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

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СКАЧАТЬ salary was being paid by his church back in the United States, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. The word missionary oppressed him like a nightmare.

      He could no longer believe what he used to believe. In his dedication to Birzeit, where he had taught for sixteen years and established the university’s archaeology programme, the first at a Palestinian university, he had developed a heretical personal theology from which faith and hope had been eliminated, and all that remained was an austere, angry and self-sacrificing Christian love. His decades of living in the land of the Bible had turned him into a dissident against the biblical God his Lutheran education had given him, whose interventions in human affairs the Bible traditionally described: for he had discovered that what he had thought of in his younger days as the land of the Bible was in reality the land of the Arab–Israeli conflict, the scene of a century of hatred, injustice and bloodshed. Over the years, he had turned his back on the discipline he had first come to Palestine to practise – biblical archaeology – and undergone a profound personal transformation into a totally different kind of scholar: still an archaeologist, but one who applied his skill to uncovering an alternative history of Palestine, a history derived from archaeological facts, rather than from the biblical narrative. This meant, in effect, a history not of ancient Israel but of the Palestinians. It was a view that set him against many of his former professional colleagues in archaeology, and against his own background.

      It was a lonely position, and one in which in order to function from one day to the next, he was forced to rely, with little respite, on his own inner reserves of moral fortitude. He seemed to draw strength from the sheer difficulty of living in the midst of conflict, under military occupation, like the salamander of ancient belief, the creature that lives in fire. Yet the effort of will taxed him severely. In his last years, a dark current of emotional turmoil and depression flowed beneath the mental activity of his professional life.

      This made him appear, to casual acquaintances, a formidable figure. He had little time for small talk, and little patience for anyone who did not appear to be living at a comparable pitch of intensity. For those he knew well, there was a dry sense of humour. The rest saw a man who looked sternly at the world through large square-rimmed glasses, and rarely smiled.

      At sixty-seven, he looked younger than his years. His hair was grey, but still thick, with a fringe that swept off his forehead. His prominent, slightly cloven chin gave his features an air of fixity of purpose. It was the craggy face of a Midwestern farmer, one that had seen hard winters and stony ground. A preference for dressing in Bible black added to the severity of his appearance.

      There was much in the way human beings relate to each other that he was simply too preoccupied to notice. In the delicate daily negotiations of academic life, he was gruff and undiplomatic: he often trod on toes, especially in an Arab society where a circumspect courtesy is an indispensable element of any transaction. He had a reputation as a poor listener: a conversation with Albert Glock tended to be a monologue in which Albert Glock spoke, compulsively and at length about whatever he was interested in, and the person to whom he was delivering it listened.

      He didn’t seek popularity, or the role of the charismatic campus guru. He was little noticed on the Birzeit site, and preferred to keep as low a profile as possible, a tactic that enabled him to go about his work with the minimum of disturbance. It was the archaeology that mattered above all: everything else was secondary. Lois would often be disturbed by her husband waking up at two o’clock in the morning, his sleep cut into by a nagging need to look something up in a book. He would dash into his study and work until sunrise.

      For his family, there was a heavy cost to bear in this exclusive concentration on archaeology. Albert Glock was an absentee father to his children – three sons and a daughter – for long periods of time, busy at Birzeit while the rest of the family was in America. As children, they had grown up with Middle Bronze Age potsherds strewn over the dining-room floor. In later years, they lost him entirely to archaeology, when it became clear that he would never return to America. All of this was quietly, loyally and patiently borne by Lois, who assumed the role of her husband’s archaeological assistant and grew to share her husband’s fervent belief in Palestinian archaeology and the larger Palestinian struggle.

      Despite his position on the other side of the cultural divide that separates Israel and Palestine, he had a few friends among Israeli archaeologists, relations with whom had to be conducted virtually in secret, since Birzeit had and still has a policy forbidding co-operation with Israeli academic institutions, but the view of him among Israeli archaeologists who didn’t know him was that he was a misfit who had burned his bridges with the respectable mainstream and thrown in his lot with the enemy. ‘Why do you want to write about failure?’ a prominent Israeli archaeologist said to me in dismay, when I told him I was researching Glock’s life. ‘What books did he write? What did he publish? Where are the articles? Where are the students he trained? Where is the legacy? Where is the institution? Where is the lab?’

      Yet the same person who was regarded as an alien in Israel was also regarded with suspicion by many Palestinians. ‘He was a difficult man, a controversial figure,’ a Palestinian archaeologist told me, one who saw Glock’s ghost casting a long dark shadow over Palestinian archaeology. And then, to prove his point, he said with a deliberate air of grave confidentiality, ‘I happen to know that he was trading illegally in antiquities.’

      Determining who Albert Glock was, and why someone would want to kill him, was like archaeology itself. An archaeologist digs at a chosen spot, and in the course of excavation finds the rim and the handle of a pottery jug, a cooking utensil and a coin, and from those scant tokens of evidence creates a picture of who lived at the site and when. Another archaeologist finding the same objects might construct an entirely different picture. There is no final authority to appeal to. The archaeologist’s hypothesis is the best account there is until it is disproved, and he must change it if new evidence emerges.

      The other unsettling fact about archaeology is that however convincing the picture one has formed may be, it will always be 99 per cent incomplete, because the breath of life is missing from it. However much we know of the world that produced that jug handle, rim, cooking utensil and coin, we will never feel the texture of everyday life that was felt when those objects were in use. In the same way, most of what could be known about the killing of Albert Glock is lost. Only a tiny fraction of the available data is retrievable, and what is retrievable is ambiguous. Yet to understand his murder would be to understand a whole society, and the conjunction of massive cultural forces. This was what I was hoping to do.

      The Glock papers were my primary trove of artefacts. Among them was an illuminating autobiographical essay (twenty-nine pages, duplicated) written by Albert Glock’s father, Ernest Glock, in 1968. Ernest Glock was also a Lutheran minister, as were Albert Glock’s two brothers, Delmer and Richard, and his second son, Peter. The essay describes the austere environment into which Albert Glock was born, and tells of the formation of the determined, solitary, earnest adventurer that Albert Glock was to become.

      Ernest Glock was born in Nevada in 1894, literally in a log cabin. His father (Albert Glock’s grandfather) came from the Franco-German province of Alsace-Lorraine, his mother from Switzerland. Ernest Glock’s parents were German-speaking Catholics who had emigrated to America, where they met in Carson City, Nevada, and married in 1892. Seven children were born and then the father disappeared, sending the family into penury. The youngest children were sent to an orphanage.

      As a teenager, Ernest worked as a farm hand for room and board. He records the hardships he endured as a youth, sleeping in a freezing barn, milking cows, feeding hogs, and later herding sheep, which required camping alone for a week at a time. He would cook his supper on a sagebrush fire, sleeping with one ear cocked for the sound of a predatory bobcat or wolf. After a few years of herding sheep he got a job hauling cordwood. In this job he had to rise at 4 a.m. to drive a team of horses and mules.

      Later he was taken in by an aunt and her husband. She СКАЧАТЬ