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Temperamentally, the boys were not rebellious. They were hewn from the same rock as their parents. They were obedient sons because it was in their nature to be obedient. They knew that they would upset their father deeply if they told him that they didn’t believe the Pope was the Antichrist, as Missouri Synod doctrine held, so they didn’t. When Albert sought a means of escape from this restricted world he quietly found one for himself in the voracious reading of books.
Delmer Glock was convinced that Albert’s interest in the archaeology of Palestine originated not in the text of the Bible but in the swashbuckling children’s adventure stories of Richard Halliburton, which were published in America in the 1920s and 1930s. In one of these books, Richard Halliburton’s Second Book of Marvels: The Orient, first published in 1938 when Albert was thirteen, one finds, after descriptions of the ancient Seven Wonders of the World, ‘Timbuctoo’, the discovery of Victoria Falls by Livingstone, a meeting with ‘Ibn Saud’ (King ‘Abd al-‘Aziz al-Sa’ud, the ruler of Saudi Arabia) in a tent outside Mecca, and visits to Petra and the Dead Sea, a swaggering account of an attempt to explore a ‘secret tunnel’ in the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. This may have been the spark that ignited Albert’s curiosity, kindled on the dry wood of an already abundant knowledge of the Bible. Exploration of the Temple Mount, the seat of the biblical Temple, also known as the Haram al-Sharif in Arabic, was and remains the holy grail of biblical archaeology, its central mystery, its ultimate prize, and a subject so thickly encrusted with myth and legend that the facts about it are easily lost. The cult of exploration of the Temple Mount, of which Halliburton was giving a simplified children’s version, could turn the homely familiarity with the Bible that Albert Glock already had into a genuine adventure. Halliburton wrote:
The more I heard about the caverns and tunnels and shaft, the more curious I became about them. How exciting it would be if someone could explore the entire passage, the passage lost all these centuries. If someone found the tunnel, it would lead – if the legend turned out to be true – right into the treasure-caverns from underneath. The reward of such an adventure might be the long-lost Ark of the Covenant, or the mummy of Israel’s greatest king.
I resolved to be that someone myself … Was I about to make one of the greatest discoveries in Bible history?
It may be a long shot to conclude that Albert Glock found the inspiration for his career as an archaeologist in the pages of the famous American adventure writer. But when he was still a teenager, he travelled on a freighter to Europe, just as Richard Halliburton had done, and years later he was excavating an ancient mound in Palestine, seeking to make discoveries in Bible history himself.
Albert showed a determined independence of mind that was unusual in a place where few aspired to individualism. ‘He was always off doing something,’ his brother Richard recalled; ‘we were never sure what it was.’ He remembers being mystified by the sight of his older brother writing Sanskrit and cuneiform characters on a piece of paper. ‘I don’t know where he got it from.’
At the age of thirteen, Albert told his father that he wanted to enrol at a residential pre-seminary high school for boys in Milwaukee, 200 miles away. The school was a German-style gymnasium where students learned Latin, Greek and Hebrew. Its purpose was to prepare boys for the Lutheran ministry. Albert’s parents could afford the fees, which were $200 per year, but not the cost of transportation, so from the age of thirteen, and for the next five years, Albert would hitchhike the 200 miles between Washburn and Milwaukee. Later, he announced that he wanted to specialize in the Old Testament, source of the legends of Solomon and the Temple and the ancient civilizations of the Near East.
Albert Glock’s motive in going to school in Milwaukee was as much a dedication to the Lutheran ministry as a desire to get out of Washburn. Later, his younger brothers Delmer and Richard followed Albert along this path, to the Missouri Synod ministry via the gymnasium in Milwaukee. By the time they had reached their late teens, the three boys had hitchhiked to every state in the Union. By the time they had reached their mid-twenties, they were Lutheran ministers.
Lutherans of the Missouri Synod subscribed unconditionally to the version of Christianity embodied in the classic works of Martin Luther, and were unimpressed with anything written later. Drinking from this pristine well of pure doctrine, based on a belief in the Bible as ‘the inspired, inerrant and infallible word of God’, Missourians saw themselves as forming ‘the only true visible church on earth’. Although it was the plan of the Missouri Synod leadership gradually to adopt English in church rites as soon as most of its members had acquired the language, and the work of translating the Lutheran classics could be completed (a process that began around the time of the First World War), the cultural and doctrinal conservatism of most members of the church were inseparable: to them, their native German tongue was the divine language of the Bible, as translated by the blessed Luther himself, and they only reluctantly gave it up completely in church services as late as the Second World War, spurred on by popular anti-German feeling in the United States.
The Missourians remained apart and solitary in their righteousness: it was not until the 1960s that they would agree to join Christian organizations that included other denominations. This attitude was reinforced by their social and cultural homogeneity: they were almost all German-Americans (there was also a Scandinavian element), and they were in and of the agricultural Midwest: two-thirds of them lived within a 300-mile radius of Chicago. Their separateness and common identity were not just ethnic. Members of the church did not need to look outside for education: the Missouri Synod had institutions that provided both. LCMS pastors were trained at an LCMS seminary – Concordia Theological Seminary, St Louis – and the children of LCMS members attended LCMS elementary schools, whose teachers were trained at an LCMS teachers’ college. As late as the 1930s, lectures in theology at Concordia Seminary were in Latin.
