Edward Fox - Palestine Twilight - The Murder of Dr Glock and the Archaeology of the Holy Land

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.’