PALESTINE TWILIGHT
The Murder of Dr Albert Glock and theArchaeology of the Holy Land
EDWARD FOX
To Emma
CONTENTS
A Note on the Names of People and Places
PART II The Archaeology of Archaeology
A NOTE ON THE NAMES OF PEOPLE AND PLACES
I have changed the names of some of the people involved in this story in an attempt to defend their privacy. I have not changed the names of political figures and of people serving in governments.
As for place names, I use the name Palestine in this book at first as a geographical term denoting the area of the Levant or southern Syria that includes what is now the State of Israel and the Occupied Territories, which extends from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean, and from Lebanon in the north to the Negev desert in the south. This is the sense intended when dealing with the history and archaeology of the country. Later, particularly where I follow Albert Glock’s life and work among the Palestinians, the name Palestine is often used as it would be understood in the Palestinian Arab context in which Albert Glock had immersed himself; that is, in a political sense, meaning the Palestinian nation in Palestine.
Bir Zeit – written as two words – is the name of the town in which Birzeit (written in English as one word) University is situated.
ON THE MORNING of Sunday 19 January 1992, the day he was to be murdered, Dr Albert Glock went to church with his wife in the Old City of Jerusalem. Albert Glock was an archaeologist, and the Director of the Institute of Palestinian Archaeology at Birzeit University, the main Palestinian university in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. The church he attended, the Church of the Redeemer, was a sombre nineteenth-century Crusader pastiche, one of a number of religious institutions clustered tightly around the Holy Sepulchre, the lugubrious and claustrophobic Christian shrine that is traditionally believed to contain the tomb of Jesus Christ and the site of his crucifixion.
He left the service after the Eucharist; his wife Lois stayed to the end: he wanted to get back to his office at Bir Zeit to work on pottery. He walked through Damascus Gate, the monumental, grimy Ottoman construction at the corner of the Old City where the world of Palestinian Jerusalem rubs uncomfortably against the world of Israeli Jerusalem, where Palestinian women in embroidered dresses sell fruit and vegetables on the busy pavements, and where minibuses and shared taxis depart for the towns and villages and refugee camps of the West Bank. Grey winter clouds clogged the sky, but despite the weather Glock had on only his well-worn black leather jacket. At about 10.30 a.m., he climbed into his blue Volkswagen van and drove northwards out of Jerusalem in the direction of Ramallah, passing first through Bayt Hanina, the Palestinian village that had been absorbed into the northern suburbs of Jerusalem where he and Lois lived. He bought an Arabic newspaper, and then stopped at a local bakery and bought a ka’ak simsim, a ring of pastry filled with dates and sprinkled with sesame seeds.
The checkpoint separating Jerusalem from the West Bank – a roadblock made from slabs of painted concrete, with a small cabin beside it occupied by Israeli soldiers – was open, so Glock was able to cover the distance from Jerusalem to Ramallah in about half an hour. He drove northwards through Ramallah, past the British-built prison inherited by the Israelis, along the road called Radio Boulevard, named after the array of three radio transmission masts built alongside it, also relics of the period of British rule that ended in 1948.
Glock stopped again before he reached Bir Zeit, at a house on the outskirts of Ramallah, near the radio transmitters, where the road was muddy and gouged with ice-filled potholes. This was the house of Dr Gabi Baramki, the acting President of Birzeit, and his wife Dr Haifa Baramki, the university’s Registrar. Nearly thirty years after