PALESTINE TWILIGHT

The Murder of Dr Albert Glock and theArchaeology 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.

The olive tree is the emblem of Birzeit University, which is the main university in the Occupied Territories of Palestine. It is a good symbol for an institution that prides itself on being the hearth of Palestinian nationalism. The olive tree embodies the virtues that Palestinians like to see in themselves: it is ancient, it is tough, it is native, and it has deep roots. The name Bir Zeit means reservoir of oil. In the academic calendar of Birzeit University, a day is added to a weekend in the middle of October, and this three-day break is observed as Olive-picking Holiday. The idea is that, on this weekend, students return to their homes to help with the olive harvest. In reality, the Olive-picking Holiday is a political and nostalgic gesture rather than a matter of agricultural necessity. Few Palestinians any more have olive groves big enough to produce an economically viable crop.

In January 1992, Albert Glock was sixty-seven years old, and in his slow, perfectionist way was getting ready for retirement. He and Lois had been expatriates for so long, and were so deeply immersed in life among the Palestinians, that Glock felt he could never live in the United States again. For many years they had lived in a large, comfortable rented house in Bayt Hanina on the main Jerusalem road, with big airy rooms and a study full of the books and artefacts that Albert had accumulated over the years: everything they had was there, materially and spiritually. Now, on the verge of retirement, they were preparing to move to a smaller house in the same neighbourhood. The American way of life, a condition of comfortable ignorance of the rest of the world, as he saw it, had become foreign to Albert Glock. He called it ‘living in the bubble’. He had been visiting Cyprus now and then on the three-monthly trips out of the country he was compelled to make to renew his Israeli visa, and favoured settling there, but he had done nothing about it. This academic year he had relinquished most of his teaching responsibilities so that he could concentrate on completing the long-delayed publication of his life’s work, the excavation of an archaeologically complex site in the northern West Bank called Ti’innik.

The Institute of Archaeology was accommodated in an old-fashioned family house with two storeys, built around a central courtyard that was entered by an ornamental iron gate. It stood on the edge of Bir Zeit’s old town, a tight maze of dilapidated Ottoman buildings. To the right of the Institute, a car mechanic worked out of a dark cave of a workshop that had formerly been a blacksmith’s shop. Down a narrow lane, among the tiny houses, there was a bakery where traditional flat bread was baked in a dome-shaped oven, and a small Greek Orthodox church in a poor state of repair.

Glock worked alone that day. The shelves in his workroom were filled from floor to ceiling with the cardboard boxes, neatly marked, that contained the excavation material from his digs at Ti’innik and Jenin. The work tables in the room were covered with hundreds of blackened shards of burnt pottery, arranged in a state somewhere between order and chaos. The fragments were from Ti’innik, and Glock was working with Maya and a staff technician on the painstaking business of putting as many of the fragments as possible back together into their original forms as domestic pottery vessels. The pots bore a mysterious pattern of ridges that they could not identify. Several vessels had already been reassembled, among them a big two-handled water jar that dominated the room.

Ti’innik is a hamlet in the northernmost part of the West Bank, a few kilometres north of the town of Jenin in the flat, green Jezreel valley, near the biblical site of Megiddo, better known as Armageddon, where the Book of Revelation prophesies that the battle to end all earthly battles will be fought. The village stands at the foot of an ancient man-made mound called Tell Ti’innik, which is almost certainly the site mentioned in the Bible as the Canaanite stronghold of Taanach. In 1987, Glock and Maya al-Farabi took the radical step of excavating, not the parts of the site that relate to biblical history, which had been the dominant interest of the archaeology of Palestine since archaeology began in the Holy Land in the middle of the nineteenth century, but the more recent Ottoman remains which had been largely ignored by archaeologists.

Some time before three o’clock, he closed up the office and turned the key in the VW. He aimed to stop off briefly at the al-Farabi house to leave the message for Maya about her meeting. He would not stay long: his appointment with Gabi Baramki was more important. Before he left, he scribbled a note to Maya on the copy of the Arabic newspaper he had bought in Bayt Hanina, that day’s edition of al-Ittihad. He wrote across the top in block capitals, ‘I may be late tomorrow. Al,’ and left it where she would see it.

