Monday 6th August 2001
Palestine Twilight: the murder of Dr Albert Glock
and the archaeology of the Holy Land
Edward Fox HarperCollins, 283pp, £19.99
ISBN 0002556073
One of the books of our age waiting to be written
could be called The Uses and Abuses of History.
So many books, from the coarsest potboilers to
seemingly scholarly works, hum with overtones and
hidden political themes; so much "history" is
nationalist propaganda in not very heavy disguise.
Eric Hobsbawm's favourite example is a book that
he came across called Five Thousand Years of
Pakistan - this of a country that was not born 60
years ago or dreamed of 20 before that. Mine is the
book that the Irish nationalist Mrs Stopford Green
published in 1925 under the magnificently absurd title
A History of the Irish State to 1014. Even now,
any historian knows well what a perilous business it
is to write about Ulster or Bosnia.
Or the Holy Land, for that matter, and what applies
to history applies there with even more force to
archaeology. Albert Glock learned that the hard
way. He was an American, a Lutheran missionary
who had given up that calling for archaeology, and
for Palestine. He had spent 17 years working in
Jerusalem and on the West Bank, where he was the
director of the Institute of Palestinian Archaeology at
Birzeit University. One Sunday in January 1992, at
the age of 67, he was shot dead by unknown
assassins near his campus.
At the time of the killing, Edward Fox had never
heard of Glock. Fox is an American journalist and
author living in London, who happened, two years
after the murder, to read an article on "Archaeology
as Cultural Survival" in the Journal of Palestine
Studies. In an astonishing footnote, written with little
pretence of scholarly detachment, Fox read that
Glock had been shot "by a masked man using an
Israeli army gun who was driven in a car with Israeli
licence plates". Fox's first reaction was, "Why would
anyone want to kill an archaeologist?" That query
prompted this book, a real-life whodunnit.
In search of an answer, he took himself to the West
Bank and enrolled in the university. Whatever he
discovered about Glock's own life and character, his
astonished question was not quite so baffling as it
might seem. Everyone quotes Sir Mortimer
Wheeler's saying that archaeology isn't a science, it is
a vendetta, but he was speaking merely of ferocious
feuding and jalousies du metier among
professionals with no profound ideological
differences. In the Holy Land (that newly convenient
expression, which avoids the question-begging of
"Israel" or "Palestine"), the vendettas are more bitter
still because they go to the heart of whose land it is.
There, "archaeology" has indeed been a continuation
of religious and communal struggle by other means,
perhaps since the Empress Helena embarked on her
search for the True Cross.
From its own early days, the Zionist movement
included enthusiasts who gave "dig for victory" new
meaning, by way of research designed to establish
the Jewish origins of the land, much overlaid by later
conquest and settlement. Several Israeli politicians
have been keen archaeologists, and anyone who has
visited the pinnacle fort of Masada, for example, will
have realised that it is as much political statement as
antique monument. Then, more recently, there had
been what Fox calls a Copernican revolution in the
subject, with the familiar world of biblical
archaeology turned upside down by a conscious
attempt to remove religious bias.
In his lifetime, Glock's work had all sorts of political
implications. Not least, he believed that the local
bodies which were relics of empire - the British
School of Archaeology and the Ecole Biblique -
would and should diminish in importance compared
with the home-grown institutions, although those, the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem and his own
university, were inevitably seen as academic
flagbearers for their respective nationalisms. At the
same time, and for all his Palestinian sympathies,
Glock wanted to be an honest man. He may not
have been a scholar of world renown (his Israeli
enemies denigrated him by pointing out how little he
had published) but he did know the difference
between scholarship and propaganda, and thought
that limiting Palestinian archaeology to the glories of
the Islamic age, as some of his students wanted, was
no better than the Zionist-biblical interpretation.
In other words, there was a variety of groups with
grudges against him. And after his death he became
a political football. Israeli newspapers quoted
"Palestinian sources" who suspected that Glock was
killed by Hamas terrorists trying to derail the peace
process, while the PLO denounced the murder of a
man who had "contributed with his technical research
to the refutation of the Zionist claims over Palestine",
and saw in the murder "new proof of Israeli attempts
to tarnish the reputation of the Palestinian people in
American and international opinion". But politics was
not the whole story: as with all the best thrillers, the
book also has a love interest. Glock had developed
a deep infatuation with Maya al-Farabi, an intelligent,
politically aware Palestinian, zealous and rebellious,
who had become "his personal holy grail of Palestine
and Palestinian archaeology". He educated her
academically, nurtured her, took her on as his
assistant, groomed her as his successor. And all the
while, as he wrote in his diary, "I can hardly deny
that I am deeply in love with her."
So whodunnit? Fox tiptoes round the question
intelligently and reflectively. His book is pleasingly
written, and if the style is sometimes dry to the point
of desiccation, that is better than the lurid
attitudinising the subject would have drawn from
some writers one can think of. His sleuthing takes
him to the Israeli police, to the CIA, which confirms
that Glock was not a spy, and to the human rights
organisation Al-Haq, which offers what is often the
only legal channel available to Palestinians, as "law
and order was virtually non-existent in the West
Bank and Gaza". The Israelis were unforthcoming,
and the Arabs continued to hint darkly that Glock
was killed as "a warning to Americans not to come
here to help the Palestinians".
An alternative theory that he was bumped off by
disgruntled Palestinians had some plausibility, but
was discounted for the bleak reason that he had
been shot so neatly, while "anti-collaborationist"
killings on the West Bank tended to be much
messier. Then there was Maya, and a report from
the American consul in Jerusalem to Washington that
said: "There has also been speculation that some of
the family members of the research assistant felt
obliged to defend family honour." In the end, Fox
provides a denouement of sorts, but no absolute
conclusion, because "in the Glock murder case, as in
archaeology, no answer will ever be final". If that
makes this fascinating book incomplete as a
detective story, it remains an absorbing, and very
sad, sidelight on the world's most bitterly intractable
conflict.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft's The Controversy of Zion
(Sinclair Stevenson, £17.99) won a 1996 US
National Jewish Book Award