s about Suha Arafat getting some money out of the PLO guys.”

Those who killed Arafat, added Rees, are people in his immediate circle who are now in control of the Palestinian Authority, and they’re under great pressure to keep Arafat’s widow quiet.

“The more that comes out, and it is in stages, the more that pressure grows,” he said. “She doesn’t have to go all the way and really name names. She is in quite a position of power because she has Al Jazeera behind her.”

Matt Rees and Matthew Kalman’s second book in their DeltaFourth imprint (Courtesy DeltaFourth)

Rees, the former Time magazine correspondent in Israel and now a fiction writer, and Kalman, also a long-time foreign journalist in Israel (and blogger for The Times of Israel), set out to write the Arafat story and other journalistic nuggets as DeltaFourth, a reference to the American special forces unit and the profession of journalism — the fourth estate. They felt they had juicy material that wouldn’t receive the proper treatment in most publications, and decided to publish it themselves, in e-book format.

“We bring people to the point that we know Arafat was murdered and the only way to find out more is to read our book,” said Rees.

What they don’t know is where the poison came from, but they are keeping tabs on the story. They theorize that it was one of the powerful men in Arafat’s circle who accessed the polonium from either Israel or the former Soviet Union, where Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas spent time while working on his doctorate.

For now, however, Rees is taking issue with Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor, who is arguing that Arafat wasn’t poisoned at all.

“He just needs to argue that Israel didn’t supply the poison,” pointed out Rees. “He seems to be a little be too positive, and frankly, a little bit too suspicious.”