In 1932, they published a synopsis of their beliefs, bearing the plain title A Brief Statement of the Doctrinal Position of the Missouri Synod, which articulates everything a Missouri Lutheran believes or ought to believe. It completes the edifice of the all-encompassing Missouri world view with a Lutheran cosmology. This proposes a universe that came into being in exactly six twenty-four-hour days. ‘Since no man was present when it pleased God to create the world,’ it argues, ‘we must look for a reliable account of creation to God’s own record, found in God’s own book, the Bible.’ They reject any scientific explanation of the origins of man and the universe that contradicts the biblical account, whatever intellectual difficulties this may cause.
Salvation is achieved exclusively by divine grace: this is their primary doctrine. The Gospels and the Sacraments are the divine tools given man to promote access to this divine grace. Good works alone are insufficient for salvation: the idea is anathema. They also believe that the Pope is the fulfilment of biblical prophecies of the Antichrist. Anabaptists, Unitarians, Masons, ‘crypto-Calvinists’, ‘synergists’, and above all papists are held to be in dangerous error. They repudiate ‘unionism’, ‘that is, church-fellowship with the adherents of false doctrine’. These tenets were the result of decades of collegial deliberation by these pious, solitary, scholarly Lutherans, conducted in earnest conferences in small towns on the Midwestern plains, based on faith in the Bible as the infallible word of God. It is a Protestantism of the American farmer: pure, primitive, austere, unworldly, defensive. When it speaks at all, it speaks plainly.
So sincere and original is their study of the Scriptures that they declare in the Brief Statement, with poignant honesty, that there are matters on which they have not been able to reach a firm position. They acknowledge themselves stumped by the dilemma of why if ‘God’s grace is universal’, ‘all men are not converted and saved?’ ‘We confess that we cannot answer it.’ This is the doctrine – transmitted via the golden chain of Christ, the Bible, Luther and the Missouri divines – that Ernest Glock taught his sons at their family devotions. Albert later admitted that he had privately scorned his father’s world view, seeing it as narrow and exclusive of all but the concerns of his Missouri Synod flock.
Ernest Glock was unenthusiastic about his son’s scholarship: he thought basic seminary training was enough. But Albert, young and intellectually hungry, continued to enlarge his field of study. In 1949 he spent a year in Europe studying theology, and took classes in biblical criticism at the University of Heidelberg, and then returned to America to study Near Eastern Languages at the University of Chicago.
His study of biblical Hebrew would set Glock in opposition to one of the most intellectually constraining articles of the Brief Statement: ‘Since the Holy Scriptures are the Word of God, it goes without saying that they contain no errors or contradictions, but that they are in all their parts and words the infallible truth, also in those parts whichtreat of historical, geographical, and other secular matters.’ Historical and geographical matters were precisely what interested Albert Glock. His scholarly intellect was too keen, and his nature too individualistic to accept this traditional dogma unquestioningly. Nevertheless, he graduated from Concordia Theological Seminary in St Louis in 1950.
The following year, he married Lois Sohn, also a German-American, the daughter of a professor of Lutheran theology, and his life seemed set for the quiet and stable life of a Lutheran clergyman. He spent the next seven years as a pastor in Normal, Illinois, not far from where he had grown up, and seemed happy enough in his vocation. In the earnest, collegial spirit of Lutheran pastors, he closed his letters ‘yours in Christ’, ‘agape’ and ‘peace’.
But his more secular studies in ancient Hebrew continued. While still serving as a pastor in Normal, he enrolled at the University of Michigan, where his thesis advisor was George Mendenhall, a biblical scholar who introduced the Marxist-oriented ‘peasants’ revolt’ model of the origin of ancient Israel. Mendenhall’s theory was opposed to the traditional biblical view which held that Israelite tribes invaded Canaan and defeated the indigenous Canaanites. Mendenhall believed that a kind of theocratic liberation movement emerged within Canaanite society, gradually transforming it into what would ultimately be called ‘Israel’. His theory, revolutionary in its day, was an early instance of a history of ancient Israel that was distinct from the biblical account. Mendenhall’s approach was an important formative influence on Albert Glock, who received his doctorate in 1968. Thirty years later, Albert wrote in his diary that he ‘had wasted seven years in Normal, Illinois’. He didn’t have the patient personality a clergyman must have, who as part of his daily business must suffer gladly the lonely, the pedantic and the boring. In 1956, he was offered a job – or ‘answered a call’, to use the Missouri idiom – to teach, the following year, Old Testament history and literature at Concordia College, River Forest, Illinois, the teachers’ college for the Missouri Synod elementary school system.
