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

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.’

I asked if this climate of suspicion that had developed around him, especially when he had become unpopular for not hiring Dr Taha, could have led to his being killed by a Palestinian.

‘It could not have been a Palestinian killing,’ he insisted.

I said, ‘Why not?’

His gaze drilled into me. ‘It was too professional. There were two fatal shots, one to the head, one to the heart. What is the word? A double – (he couldn’t find the word)? The Palestinians don’t do it like that. When a Palestinian shoots someone, he just points the gun and goes bang bang bang bang.’

I suggested that a hot-headed young man, perhaps with brothers who had died in jail, who was acting in the rage of despair, might have killed Glock independently as an anti-American gesture.

‘But why would he kill Albert Glock?’ he responded. ‘There are plenty of other blue-eyed people around. And bullets are precious and expensive and hard to get hold of for Palestinians.’

He told me one detail I hadn’t heard before. The gunman was wearing white sneakers, which were the trademark of both the Shin Bet – the General Security Services, roughly the Israeli equivalent of the FBI – and the shabab, the young fighters of the intifada. You sometimes can’t tell the two sides apart.

Khreisheh apologized for the report. He couldn’t do a decent job, he explained, because the Israelis wouldn’t give him the autopsy. No Israeli authorities would talk to them, presumably because they represented the PLO. Besides that, Maya fell to pieces during the interview. Mrs Glock had left the country, or so he thought. (She hadn’t.) They interviewed about twelve people. There was not much they could say, because ‘there were no clues’. He just assumed with a shrug that it was some kind of Israeli undercover operation.

‘Look to the archaeology,’ he kept saying: that was where the answer lay. That meant that the Israelis did it, or ordered it done, because of the danger his work posed to a state so dependent on archaeology to demonstrate its roots in the land. It is a thought that persists among Palestinians now, even if you point out that Glock was here on a tourist visa, which he had to renew every three months. If the Israelis didn’t want him in the country, all they would have to do is not renew his visa. They wouldn’t have to give a reason. They didn’t need to shoot him.

This Palestinian view of the political potency of Glock’s archaeological work was darkly reflected in a rumour that began to circulate soon after the murder. The rumour was that Albert Glock was working on an archaeological excavation near Nablus, and that he had discovered something big and important, which would somehow undermine the whole Israeli historic claim to Jerusalem. So ‘they’ killed him to prevent him from revealing his discovery. The story is garbled: Glock never excavated near Nablus. But it showed that, in death, Albert Glock’s life had attained the power of myth. It reflected the Palestinian conviction, which people around Bir Zeit still hold, that there was an Israeli hand in Glock’s murder. And it showed that in Israel/Palestine, archaeology is at the heart of the conflict between the two peoples.

Khreisheh’s report told another myth about Glock: that his death was a sort of personal implosion, that he was killed because of the architecture of his own character. It is a myth of tragic fatalism. Albert Glock was a difficult man, this myth says. He didn’t fit into society, he wanted to do things his own way, and that is impossible in Palestine, and it was therefore his destiny to die catastrophically.

As we left the café, he repeated the point he had been emphasizing throughout our conversation, and which to him was the key to the whole thing.

‘Remember,’ he said. ‘Look at the archaeology.’

FIVE

TO UNDERSTAND FULLY what Nabhan Khreisheh meant in his cryptic remark about the significance of archaeology in this murder; to understand how Albert Glock, an American archaeologist, came to be assassinated in a driveway in the West Bank, one has to go back a long way, to the very beginning of archaeology in Palestine.

In about the year 325 of the common era, shortly after he acquired the eastern provinces that included Palestine, the Emperor Constantine – the first Christian emperor and the founder of Byzantine civilization – sent his mother, Flavia Julia Helena Augusta, the Empress Dowager, at the head of a mission to Palestine. Its immediate political purpose was to assert Constantine’s authority in the province, and implement his policy of promoting Christians and Christianity in the imperial state among a mostly non-Christian population. As physical signs of this new dispensation, a number of churches and basilicas were commissioned, including a church over the Holy Sepulchre, the presumed tomb of Christ. A local cult of the relic of the cross on which Christ was crucified had already come into existence at some point in the intervening three centuries, though how and when remains obscure. Albert Glock worshipped at a church a stone’s throw from this place on the morning of the day he was murdered.

