Читать книгу Palestine Twilight: The Murder of Dr Glock and the Archaeology of the Holy Land - Edward Fox - Страница 11

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.

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.’