The Missouri Synod’s insistence on the infallibility of the Bible created a tension among its scholars that developed in the late fifties and early sixties into a controversy and finally into a split in the church, a trauma from which it has only recently recovered. A liberal wing, acknowledging the ‘higher criticism’ of German biblical scholars like Julius Wellhausen, believed their faith in scripture was not undermined by analysing the Old Testament historically, and seeing it as the work not of Moses, but of later authors, writing from the eighth century BCE and afterwards. The Brief Statement breathes fire on this approach: ‘We reject this erroneous doctrine as horrible and blasphemous.’ The leadership of the Missouri Synod, representing the conservative mainstream, sought to stamp out this heresy, which was threatening to engulf the entire church. To put reason before faith in studying the Bible was the beginning of the end of religion, they argued. Worst of all, this heretical fire had broken out in the church’s theological engine room, the Concordia Theological Seminary. One of the means the leadership used to extinguish it was to demand allegiance to the Brief Statement by the forty or so dissident professors at Concordia, which the professors were unwilling to do, arguing it infringed their right to academic freedom.
Although Glock was teaching elsewhere, he took the side of the dissidents, since this was the direction he too was following in his biblical studies. His eldest son, Albert Glock Jr, recalled later that in the family devotions he led with his own children, he would teach them about the ‘Yahwist’ and the ‘Deuteronomist’, as two of the biblical authors were named in Wellhausen’s analysis: an approach that defied his own father’s stern literalism.
In 1960 (aged thirty-five), he wrote an article in defence of the dissidents entitled ‘A critical evaluation of the article on Scripture in A Brief Statement of the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod’. The tone of the article was conventionally and respectfully pious, but the criticism it contained attacked the Missouri Synod’s uncompromising doctrine at its heart. The church’s theology is locked in the seventeenth century, he wrote, resulting in ‘a serious breakdown of communication when speaking to our age’. He then went on to propose a tectonic shift in the church’s doctrine, away from its most distinctive feature, its stubborn belief in the literalism of the Bible, towards an emphasis on its meaning and spirit, aware that it was a product of human authorship.
After Glock read the article at a meeting of his department at Concordia Teachers College, they insisted that it be locked in a safe and not allowed to circulate. For Albert, the episode was his first public act of opposition. He saw it as the symbolic sealing of his fate. Henceforth, he would always be a dissident.
The rebels of Concordia Seminary eventually accepted defeat. They left the church, and founded Seminex, a ‘seminary in exile’. Their departure strengthened the conservatives’ grip on Missouri Synod doctrine. Seminex survived in the wilderness, training Lutheran pastors who were not recognized by the Missouri Synod until 1988, when it voted itself out of existence and joined the more liberal Evangelical Lutheran Church of America.
In an essay unpublished during his lifetime, written when he was at Birzeit, Albert Glock described himself as ‘a skeptical white American tending to minority views’. Taking the side of the liberals in the Missouri Synod split was like rebelling against his father. Taking the minority view was an instinct that he was to follow at every crossroads in his life.
‘It has occurred to me more than once,’ he wrote, ‘that I have chosen usually the losing side, the down side, in whatever I have done. I suppose the two most notable examples are the left side of the church and the Palestinian side of politics.’ This is the motive that drove him through an intellectual, political, spiritual and personal evolution that he began as a Lutheran pastor, becoming, in succession, biblical scholar, biblical archaeologist, Palestinian archaeologist, and, finally and improbably, intellectual commissar for Palestinian cultural nationalism, which ended in his assassination. All of this was done in a robustly Lutheran spirit of earnestly working things out in the tribunal of his own conscience. In this he was following the example of Luther himself. Glock was always nailing his theses to the door, and taking the consequences.
Glock’s journey from the plains of the Midwest to the concrete slope of his assassination was an odyssey of gradual, determined metamorphosis. As soon as he completed one stage of personal transformation, he would renounce it, seeing on the horizon a clearer and sharper image of truth; and once a new image of truth appeared to him, he would head towards that, regardless of the consequences. Glock’s goal was to throw off the burden of his own past, his own background. At sixty-seven, he was on the verge of reaching it. And then he was shot.
His life was an odyssey, but when he died it was unfinished. An odyssey is a process of the maturation of the self, a narrative whose meaning and purpose become clear once it is at an end, once it has come full circle. Ulysses, the hero of the original Odyssey of Homer, goes on a long journey, undergoes trials, and returns home fulfilled. The homecoming completes and resolves the process. Without it, the odyssey is not complete, and its meaning and purpose are not realized. Glock’s long odyssey was violently ended before it reached that point of fulfilment.
FOUR (#ulink_f5212c07-5d97-5244-993b-b7f81e431297)
THEORIES ABOUT WHO might have been responsible for the shooting circulated in the first news reports broadcast within hours of the firing of the bullets. The Birzeit University public relations department had to act quickly to manage the almost immediate descent of reporters. The department’s two senior staff members, who were well accustomed to the task of megaphoning to the international media the university’s outrage at the regular shooting, killing and arrest of its students by the Israeli military, were both out of the country, and the job of announcing the university’s official reaction fell to a young Canadian aid worker, Mark Taylor, who had been seconded to Birzeit from what is now Oxfam Quebec in Jerusalem. He was at a friend’s house in Ramallah when the acting president of the university, Gabi Baramki, called him. They discussed the reports that had already been broadcast on the Israeli radio station, Qol Yisrael, which stated, as if it were a known fact, that Glock had been killed by a Palestinian, either in a family conflict or as a result of the dispute at the university. Gabi Baramki wanted to get across that there was no certainty at that point about who killed Albert Glock. It was inconceivable to Baramki that a Palestinian could have done it. He dictated to Mark Taylor the approximate wording, and let Taylor do the rest.