The Empress Helena died in about 328, in her eighties. Some fifty years after her death, a legend began to circulate about her and her visit to Palestine. It appears in the Ecclesiastical History of Tyrannius Rufinus, written towards the end of the fourth century:

Helena, the mother of Constantine, a woman of outstanding faith and deep piety, and also of exceptional munificence … was advised by divinely-sent visions to go to Jerusalem. There she was to make an enquiry among the inhabitants to find out the place where the sacred body of Christ had hung on the Cross. This spot was difficult to find, because the persecutors of old had set up a statue of Venus over it, so that if any Christian wanted to worship Christ in that place, he seemed to be worshipping Venus. For this reason, the place was not much frequented and had all but been forgotten. But when … the pious lady hastened to the spot pointed out to her by a heavenly sign, she tore down all that was profane and polluted there. Deep beneath the rubble she found three Crosses lying in disorder. But the joy of finding this treasure was marred by the difficulty of distinguishing to whom each Cross belonged. The board was there, it is true, on which Pilate had placed an inscription written in Greek, Latin and Hebrew characters.

Helena was unsure that what she had found was the True Cross. To allay her doubts, the bishop of Jerusalem, Macarius, determined that divine proof was needed. He led Helena and her entourage to the house of a woman who was mortally ill with a serious disease. One by one the crosses Helena had found were shown to the sick woman. When the third cross was brought to her, the woman leapt out of bed, cured. This miracle identified the third cross as the True Cross.

When the queen saw that her wish had been answered by such a clear sign, she built a marvellous church of royal magnificence over the place where she had discovered the Cross. The nails which had attached the Lord’s body to the Cross, she sent to her son. From some of these he had a horse’s bridle made, for use in battle, while he used others to add strength to a helmet, equally with a view to using it in battle. Part of the redeeming wood she sent to her son, but she also left part of it there preserved in silver chests. This part is commemorated by regular veneration to this very day.

This legend has been woven into later historical narratives as if it were fact, but it is a pious fiction, emanating from the imperially supported church in Jerusalem. (In his account of the life of Constantine, written in about 338, about the time of her death, the Bishop Eusebius, chronicler of the early church in Palestine, mentions Helena’s piety and her commissioning of churches, but says nothing about finding the Cross.) The purpose of the legend is to burnish Constantine’s reputation as a Christian emperor. Note the symbolism in what happened to the nails: incorporated into the Emperor’s helmet (other versions of the legend say diadem or crown) and his horse’s bridle. The sacred power of Christ is incorporated into Constantine’s imperial implements of war and governance, giving supernatural legitimacy to his military and civil authority.

The legend also enhances the reputation of Jerusalem as the home of sacred relics, and reflects the beginning of a tradition that persists to this day of the search for the physical remains of biblical history as a dimension of Christian spirituality. It establishes the idea of the Holy Land as one of the universal features of the Christian faith: a transcendental geography imposed on the mundane geography of southern Syria. In subsequent centuries, Jerusalem and surrounding sacred sites were the prized destinations of Christian pilgrims, and splinters of Helena’s True Cross and other relics were sold as sacred souvenirs for the pilgrims to take home with them. This account was an advertisement, intended to promote the pilgrimage industry, not a report.

Helena’s excavation techniques have been improved upon, but her archaeological assumptions have proven remarkably durable, persisting well into an age of scientific rationalism. She knew what she was looking for, and – with divine inspiration – she found it.

Before Helena’s visit, Christian pilgrimages to Palestine originating from outside the country were unknown. Visiting sacred sites was a local cult, preceding Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The Church’s earliest authorities considered it theologically unnecessary for Christians to tread the land that Jesus’s feet had trodden. Besides, the anti-Christian policy of the Roman authorities that governed Palestine discouraged Christian visitors. After Constantine’s institutionalization of Christianity in the Roman empire, pilgrimage was encouraged as a natural expression of piety. Monasteries and hostels were built to accommodate pilgrims. In the first centuries after Constantine, the numbers of pilgrims travelling to the Holy Land rose and fell in response to changing political conditions in the Mediterranean and the countries through which they were obliged to pass.

These early pilgrims were either very rich or very determined, as the journey was long, arduous and expensive. Pilgrimages would often take several years to complete. One of the earliest pilgrims to leave a written account was a nun named Egeria, probably from Spain, who visited Palestine in the years 381 to 384. Her narrative, of which only a fragment survives, shows her conducting her pilgrimage as a kind of liturgical ritual. Accompanied by monks, she and her party would offer prayers at every point of interest. She ascended Mount Sinai, where Moses received from God the stone tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments, as if she were performing the ceremony of the Stations of the Cross.

Throughout her narrative she describes little that was not related to the network of hundreds of minor and major Christian shrines that by the time of her visit had been established in the region. Where a sacred site had previously been pagan, a Christian legend would be created to absorb it into the new landscape of religious meaning. From her point of view the whole country was like an enormous church. It was a land whose holiness, combined with its unfamiliarity to a European, rendered it unreal: pilgrims depended on local guides and story tellers, who wove inspiring tales of miracles and marvels about the sites on the pilgrim circuit, more or less closely based on familiar stories in the Old and New Testaments, sometimes wholly original. The folkloric impulse to create religious marvels was irresistible: the rock inside the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, for example, bears a mark that is interpreted as both the footprint of Christ and the handprint of Muhammad.

