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

That day, a funeral was taking place at the Greek Orthodox church. The town of Bir Zeit is unusual among West Bank towns in that its population is mostly Christian, and unlike better-known Palestinian towns that have traditionally had Christian majorities, such as Bethlehem, the proportion of its population that is Christian has increased rather than shrunk in recent years. The thresholds of the doorways of houses tend to be decorated with a carved relief of St George slaying the Dragon (a motif thought to originate with the Crusades), indicating a Christian household, rather than a Qur’anic inscription. Most of the Christians in Bir Zeit, in common with most Palestinian Christians, belonged to the Greek Orthodox Church. As Glock was leaving the Institute, the funeral procession, with its train of cars, came along the narrow road toward the church in the opposite direction. People in Bir Zeit remember that Glock patiently pulled over to the side of the road to let it pass. His VW van was a familiar sight in the area, and everyone knew it belonged to the American archaeologist. They remember that moment as a characteristically modest, thoughtful act of courtesy. They also remember it as the last time many of them saw him alive.

After the procession had passed, Dr Glock drove out of the town and along the road to the new campus. The al-Farabi house was on this road, about a kilometre outside the town. It was built on a steep slope, below the level of the road, from which one looks down on the roof of the house, with its solar panel array, hot water tank and television antenna. Glock parked the van on the gravel verge, under a fig tree. It was a dark day, so he left the van’s headlights on, not meaning to stay long. The time was just after three o’clock. Foreigners who knew Glock, that is people who were not Palestinians, were impressed by the fearlessness with which he drove around the West Bank during the intifada , the Palestinian uprising against Israeli rule that had erupted in 1987, going into areas where a vehicle with Israeli licence plates, like his, was almost certain to have stones thrown at it by children and teenagers. Glock had endured his share of stones, but he still went where he wanted to go, although lately he had begun to take precautions when he drove the van, aware that it was well known and that he was conspicuous driving it. He would vary his usual routes, and check underneath the van before he got into it. He was afraid of something, but whether it was a general fear for his safety at a dangerous time or whether he was afraid of something or someone in particular is unknowable, another blank in the narrative of history.

He walked around to the gate at the top of the driveway, pushed it open and walked down the concrete ramp. If you put all the accounts together, this is what happened next. A young man with his face wrapped in a kaffiyah , the black-and-white checked cotton scarf the Palestinians wear to identify themselves as Palestinian, dressed in a dark jacket, jeans and white sneakers, jumped down from the stone wall built against the edge of the road. He landed in the al-Farabis’ front garden, a strip of ploughed earth planted with olive trees. He could not be seen from the road. Glock probably didn’t see or hear him. Inside the house they heard the shots, two together, then one: like this, Lois said later, imitating the sound with her hands: clap clap … clap .

TWO YEARS AFTER Albert Glock was murdered, I came across an article in the Journal of Palestine Studies (‘a quarterly on Palestinian affairs and the Arab – Israeli conflict’) entitled ‘Archaeology as Cultural Survival: The Future of the Palestinian Past’. Albert Glock was the author. I had never heard of him. At first glance, the article attracted my attention because it was unusual for this journal to publish an article on archaeology. Its usual concerns were political science and history, and detailed accounts of the latest diplomatic convolutions in the never-ending struggle for Palestine. The subject of the piece was intriguing, but then I read the biographical footnote that took up most of the first page: it stunned me.

Albert Glock, an American archaeologist and educator who was killed by an unidentified gunman in Bir Zeit, the West Bank, on 19 January 1992, wrote this essay in 1990 …

Dr. Glock spent seventeen years in Jerusalem and the West Bank, first as director of the Albright Institute for Archaeology and then as head of the archaeology department of Birzeit University, where he helped found the Archaeology Institute.

A brief review of the facts connected with his unsolved murder is in order. Dr. Glock was shot twice [sic] at close range (twice in the back of the head and neck and once in the heart from the front) by a masked man using an Israeli army gun who was driven away in a car with Israeli license plates. It took the Israeli authorities, who were nearby, three hours to get to the scene. Apart from giving a ten-minute statement, Dr. Glock’s widow was never asked about his activities, entries in his diary, possible enemies, and so on. The lack of Israeli investigation into the murder of an American citizen is perhaps the most unusual feature of the case …

Finally, the U.S. authorities, including the FBI, have not responded to repeated requests by the Glock family to look into the assassination or to ask the Israelis to do so. Prospects for solving the case thus appear remote.

I had never read a footnote like it. It contained volumes of subtext, all in sentences that ended with a question mark. The way it was written – in a tone of muted outrage – suggested that Glock was killed by some sort of Israeli hit squad (the gun, the licence plates, the lack of investigation). But why would an Israeli hit squad want to kill an archaeologist? Why would an Israeli hit squad want to kill an American archaeologist, even one with obvious Palestinian sympathies? Why would anyone want to kill an archaeologist?

What, moreover, did the writer of the footnote mean by ‘the lack of Israeli investigation’? Did that mean there was no Israeli investigation at all – or that there was no successful Israeli investigation? Above all, who was Albert Glock? Why was he teaching at Birzeit University, a chronically under-funded and embattled Palestinian university, especially since, as the footnote pointed out, he had formerly been Director of the Albright Institute, one of the most prestigious archaeological institutions in the Near East? Any addict of news about the Israel – Palestine conflict, as I was, knew that Birzeit was the site of countless unequal battles between students and the Israeli army, and frequently closed by order of the military authorities. A foreigner would only be teaching there if he had a serious commitment to the Palestinian cause: one would hardly consider it a prestigious academic post, a place one went to advance a career. What had brought Albert Glock to Birzeit? Why had he apparently chosen to devote himself to the perennially losing side in the Israel–Palestine conflict?

I entered the world of this footnote, and these questions became my life. The curiosity it aroused became a mission to investigate this obscure murder, buried away in a footnote in an academic journal, which surely no more than a few hundred people had read. There was a passion in there, in the story of the life and death of Albert Glock – something heroic and tragic that these sparse facts only hinted at.

Eventually, in September 1997, the footnote brought me to Bir Zeit, the weary little Palestinian town in the West Bank where Albert Glock’s life ended. I enrolled as a foreign student at Birzeit University, in the vague hope that I might penetrate the mystery of Glock’s death by being inside the institution where he taught. With the university’s help, I rented an apartment in the town from a Birzeit professor, Munir Nasir. A few weeks later, my partner Emma and our three-month-old son Theodore joined me. The three of us would bounce back and forth on the road between Bir Zeit, Ramallah and Jerusalem squeezed into shared taxis, with Theo strapped to my chest in a baby carrier. We carried him about the West Bank with a little black-and-white checked Palestinian kaffiyah that Munir Nasir had given us wrapped around his neck.