The press release that was circulated that day read, after announcing the fact of the murder and giving a short biography of Glock:
According to Israeli news reports, Dr. Glock was shot to death late this afternoon near the village of Bir Zeit. To the University’s knowledge, there were no witnesses to the attack on Dr. Glock. The University condemns this act in the strongest possible terms. It further holds that such acts are totally uncharacteristic of the spirit of the Palestinian community, and could only have been perpetrated by enemies of the Palestinian people.
The last sentence, carefully vague, directed suspicion towards the Israelis, while allowing in its sense that a Palestinian could have been responsible.
The killing made it into the following day’s Jerusalem Post. This story included speculation about who might have been responsible. ‘Palestinian sources’, the paper reported, ‘said last night they suspected Glock was slain by Hamas terrorists trying to stop the peace process.’ The Israel–Arab peace talks, which would end in the Oslo Agreement in September 1993, were under way, and the Islamic party Hamas had declared their total opposition to the negotiations, which they considered capitulation to the Israeli enemy.
The theories followed a predictable pattern: each side blamed the other. In response to the suggestion that Hamas was responsible, Gabi Baramki was quoted saying, ‘This man has been with us for sixteen years and has been working with all his strength to serve our people. A nationalist murder [that is, a murder by Hamas, a nationalist group]? That’s impossible.’
The Jerusalem Post went into greater detail in the story it published the following day. This widened the field of suspicion, but again set it squarely on the Palestinian side:
Two motives for the crime are being discussed around campus [figuratively speaking: the campus had been closed for four years]. The first, say Arab sources, is that Glock was killed either by Hamas or Popular Front activists in order to disrupt the peace process. They also link the timing of this killing to the fact that he was an American citizen and this is the anniversary of the Gulf War.
It was not quite perfect timing: the Gulf War started on 16 January 1991, and Glock was killed three days after the anniversary.
‘The second version is that the murder was part of a power struggle among the archaeology faculty, one of whom was fired recently. Birzeit president Gabi Baramki denies this emphatically.’ The Israeli police spokesman persistently lobbed the tear-gas canister of suspicion into the Palestinian yard in her comments to journalists. ‘We’re looking at the power games at Birzeit theory,’ she said.
In turn, Birzeit lobbed the canister back. ‘We are all in shock about this. He had been with us for many years and was well respected,’ Mark Taylor said. ‘I have no doubt that this does not come from the Palestinians.’ This meant it must therefore have come from the Israelis.
Three days after the killing, the PLO broadcast a statement on their Algiers radio station, Voice of Palestine. The statement set the murder squarely in the front line of the Israel – Palestine conflict, making the simple, obvious equation that Glock was the victim of a political assassination because of the political potency of his archaeological work, and that Israel was responsible for it.
The PLO denounces most strongly the ugly crime of the assassination of the US professor Dr Albert Glock, head of the Palestinian antiquities department at Birzeit University, where he contributed with his technical research to the refutation of the Zionist claims over Palestine. Zionist hands were not far away from this ugly crime, in view of the pioneering role which this professor played in standing up to the Zionist arguments. This crime provides new proof of Israel’s attempts to tarnish the reputation and position of the Palestinian people in American and international public opinion. The PLO extends its most heartfelt condolences to the family and sons of the deceased [not entirely accurate, since the Glocks also had a daughter], who are residents in Palestine, and to the Birzeit university family.
The PLO statement was one of a flurry of denunciations of the murder that were published in the days immediately after the shooting. The clandestine leadership of the intifada, the Unified National Leadership, included one in their first bulletin after the incident. The UNL were as quick and as certain as the PLO in their attribution of blame.
The Unified Leadership denounces strongly the assassination of Dr Albert Glock, the head of the archaeology department at Birzeit university, who was attacked and killed unjustly and holds the secret agencies of the Zionist enemy responsible for the killing of Dr Glock who gave invaluable services to the Palestinian community and gives its deepest sympathies to the family of the deceased.
Even Hamas issued a denial, eight days after the killing, in a statement whose main point was to contradict a report in the Jerusalem Post that said it was responsible.
These announcements do not represent what one might call a considered view. They were verbal gunfire against the enemy in a war in which both sides naturally and with total conviction expected the worst from each other.
Gabi Baramki (who bore the title of acting President of Birzeit because the appointed President, Hanna Nasir, was in Israeli-imposed exile in Amman), shared the almost universal Palestinian view that the hand behind the killing was Israeli. He based his suspicion on the length of time the army took to arrive at the scene.
‘Can you just give me an explanation for it?’ he said to me, when I met him in his house outside Ramallah, the one Glock had intended to visit on his last afternoon. Gabi Baramki was a tall, courteous Palestinian patrician, with a thoughtful, diffident, donnish manner, about the same age as Glock. ‘Israel has a very efficient and effective system of policing. But to come three hours late!’ he said.
The killing happened at about 3.15 p.m. The army didn’t arrive until some time after six. Yet when the Israel National Police gave a terse list of official answers about the incident to the American Consulate a year later, at the request of the Glock family, they claimed that the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) patrol arrived at five minutes past four, a discrepancy of two hours. Trying, with difficulty, to understand his thinking, I asked Baramki, ‘Why would they want to kill Albert Glock?’
