Palestine Twilight. The Murder of Dr Glock and the Archaeology of the Holy Land (Text Only)

244 Pages·2013·1.07 MB·English

by  Edward Fox

PALESTINE TWILIGHT
The Murder of Dr Albert Glock and the
Archaeology of the Holy Land
EDWARD FOX
To Emma
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
A Note on the Names of People and Places
PART I That Day
One
PART II The Archaeology of Archaeology
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
PART III Destruction Level
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Glossary
Notes on Sources
Index
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Praise
Copyright
About the Publisher
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.
PART I
That Day
ONE
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 first coming to Palestine, Glock still thought that it was
an Arab custom not to make appointments, and Palestinian courtesy had
restrained anyone from telling him this was not the case. When Haifa Baramki
answered the doorbell and saw Glock in the doorway, she was not expecting to
see him, but she was not surprised either.
Haifa told him that Gabi was not at home, but invited him in for coffee.
Glock declined, but said he would return after he had finished working at the
Institute. He would come back at about four, he said. He wanted to discuss the
allocation of teaching assignments at the Institute. Gabi Baramki and Glock were
close friends, and allies in Birzeit’s overheated academic politics. The
conversation would undoubtedly touch on the problem that had been simmering
in the Institute since the summer: Glock had turned down for a teaching job one
of his longest-serving graduate students, who had reacted by waging a noisy,
bitter and very public campaign to overturn the decision.
Before he left, Haifa Baramki asked him if he planned to stop at the house of
the al-Farabi family in Bir Zeit. If he did, she asked, he might remind Maya al-
Farabi, who was Glock’s teaching assistant at the Institute, to attend a meeting
the next day of a professional women’s group at Birzeit to which they both
belonged. The al-Farabis did not have a telephone, and Haifa knew that Glock
was a regular visitor to the house. This was an errand that Glock would have
been happy to undertake. Indeed, he was probably intending to stop there
anyway. Maya al-Farabi was Glock’s closest colleague at the Institute of
Archaeology, and his favoured successor as Director. He had guided and
nurtured her academic career every step of the way, from undergraduate to PhD,
and had done the same for her younger sister, Huda. If Glock trusted anyone to
take over his position as Director of the Institute, it was Maya al-Farabi. On
working days, Glock would often have lunch at the al-Farabi house. As a sign of
affectionate familiarity, they gave him a traditional Arabic nickname, Abu Abed.
This meant ‘father of Albert’, which was also the name of Glock’s eldest son.
By now it was between eleven o’clock and noon. Glock drove out of
Ramallah and down into a valley where a bypass to an Israeli settlement crossed
the road to Bir Zeit. Here there was usually an Israeli checkpoint, with a jeep, a
strip of spiked chain across the road, and some surly young soldiers with
machine guns slung over their shoulders stopping vehicles and checking identity
cards. Glock was slyly proud of his skill at talking his way past these obstacles.
Palestinian friends would marvel at how he managed to appear at their door on
days when the tightest closures were in place, when no one was able to travel
anywhere. He took full advantage of his appearance as a serious-looking, elderly
foreigner. He was even careful to establish discreet but cordial relations with the
few Israeli soldiers he saw more than once at the checkpoints, chatting with
them, aware of their boredom. If this made it easier to go about his business he
was willing to do it, though he was careful not to seem too friendly with the
soldiers when he had a Palestinian passenger sitting beside him.
Covering the distance from Ramallah to Bir Zeit took about fifteen minutes.
The road winds around rocky, rubbly hills, and through a few villages. Just
outside Bir Zeit, he drove past the new campus, built in 1980, and now closed by
military order, a limestone quarry at the side of the road, and the houses on the
outskirts of the town, including the al-Farabi house. He knew that Maya had a
dentist’s appointment in Ramallah that day, and he assumed that she would be
back home by the time he finished work at the Institute. He drove through the
compact town, whose position on a ridge gave it a grand view of the valley
below, with tiers of crumbling olive terraces, some in use, some not, descending
to a narrow plain where, according to local legend, the Roman general Titus
encamped with his army in the year 70 before marching on Jerusalem to besiege
it. From this road you could look down into the valley and across towards
Ramallah, at the blinking lights of the radio masts, and on the top of a distant
ridge, the Israeli settlement of Beit El, site of the region’s military headquarters,
built on the traditional site of the biblical Bethel. On the slope below it one could
see the Palestinian refugee camp of Jalazun. At night, these two enemy
settlements, irreconcilable worlds of victor and vanquished, were visible only as
streaks of light, the upper one brilliant white, the lower one yellow. When a
power cut cast Bir Zeit and the surrounding area into darkness, Jalazun would
seem to disappear, while Beit El, with its own source of power, blazed on.
This winter had been the coldest anyone could remember. There had been
heavy snow, which stayed frozen on the ground for days. The snow brought
down telephone lines and power cables, cutting off electricity and telephones,
and the ice caused water pipes to burst. The people of Bir Zeit had endured long,
bleak spells without electricity, telephone and water. In the narrow, layered
terraces of rocky soil sculpted into the slopes, the cold froze and killed thousands
of olive trees.