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

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.