Читать книгу Palestine Twilight: The Murder of Dr Glock and the Archaeology of the Holy Land - Edward Fox - Страница 9

TWO YEARS AFTER Albert Glock was murdered, I came across an article in the Journal of Palestine Studies (‘a quarterly on Palestinian affairs and the Arab – Israeli conflict’) entitled ‘Archaeology as Cultural Survival: The Future of the Palestinian Past’. Albert Glock was the author. I had never heard of him. At first glance, the article attracted my attention because it was unusual for this journal to publish an article on archaeology. Its usual concerns were political science and history, and detailed accounts of the latest diplomatic convolutions in the never-ending struggle for Palestine. The subject of the piece was intriguing, but then I read the biographical footnote that took up most of the first page: it stunned me.

Albert Glock, an American archaeologist and educator who was killed by an unidentified gunman in Bir Zeit, the West Bank, on 19 January 1992, wrote this essay in 1990 …

Dr. Glock spent seventeen years in Jerusalem and the West Bank, first as director of the Albright Institute for Archaeology and then as head of the archaeology department of Birzeit University, where he helped found the Archaeology Institute.

A brief review of the facts connected with his unsolved murder is in order. Dr. Glock was shot twice [sic] at close range (twice in the back of the head and neck and once in the heart from the front) by a masked man using an Israeli army gun who was driven away in a car with Israeli license plates. It took the Israeli authorities, who were nearby, three hours to get to the scene. Apart from giving a ten-minute statement, Dr. Glock’s widow was never asked about his activities, entries in his diary, possible enemies, and so on. The lack of Israeli investigation into the murder of an American citizen is perhaps the most unusual feature of the case …

Finally, the U.S. authorities, including the FBI, have not responded to repeated requests by the Glock family to look into the assassination or to ask the Israelis to do so. Prospects for solving the case thus appear remote.

I had never read a footnote like it. It contained volumes of subtext, all in sentences that ended with a question mark. The way it was written – in a tone of muted outrage – suggested that Glock was killed by some sort of Israeli hit squad (the gun, the licence plates, the lack of investigation). But why would an Israeli hit squad want to kill an archaeologist? Why would an Israeli hit squad want to kill an American archaeologist, even one with obvious Palestinian sympathies? Why would anyone want to kill an archaeologist?

What, moreover, did the writer of the footnote mean by ‘the lack of Israeli investigation’? Did that mean there was no Israeli investigation at all – or that there was no successful Israeli investigation? Above all, who was Albert Glock? Why was he teaching at Birzeit University, a chronically under-funded and embattled Palestinian university, especially since, as the footnote pointed out, he had formerly been Director of the Albright Institute, one of the most prestigious archaeological institutions in the Near East? Any addict of news about the Israel – Palestine conflict, as I was, knew that Birzeit was the site of countless unequal battles between students and the Israeli army, and frequently closed by order of the military authorities. A foreigner would only be teaching there if he had a serious commitment to the Palestinian cause: one would hardly consider it a prestigious academic post, a place one went to advance a career. What had brought Albert Glock to Birzeit? Why had he apparently chosen to devote himself to the perennially losing side in the Israel–Palestine conflict?

I entered the world of this footnote, and these questions became my life. The curiosity it aroused became a mission to investigate this obscure murder, buried away in a footnote in an academic journal, which surely no more than a few hundred people had read. There was a passion in there, in the story of the life and death of Albert Glock – something heroic and tragic that these sparse facts only hinted at.

Eventually, in September 1997, the footnote brought me to Bir Zeit, the weary little Palestinian town in the West Bank where Albert Glock’s life ended. I enrolled as a foreign student at Birzeit University, in the vague hope that I might penetrate the mystery of Glock’s death by being inside the institution where he taught. With the university’s help, I rented an apartment in the town from a Birzeit professor, Munir Nasir. A few weeks later, my partner Emma and our three-month-old son Theodore joined me. The three of us would bounce back and forth on the road between Bir Zeit, Ramallah and Jerusalem squeezed into shared taxis, with Theo strapped to my chest in a baby carrier. We carried him about the West Bank with a little black-and-white checked Palestinian kaffiyah that Munir Nasir had given us wrapped around his neck.

Our apartment overlooked the route that Glock took on his last day, from the Institute to the al-Farabi house. To my left, as I stood on the balcony, and just outside my field of vision, was the old town of Bir Zeit, the old campus, the Institute of Archaeology, and the Greek Orthodox church where the funeral took place on the day of the murder. Closer was the stretch of pavement onto which Glock pulled over and waited to allow the procession to pass by. Before me, and occupying most of the view, was a vista of rocky hills. In the distance, on the opposite hill, were the refugee camp of Jalazun, and above it the Israeli settlement Beit El, and to the right of them, on the horizon, the blinking radio masts of Ramallah. The panorama encompassed most of the area in which the events of the day of the murder took place. To the right were the rooftops of the centre of the town of Bir Zeit. Beyond the town stretched the road to Ramallah and, invisible where I stood, the al-Farabi house, in the driveway of which Glock was shot. Below, across the street, was a municipal trash dumpster which at night attracted feral cats, and by day jangled the nerves as people banged its metal doors open and shut; behind it lay a group of neglected olive trees standing in a clutter of soda bottles.