He answered cryptically, ‘The Israelis always like to kill a hundred birds with one stone.’
He meant, I think, that the killing was intended to create fear among the Palestinian population, to damage Birzeit’s reputation, to create an excuse to close the university permanently if they wanted to, to frighten the remaining foreign teaching staff at Birzeit into leaving, to spread discord and suspicion, to weaken Palestinian morale, above all to rid the country of a troublesome intellectual who was literally digging up embarrassing facts. These were the motives that people discussed.
On the last point, digging up the past, an educated Palestinian like Gabi Baramki would have some knowledge to back up his suspicion. Since the occupation of the West Bank began in 1967, the Israeli censors had maintained a hawk-eyed vigil for anything that contained a Palestinian version of the history of the country, banning hundreds of books. Baramki himself published an article in the Journal of Palestine Studies in 1988 on Palestinian education under occupation. In 1976 (he wrote) Birzeit tried to establish standardized literacy and adult education programmes in the West Bank. ‘The university … began preparing instructional materials that included information on Palestine. Unfortunately, some of the books were confiscated by the Israelis because they contained the history and geography of a particular village or town demolished in 1948,’ he wrote. Recording the Palestinian past was considered an act of sedition.
‘But what was the purpose of the delay?’ I asked Baramki.
‘They wanted to give the person who did the shooting time to run away!’
Looking at the matter from his point of view, I could see a wicked logic. The way he told it, his account made sense – not perfect sense, but it was the best explanation available.
The other strange thing was that the army did not impose a curfew. In the past two months, two severe curfews had been imposed on the Ramallah area in response to incidents where guns had been used by Palestinians against Israelis. The first incident was on 1 December, when Israeli settlers from the settlement of Ofrah, near Ramallah, were shot through the windshield of their car as they drove through the adjoining town of al-Bireh. One of the settlers was shot in the head and later died in hospital, and his woman passenger was also hit by a bullet, but not fatally. Responsibility for the attack, in the language of these things, was claimed by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a Marxist faction of the PLO. The response of the army was immediate and harsh. The entire district, which included Bir Zeit, was closed off. Roadblocks were deployed, and the army carried out thorough house-to-house searches, detained 150 people and interrogated many more than that. A curfew was imposed which lasted six weeks.
Glock himself referred to it in one of his last letters: ‘The curfew on Ramallah was very tight for two weeks and effectively shut down the University. The night-time curfew that has since been imposed, from 5 p.m. to 4 a.m., was lifted for 3 nights, 24–26 December. Then came the order not to use the roof of your house unless to hang washing and then use it for only 2 hours in a day.’
The other incident took place five days before the assassination of Dr Glock, outside ‘Ain Siniya, a village about five kilometres north of Bir Zeit. A bus carrying Israeli settlers was attacked with stones and gunfire as it drove along the main road between Ramallah and Nablus at about six o’clock in the evening. In the words of the news report broadcast that night on IDF radio, ‘Troops have closed off the area and are combing it for perpetrators.’ No one was hurt, let alone killed. But the attack provoked a massive military response, with helicopters and house-to-house searches.
But when, five days later, a shooting took place in a Palestinian village, and the victim died, there was no curfew at all. The army weren’t interested.
Baramki told me that soon after the murder, ‘we got in touch with the PLO outside’.
‘Why?’ I said.
‘Just to check if they knew anything, to see if it had anything to do with any of the [Palestinian political] factions. Because we wanted to know.’
Gabi Baramki was a regular visitor to PLO headquarters in Tunis. He would go there to plead for funds for the university. Until the PLO’s treasury was depleted by the loss of gifts from the oil-rich Arab states of the Gulf, in retaliation for the Palestinians’ support for Iraq in the Gulf War, Birzeit had been funded almost entirely by the PLO. Gabi Baramki himself was a mainstream PLO man, aligned with no particular faction within it, but supporting it like most Palestinians did, as their obvious representatives in world politics, for better or for worse.
PLO headquarters in Tunis told Baramki they knew nothing about the murder. But they did not let the matter rest. They told Baramki to arrange for a Palestinian investigation into the murder, and asked that a report be written. So Baramki organized a committee of enquiry. At the head of it was a local Fatah politician, businessman and Arafat loyalist named Jamil al-Tarifi, now a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council and Minister of Civil Affairs in the Palestinian Authority. The other members were Mursi al-Hajjir, a lawyer and an associate of Tarifi, and two journalists, Izzat al-Bidwan and Nabhan Khreisheh. Most of the work was done by the journalists, and the report itself was written by Nabhan Khreisheh.
Khreisheh’s report can best be described as a work of crepuscular forensics. Unable to establish any substantial facts, because the conventions of the conflict prevented them from seeking information from the Israel National Police, he deduced a suspect – Israel – from the pattern of meaning he discerned in the common knowledge about the case. It is mainly of interest as a record of the prevailing currents of gossip and rivalry inside Birzeit University. Otherwise, the report was such a whitewash (and in its English translation, such a muddle to read), that I wondered if Khreisheh knew more than he dared to put in it.
