Palestine Twilight: The Murder of Dr Glock and the Archaeology of the Holy Land

Salvation is achieved exclusively by divine grace: this is their primary doctrine. The Gospels and the Sacraments are the divine tools given man to promote access to this divine grace. Good works alone are insufficient for salvation: the idea is anathema. They also believe that the Pope is the fulfilment of biblical prophecies of the Antichrist. Anabaptists, Unitarians, Masons, ‘crypto-Calvinists’, ‘synergists’, and above all papists are held to be in dangerous error. They repudiate ‘unionism’, ‘that is, church-fellowship with the adherents of false doctrine’. These tenets were the result of decades of collegial deliberation by these pious, solitary, scholarly Lutherans, conducted in earnest conferences in small towns on the Midwestern plains, based on faith in the Bible as the infallible word of God. It is a Protestantism of the American farmer: pure, primitive, austere, unworldly, defensive. When it speaks at all, it speaks plainly.

So sincere and original is their study of the Scriptures that they declare in the Brief Statement, with poignant honesty, that there are matters on which they have not been able to reach a firm position. They acknowledge themselves stumped by the dilemma of why if ‘God’s grace is universal’, ‘all men are not converted and saved?’ ‘We confess that we cannot answer it.’ This is the doctrine – transmitted via the golden chain of Christ, the Bible, Luther and the Missouri divines – that Ernest Glock taught his sons at their family devotions. Albert later admitted that he had privately scorned his father’s world view, seeing it as narrow and exclusive of all but the concerns of his Missouri Synod flock.

Ernest Glock was unenthusiastic about his son’s scholarship: he thought basic seminary training was enough. But Albert, young and intellectually hungry, continued to enlarge his field of study. In 1949 he spent a year in Europe studying theology, and took classes in biblical criticism at the University of Heidelberg, and then returned to America to study Near Eastern Languages at the University of Chicago.

His study of biblical Hebrew would set Glock in opposition to one of the most intellectually constraining articles of the Brief Statement: ‘Since the Holy Scriptures are the Word of God, it goes without saying that they contain no errors or contradictions, but that they are in all their parts and words the infallible truth, also in those parts which treat of historical, geographical, and other secular matters.’ Historical and geographical matters were precisely what interested Albert Glock. His scholarly intellect was too keen, and his nature too individualistic to accept this traditional dogma unquestioningly. Nevertheless, he graduated from Concordia Theological Seminary in St Louis in 1950.

The following year, he married Lois Sohn, also a German-American, the daughter of a professor of Lutheran theology, and his life seemed set for the quiet and stable life of a Lutheran clergyman. He spent the next seven years as a pastor in Normal, Illinois, not far from where he had grown up, and seemed happy enough in his vocation. In the earnest, collegial spirit of Lutheran pastors, he closed his letters ‘yours in Christ’, ‘agape’ and ‘peace’.

But his more secular studies in ancient Hebrew continued. While still serving as a pastor in Normal, he enrolled at the University of Michigan, where his thesis advisor was George Mendenhall, a biblical scholar who introduced the Marxist-oriented ‘peasants’ revolt’ model of the origin of ancient Israel. Mendenhall’s theory was opposed to the traditional biblical view which held that Israelite tribes invaded Canaan and defeated the indigenous Canaanites. Mendenhall believed that a kind of theocratic liberation movement emerged within Canaanite society, gradually transforming it into what would ultimately be called ‘Israel’. His theory, revolutionary in its day, was an early instance of a history of ancient Israel that was distinct from the biblical account. Mendenhall’s approach was an important formative influence on Albert Glock, who received his doctorate in 1968. Thirty years later, Albert wrote in his diary that he ‘had wasted seven years in Normal, Illinois’. He didn’t have the patient personality a clergyman must have, who as part of his daily business must suffer gladly the lonely, the pedantic and the boring. In 1956, he was offered a job – or ‘answered a call’, to use the Missouri idiom – to teach, the following year, Old Testament history and literature at Concordia College, River Forest, Illinois, the teachers’ college for the Missouri Synod elementary school system.

The Missouri Synod’s insistence on the infallibility of the Bible created a tension among its scholars that developed in the late fifties and early sixties into a controversy and finally into a split in the church, a trauma from which it has only recently recovered. A liberal wing, acknowledging the ‘higher criticism’ of German biblical scholars like Julius Wellhausen, believed their faith in scripture was not undermined by analysing the Old Testament historically, and seeing it as the work not of Moses, but of later authors, writing from the eighth century BCE and afterwards. The Brief Statement breathes fire on this approach: ‘We reject this erroneous doctrine as horrible and blasphemous.’ The leadership of the Missouri Synod, representing the conservative mainstream, sought to stamp out this heresy, which was threatening to engulf the entire church. To put reason before faith in studying the Bible was the beginning of the end of religion, they argued. Worst of all, this heretical fire had broken out in the church’s theological engine room, the Concordia Theological Seminary. One of the means the leadership used to extinguish it was to demand allegiance to the Brief Statement by the forty or so dissident professors at Concordia, which the professors were unwilling to do, arguing it infringed their right to academic freedom.

Although Glock was teaching elsewhere, he took the side of the dissidents, since this was the direction he too was following in his biblical studies. His eldest son, Albert Glock Jr, recalled later that in the family devotions he led with his own children, he would teach them about the ‘Yahwist’ and the ‘Deuteronomist’, as two of the biblical authors were named in Wellhausen’s analysis: an approach that defied his own father’s stern literalism.

In 1960 (aged thirty-five), he wrote an article in defence of the dissidents entitled ‘A critical evaluation of the article on Scripture in A Brief Statement of the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod’. The tone of the article was conventionally and respectfully pious, but the criticism it contained attacked the Missouri Synod’s uncompromising doctrine at its heart. The church’s theology is locked in the seventeenth century, he wrote, resulting in ‘a serious breakdown of communication when speaking to our age’. He then went on to propose a tectonic shift in the church’s doctrine, away from its most distinctive feature, its stubborn belief in the literalism of the Bible, towards an emphasis on its meaning and spirit, aware that it was a product of human authorship.

After Glock read the article at a meeting of his department at Concordia Teachers College, they insisted that it be locked in a safe and not allowed to circulate. For Albert, the episode was his first public act of opposition. He saw it as the symbolic sealing of his fate. Henceforth, he would always be a dissident.

The rebels of Concordia Seminary eventually accepted defeat. They left the church, and founded Seminex, a ‘seminary in exile’. Their departure strengthened the conservatives’ grip on Missouri Synod doctrine. Seminex survived in the wilderness, training Lutheran pastors who were not recognized by the Missouri Synod until 1988, when it voted itself out of existence and joined the more liberal Evangelical Lutheran Church of America.

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.

FOUR

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.

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.

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.