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

In an essay unpublished during his lifetime, written when he was at Birzeit, Albert Glock described himself as ‘a skeptical white American tending to minority views’.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.

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.