He had a mobile phone, like a lot of Palestinians. You can wait years for a land line in the Occupied Territories. I called him and arranged to meet him one evening in Ramallah. We met across the street from the main taxi park and we went to a café. As both a journalist and a Palestinian, he was a rich source of the political intrigue which is the Palestinian national pastime. His English was comparatively lucid, and his style salesmanlike and shrewd, but he liked to talk, and was particularly interested in this case.
‘Abu Ammar [the name by which PLO leader Yasir Arafat is familiarly known among Palestinians] called me personally and said, “I want that report on my desk in twenty-five days.”’ Khreisheh said. I speculated that he was chosen to write the report because of a feel for politics, rather than for his research skills. He told me that he had a degree in media studies from a university in Syracuse, New York, and was a stringer for the Washington Post. I had heard that he had done work of some kind for the PLO before, though I didn’t know what.
‘I accept the weakness of this report,’ he said. ‘The purpose of it was so that Arafat could have something in his briefcase, that he could show people on his plane, especially Americans, that cleared the Palestinians, so he could say, “Look, here is this matter of an American citizen who was killed in the West Bank and we are taking it seriously while the Israelis are not.” It was a political report. The object of it was to clear the Palestinians.’ It was kept confidential for about two months.
The report did not tell Yasir Arafat who killed Albert Glock. As Khreisheh said, it was a political report, intended to supply Tunis with the available knowledge, and to suggest a line for the PLO to take in public comments, if required. That was all it could be. Khreisheh didn’t find out who committed the murder, and he couldn’t even make a convincing guess. No one could. Applying the usual political logic failed to produce a suspect. It was hard to tell what message was being sent by the murder, and who was sending it. If it was a political murder, no one had followed the convention of political murders and ‘claimed responsibility’. It was not unanimously, unambiguously self-evident who could have done it, in a way that would enable the man in the Palestinian street to shrug and say, ‘It was so-and-so who killed Albert Glock: everybody knows that.’
Khreisheh noted in his report the Israeli news stories that said the likely killers were Hamas or the PFLP, and the alternative version that Glock was killed because of a conflict within the Institute of Archaeology. He reported the statements that were issued by the Birzeit University teachers’ union, the student council and the administration, and stated the widespread Palestinian view that Glock was murdered because of the political potency of his archaeological work, which was intended, as Khreisheh put it, to contradict an Israeli version of the archaeology of Palestine which emphasized the periods associated with ancient Israel at the expense of the later Islamic centuries. There were few Palestinians who didn’t understand instinctively that to own the history of the land is to own the land itself.
This Palestinian suspicion, he wrote, was supported by the fact that the PFLP and Hamas, the political factions that the Israeli reports suggested were responsible, both denied the killing. It was further confirmed by the professionalism with which the killing was carried out, and the fact that the police and their army escort took three hours to arrive at the scene. He concluded that, in the absence of any hard facts to the contrary, the Israelis must somehow be responsible, on the grounds of political logic. It was Israel that benefited from the killing; Palestinian interests were gravely harmed by it; therefore, Israel was responsible. In closing, Khreisheh was careful to point out that the members of the committee did not approach ‘the occupation’ for information ‘because it does not recognize the occupation and its various authorities’. And besides, the occupation wouldn’t have helped them even if they’d asked.
The only material of any substance is an account of a conflict within the Institute of Palestinian Archaeology. Albert Glock was at the centre of it. This is the ‘power struggle’ mentioned in the first Jerusalem Post story the day after the murder, and which Dr Baramki ‘denied emphatically.’ Khreisheh reported the view that Glock was killed because he had been responsible for firing qualified Palestinians from the Institute, and that he may have been killed by members of a political faction in reaction. He dismisses this speculation. But he then goes into more detail, compiling a picture from campus gossip and what he learned in interviews with Institute staff and others at the university who knew the dead man. This picture shows Glock as a ‘tyrant’ in his running of the Institute, and records a view that he ‘worked systematically to kick out all qualified Palestinian academicians in the field of archaeology’. That is, he had fired too many people, and this tendency came to a head in the case of a teaching assistant named Dr Hamdan Taha, who had mounted a campaign against Glock in protest at Glock’s refusal to give him a teaching job.
Nabhan Khreisheh’s report said that some people thought Glock was a spy for the CIA. This is a canard that every American in an Arab country finds lobbed at himself sooner or later. There is no reason to take it any more seriously than that. But it pointed to a powerful irony, if it were true: that this man who had struggled so hard and sacrificed so much to develop the Institute at Birzeit and a Palestinian-oriented approach to archaeology was looked upon with suspicion and dislike by a sufficient number of Palestinians to create a viable rumour.
Explaining how the report took the form it did, Khreisheh said, ‘We sat down and discussed who might have done it. I said, “We should look at Hamas and the PFLP.” The PFLP was in the union that had been campaigning against Glock, the teachers’ union. The others in the committee said, “No, we cannot do that: these are our people.”
‘I said, “Well if they turn out to be innocent, then they are in the clear. And if they are not, it is not a problem for us. We are the mainstream. It is no problem for us if we investigate extremists.”