A pilgrimage was not a fact-finding mission. The point was to be amazed. The pilgrim beheld a holy site to enhance the faith that had brought him there, not to remove doubt through the acquisition of data.

This corpus of religious folklore, which as a whole constituted the holiness of the Holy Land, grew prolifically in the centuries after Constantine, and became part of what it meant to be a Christian. In the case of Jerusalem, the Holy Land’s focal point, the physical city came to be totally overshadowed by an idealized version that bore little resemblance to the original; the sacred geography became stylized and symbolic, existing purely in a realm of spiritual meaning. In maps, Jerusalem was often depicted as a circle, with a round wall enclosing the sacred sites, as if it were one of the celestial spheres. Besides the tomb of Christ and the site of his crucifixion, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre came to include the tomb of Adam (directly underneath the Cross), and the centre of the world itself: the shrine became a model in miniature of the Christian cosmos.

To increase the pilgrim’s sense of awe, the interior of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was improved and augmented, with further spiritual power conveyed by ritual and art, and by the hallowed objects that had come into contact with the body of Christ in the course of his passion and crucifixion. A seventh-century account by a monk of the Scottish monastery on the island of Iona (basing his account on what a fellow monk told him) records that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre contained the cup that Jesus used at the last supper (made of silver, with two handles, and large enough to hold ‘a French quart’), the vinegar-soaked sponge that was thrust into Jesus’s mouth by a soldier, the spear that was used to stab him and the cloth that was placed over his body.

The power of the cult of the Holy Land was such that reverence for the Holy Sepulchre was not extinguished after the church and its contents were systematically destroyed in the year 1009. The demolition was carried out by soldiers based in Ramla acting on the order of the mad Fatimid Caliph Hakim bi Amr Allah, who was waging a particularly eccentric campaign of persecution of Christians and Jews in his dominions, which included Palestine. (At one point he required the Christians of Cairo to identify themselves in public by carrying large wooden crosses; Jews were compelled to carry wooden posts. He also banned the sale of mulukhiyya, a vegetable like spinach, fish without scales, wine, beer, grapes and honey, forbade women from going out of doors or even looking out of the window, and eventually came to believe himself to be God incarnate.) The destruction was thorough: according to an Arab historian, the Arab governor ‘did all he could to uproot the Sepulchre and to remove all trace of it, and to this effect he dug away most of it and broke it up’. The destruction of the shrine stopped the pilgrim trade temporarily, but once the church was rebuilt (1042–8) by the Byzantine Emperor Constantine Monomachus, with the destroyed Tomb of Christ replaced by a replica, the pilgrims returned in greater numbers than ever.

Al-Hakim’s destruction of the Holy Sepulchre spurred the launch of the First Crusade, a military campaign decreed by Pope Urban II at the Council of Clermont in 1095, to seize the Holy Land from Muslim rule. The Pope’s call ignited the popular imagination in Western Europe, and the subsequent capture of Jerusalem in 1099 inspired a new burst of growth in Christian geo-piety. The Dome of the Rock, the Islamic shrine built on the site of the Israelite Temple, was now seen as the Temple of Solomon itself, and the place where, in the Gospel narrative, Jesus was presented to the priests. The ‘Temple’ was absorbed into the ‘way of the cross’, the pilgrims’ tour of the sites associated with the life and death of Jesus. In the Jerusalem of the Crusaders, a new cult of the Temple came into being, established by the Knights Templar – the Poor Knights of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon to give them their full, formal name – a monastic military order who made their headquarters inside the Dome of the Rock. They developed a system of gnostic mysticism – secret religious knowledge – based on a sacred geometry of the octagon, after the octagonal shape of the Dome of the Rock, and on a concept of God as the architect of the world, as Solomon had been the architect of the Temple.

The Christianization of the Holy Land was accomplished through the discovery, or ‘invention’, of countless new sacred relics, most of which were carried back to Europe. Besides further fragments of the True Cross, Christians ‘found’ the nails of the True Cross (again), Jesus’s crown of thorns, the lance used to pierce Jesus’s side (which became the Crusaders’ battle standard), the bones of the Old Testament patriarchs (at Hebron) and the bones of numerous saints. The typical method for finding relics was for a monk to find an object and then ‘discover’ its sacred identity in a dream. The proliferation of fragments of the True Cross famously prompted the Protestant reformer John Calvin to scoff, at the close of the Middle Ages, that if all these fragments were collected, they would be ‘comparable in bulk to a battleship’ (an assertion that is carefully refuted in the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia, which argues that they would all add up to no more than about a third of a whole cross weighing 75 kilograms).