Lying open on the tiled floor in the hall was a partially unpacked suitcase containing a stack of papers: Glock’s correspondence, diaries, published and unpublished articles, the available documentation of his life, his work and his death. On a trip to the United States six months earlier, my first step in investigating the shooting, I had been to see Glock’s widow, Lois, and she had let me copy the papers and computer disks in her late husband’s enormous personal archive.

The documents conjured up the ghost of the murdered archaeologist. I read and re-read the material, and my virtual acquaintance with Albert Glock deepened. Sometimes I would forget that I never knew him, that five years separated our experience of this weary little town. I came to see him in my mind’s eye like the memory of an old friend. His life was an enigma, not least because his work as an archaeologist never reached completion. To me, he existed as a holographic image in a swarm of facts, but within this mass of data one pattern stood out clearly, like stars forming a constellation: a trajectory of purpose, vivid and irresistible. Glock’s life had been a mission. He had obeyed the severe demands of his conscience, and put the fulfilment of its imperatives before anything else in his life, and he had followed it unswervingly to the extreme and solitary point where a violent death closed in on him.

In the evenings I would sit on the balcony, eating grilled chicken from the restaurant across the road, looking out over the activity in the street below, and think that I was attempting the impossible, to know the unknowable, to capture the atoms of a moment that had passed five years ago. All societies have secrets that an outsider will never penetrate, and this was one held by no more than a handful of people, who would not tell me even if I could find them. The headlights of passing cars – the Mercedes taxis and battered pickup trucks – would illuminate me for a moment where I sat. The town looked peaceful enough, yet just down the road, outside the post office where I bought my first Yasir Arafat postage stamps, there were terrible scenes during the intifada, of people of all ages confronting the military force of the dominant Israelis, getting beaten and shot and tear-gassed. Now in the same place, four years after the Oslo Agreement had introduced limited Palestinian self-rule in the Occupied Territories, the precarious truce between Israel and Palestine was symbolized by groups of young Palestinian Authority policemen, strolling about with nothing better to do than check the licences of the taxis that plied the two kilometres to the Birzeit campus. The moment of the murder was lost and buried; it was now ancient history.

I had a copy of the autopsy in my suitcase. After Glock was shot, his body was taken to the Greenberg Institute of Forensic Medicine at Abu Kabir, outside Tel Aviv, and kept on ice overnight. The pathologist noted that the body was dressed in grey trousers, blue underwear, brown shoes and dark blue socks. One lens of his glasses was missing, and his stomach contained a porridgy material: the ka’ak simsim Glock had partly eaten earlier that day. The body showed the wear and tear that would be expected of a man of Glock’s age. His heart was in good condition. His lungs were a bit grey from smoking.

One bullet entered the back through the right shoulder, passed through the right lung, the heart and the liver, and exited through the lower ribs on the left-hand side. Another bullet entered under the right cheekbone (‘zygomatic bone’), passed through the skull and the brain and came out on the left-hand side of the neck. The paths of both bullets sloped downwards, which indicated that the gunman had fired from a position higher than his victim. This made sense: Glock was walking down a slope at the time, and the gunman fired from the top of the slope. A third bullet entered his right shoulder from the front and emerged at the back of the body. This third bullet was fired from below to above, indicating it was shot at a different angle, that the body was in a different position when this bullet entered. The entry and exit wounds were clean – ‘no marks of powder burn, soot and/or fire effect’ – which shows that the gunman was not using hollow-pointed bullets. Hollow-pointed bullets expand on impact and leave messy wounds as they pass through. They tend to be used by police officers because they bring the victim down quickly. The absence of these markings suggests that a military-type weapon was used: military weapons fire solid bullets, which leave clean exit and entry wounds.

It is hard to tell for sure which bullet was fired first, but the gunman may have fired first at Glock’s back, as he was walking down the concrete slope. This shot – which entered the right shoulder – then turned him around slightly, so that the bullet fired the next instant hit his right cheek. Glock fell forwards, onto his face, onto the concrete, wounding his nose and forehead. Then – and this depends on how much time elapsed between the first two shots and the last – Glock turned over where he lay, with his feet towards the gunman, and his head away from him, and the killer fired a final bullet into Glock’s right shoulder before he made his escape in the waiting car. Either he turned over in a spasm, or the gunman got close enough to turn him over, and then fired a last shot. The first alternative seems more likely. Glock was found lying on his back, with grazes on his face.

The pathologist estimated that the bullets were fired from a distance of about one metre.