‘Glock was a person who tried to live the life of an individualist – the American dream – in an open society, and you cannot do that here,’ Khreisheh explained. ‘That was why he was unpopular.’ He tried to build walls around himself, Khreisheh said. Khreisheh thought he had an insight into Glock’s character and thinking, mainly based on the fact that he had taken a course of Glock’s at Birzeit when he was a student, and had read a few of his articles. He wrote in the report that Dr Glock was ‘mysterious’, that ‘he never liked to appear in public … he never wanted to go public or face the press with his views and [he] always encouraged his assistants not to go into details regarding what discoveries they found … It is natural that this kind of behavior would arouse suspicion among Palestinians.’
I asked if this climate of suspicion that had developed around him, especially when he had become unpopular for not hiring Dr Taha, could have led to his being killed by a Palestinian.
‘It could not have been a Palestinian killing,’ he insisted.
I said, ‘Why not?’
His gaze drilled into me. ‘It was too professional. There were two fatal shots, one to the head, one to the heart. What is the word? A double – (he couldn’t find the word)? The Palestinians don’t do it like that. When a Palestinian shoots someone, he just points the gun and goes bang bang bang bang.’
I suggested that a hot-headed young man, perhaps with brothers who had died in jail, who was acting in the rage of despair, might have killed Glock independently as an anti-American gesture.
‘But why would he kill Albert Glock?’ he responded. ‘There are plenty of other blue-eyed people around. And bullets are precious and expensive and hard to get hold of for Palestinians.’
He told me one detail I hadn’t heard before. The gunman was wearing white sneakers, which were the trademark of both the Shin Bet – the General Security Services, roughly the Israeli equivalent of the FBI – and the shabab, the young fighters of the intifada. You sometimes can’t tell the two sides apart.
Khreisheh apologized for the report. He couldn’t do a decent job, he explained, because the Israelis wouldn’t give him the autopsy. No Israeli authorities would talk to them, presumably because they represented the PLO. Besides that, Maya fell to pieces during the interview. Mrs Glock had left the country, or so he thought. (She hadn’t.) They interviewed about twelve people. There was not much they could say, because ‘there were no clues’. He just assumed with a shrug that it was some kind of Israeli undercover operation.
‘Look to the archaeology,’ he kept saying: that was where the answer lay. That meant that the Israelis did it, or ordered it done, because of the danger his work posed to a state so dependent on archaeology to demonstrate its roots in the land. It is a thought that persists among Palestinians now, even if you point out that Glock was here on a tourist visa, which he had to renew every three months. If the Israelis didn’t want him in the country, all they would have to do is not renew his visa. They wouldn’t have to give a reason. They didn’t need to shoot him.
This Palestinian view of the political potency of Glock’s archaeological work was darkly reflected in a rumour that began to circulate soon after the murder. The rumour was that Albert Glock was working on an archaeological excavation near Nablus, and that he had discovered something big and important, which would somehow undermine the whole Israeli historic claim to Jerusalem. So ‘they’ killed him to prevent him from revealing his discovery. The story is garbled: Glock never excavated near Nablus. But it showed that, in death, Albert Glock’s life had attained the power of myth. It reflected the Palestinian conviction, which people around Bir Zeit still hold, that there was an Israeli hand in Glock’s murder. And it showed that in Israel/Palestine, archaeology is at the heart of the conflict between the two peoples.
Khreisheh’s report told another myth about Glock: that his death was a sort of personal implosion, that he was killed because of the architecture of his own character. It is a myth of tragic fatalism. Albert Glock was a difficult man, this myth says. He didn’t fit into society, he wanted to do things his own way, and that is impossible in Palestine, and it was therefore his destiny to die catastrophically.
As we left the café, he repeated the point he had been emphasizing throughout our conversation, and which to him was the key to the whole thing.
‘Remember,’ he said. ‘Look at the archaeology.’
FIVE (#ulink_ebbc5d76-3647-5780-ac16-69121e79fdfb)
TO UNDERSTAND FULLY what Nabhan Khreisheh meant in his cryptic remark about the significance of archaeology in this murder; to understand how Albert Glock, an American archaeologist, came to be assassinated in a driveway in the West Bank, one has to go back a long way, to the very beginning of archaeology in Palestine.
In about the year 325 of the common era, shortly after he acquired the eastern provinces that included Palestine, the Emperor Constantine – the first Christian emperor and the founder of Byzantine civilization – sent his mother, Flavia Julia Helena Augusta, the Empress Dowager, at the head of a mission to Palestine. Its immediate political purpose was to assert Constantine’s authority in the province, and implement his policy of promoting Christians and Christianity in the imperial state among a mostly non-Christian population. As physical signs of this new dispensation, a number of churches and basilicas were commissioned, including a church over the Holy Sepulchre, the presumed tomb of Christ. A local cult of the relic of the cross on which Christ was crucified had already come into existence at some point in the intervening three centuries, though how and when remains obscure. Albert Glock worshipped at a church a stone’s throw from this place on the morning of the day he was murdered.
The Empress Helena died in about 328, in her eighties. Some fifty years after her death, a legend began to circulate about her and her visit to Palestine. It appears in the Ecclesiastical History of Tyrannius Rufinus, written towards the end of the fourth century:
Helena, the mother of Constantine, a woman of outstanding faith and deep piety, and also of exceptional munificence … was advised by divinely-sent visions to go to Jerusalem. There she was to make an enquiry among the inhabitants to find out the place where the sacred body of Christ had hung on the Cross. This spot was difficult to find, because the persecutors of old had set up a statue of Venus over it, so that if any Christian wanted to worship Christ in that place, he seemed to be worshipping Venus. For this reason, the place was not much frequented and had all but been forgotten. But when … the pious lady hastened to the spot pointed out to her by a heavenly sign, she tore down all that was profane and polluted there. Deep beneath the rubble she found three Crosses lying in disorder. But the joy of finding this treasure was marred by the difficulty of distinguishing to whom each Cross belonged. The board was there, it is true, on which Pilate had placed an inscription written in Greek, Latin and Hebrew characters.
Helena was unsure that what she had found was the True Cross. To allay her doubts, the bishop of Jerusalem, Macarius, determined that divine proof was needed. He led Helena and her entourage to the house of a woman who was mortally ill with a serious disease. One by one the crosses Helena had found were shown to the sick woman. When the third cross was brought to her, the woman leapt out of bed, cured. This miracle identified the third cross as the True Cross.
When the queen saw that her wish had been answered by such a clear sign, she built a marvellous church of royal magnificence over the place where she had discovered the Cross. The nails which had attached the Lord’s body to the Cross, she sent to her son. From some of these he had a horse’s bridle made, for use in battle, while he used others to add strength to a helmet, equally with a view to using it in battle. Part of the redeeming wood she sent to her son, but she also left part of it there preserved in silver chests. This part is commemorated by regular veneration to this very day.
This legend has been woven into later historical narratives as if it were fact, but it is a pious fiction, emanating from the imperially supported church in Jerusalem. (In his account of the life of Constantine, written in about 338, about the time of her death, the Bishop Eusebius, chronicler of the early church in Palestine, mentions Helena’s piety and her commissioning of churches, but says nothing about finding the Cross.) The purpose of the legend is to burnish Constantine’s reputation as a Christian emperor. Note the symbolism in what happened to the nails: incorporated into the Emperor’s helmet (other versions of the legend say diadem or crown) and his horse’s bridle. The sacred power of Christ is incorporated into Constantine’s imperial implements of war and governance, giving supernatural legitimacy to his military and civil authority.
The legend also enhances the reputation of Jerusalem as the home of sacred relics, and reflects the beginning of a tradition that persists to this day of the search for the physical remains of biblical history as a dimension of Christian spirituality. It establishes the idea of the Holy Land as one of the universal features of the Christian faith: a transcendental geography imposed on the mundane geography of southern Syria. In subsequent centuries, Jerusalem and surrounding sacred sites were the prized destinations of Christian pilgrims, and splinters of Helena’s True Cross and other relics were sold as sacred souvenirs for the pilgrims to take home with them. This account was an advertisement, intended to promote the pilgrimage industry, not a report.
Helena’s excavation techniques have been improved upon, but her archaeological assumptions have proven remarkably durable, persisting well into an age of scientific rationalism. She knew what she was looking for, and – with divine inspiration – she found it.
Before Helena’s visit, Christian pilgrimages to Palestine originating from outside the country were unknown. Visiting sacred sites was a local cult, preceding Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The Church’s earliest authorities considered it theologically unnecessary for Christians to tread the land that Jesus’s feet had trodden. Besides, the anti-Christian policy of the Roman authorities that governed Palestine discouraged Christian visitors. After Constantine’s institutionalization of Christianity in the Roman empire, pilgrimage was encouraged as a natural expression of piety. Monasteries and hostels were built to accommodate pilgrims. In the first centuries after Constantine, the numbers of pilgrims travelling to the Holy Land rose and fell in response to changing political conditions in the Mediterranean and the countries through which they were obliged to pass.
These early pilgrims were either very rich or very determined, as the journey was long, arduous and expensive. Pilgrimages would often take several years to complete. One of the earliest pilgrims to leave a written account was a nun named Egeria, probably from Spain, who visited Palestine in the years 381 to 384. Her narrative, of which only a fragment survives, shows her conducting her pilgrimage as a kind of liturgical ritual. Accompanied by monks, she and her party would offer prayers at every point of interest. She ascended Mount Sinai, where Moses received from God the stone tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments, as if she were performing the ceremony of the Stations of the Cross.
Throughout her narrative she describes little that was not related to the network of hundreds of minor and major Christian shrines that by the time of her visit had been established in the region. Where a sacred site had previously been pagan, a Christian legend would be created to absorb it into the new landscape of religious meaning. From her point of view the whole country was like an enormous church. It was a land whose holiness, combined with its unfamiliarity to a European, rendered it unreal: pilgrims depended on local guides and story tellers, who wove inspiring tales of miracles and marvels about the sites on the pilgrim circuit, more or less closely based on familiar stories in the Old and New Testaments, sometimes wholly original. The folkloric impulse to create religious marvels was irresistible: the rock inside the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, for example, bears a mark that is interpreted as both the footprint of Christ and the handprint of Muhammad.