That day, a funeral was taking place at the Greek Orthodox church. The town of Bir Zeit is unusual among West Bank towns in that its population is mostly Christian, and unlike better-known Palestinian towns that have traditionally had Christian majorities, such as Bethlehem, the proportion of its population that is Christian has increased rather than shrunk in recent years. The thresholds of the doorways of houses tend to be decorated with a carved relief of St George slaying the Dragon (a motif thought to originate with the Crusades), indicating a Christian household, rather than a Qur’anic inscription. Most of the Christians in Bir Zeit, in common with most Palestinian Christians, belonged to the Greek Orthodox Church. As Glock was leaving the Institute, the funeral procession, with its train of cars, came along the narrow road toward the church in the opposite direction. People in Bir Zeit remember that Glock patiently pulled over to the side of the road to let it pass. His VW van was a familiar sight in the area, and everyone knew it belonged to the American archaeologist. They remember that moment as a characteristically modest, thoughtful act of courtesy. They also remember it as the last time many of them saw him alive.

After the procession had passed, Dr Glock drove out of the town and along the road to the new campus. The al-Farabi house was on this road, about a kilometre outside the town. It was built on a steep slope, below the level of the road, from which one looks down on the roof of the house, with its solar panel array, hot water tank and television antenna. Glock parked the van on the gravel verge, under a fig tree. It was a dark day, so he left the van’s headlights on, not meaning to stay long. The time was just after three o’clock. Foreigners who knew Glock, that is people who were not Palestinians, were impressed by the fearlessness with which he drove around the West Bank during the intifada, the Palestinian uprising against Israeli rule that had erupted in 1987, going into areas where a vehicle with Israeli licence plates, like his, was almost certain to have stones thrown at it by children and teenagers. Glock had endured his share of stones, but he still went where he wanted to go, although lately he had begun to take precautions when he drove the van, aware that it was well known and that he was conspicuous driving it. He would vary his usual routes, and check underneath the van before he got into it. He was afraid of something, but whether it was a general fear for his safety at a dangerous time or whether he was afraid of something or someone in particular is unknowable, another blank in the narrative of history.

He walked around to the gate at the top of the driveway, pushed it open and walked down the concrete ramp. If you put all the accounts together, this is what happened next. A young man with his face wrapped in a kaffiyah, the black-and-white checked cotton scarf the Palestinians wear to identify themselves as Palestinian, dressed in a dark jacket, jeans and white sneakers, jumped down from the stone wall built against the edge of the road. He landed in the al-Farabis’ front garden, a strip of ploughed earth planted with olive trees. He could not be seen from the road. Glock probably didn’t see or hear him. Inside the house they heard the shots, two together, then one: like this, Lois said later, imitating the sound with her hands: clap clap … clap.

PART II The Archaeology of Archaeology

TWO

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.

THREE

NOT MANY PEOPLE at Birzeit knew it, but besides being an archaeologist Albert Glock was also a Lutheran minister and a missionary. It was a fact that he preferred not to draw attention to. Being a minister was an aspect of himself that he had been gradually shedding in the last years of his life. He didn’t like people to know that while he was teaching archaeology at Birzeit his 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 was a convert to the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, a St Louis-based organization that had been established to care for the millions of Germans migrating to the United States in the nineteenth century. When Ernest Glock expressed a need to improve himself by getting an education, his aunt suggested a Lutheran seminary in California. He took the advice. Before his graduation from the seminary he was sent as a Missouri Synod vicar and schoolmaster to Lebeau, Texas, a small town so steeped in German culture that even the blacks spoke German.

After graduating, Ernest Glock married a grocer’s daughter, Meta Matulle. Then he and his wife were sent to Gifford, Idaho, a rural, roadless place, surrounded by forest, where the congregation was again entirely German-speaking, and which is now within the borders of an Indian reservation (the Nez Percé tribe). ‘During my four and one half years as pastor I did not preach one English sermon,’ he wrote. Their house in Gifford had no indoor plumbing; their water supply was rainwater and snowmelt from the roof which drained into a brick cistern, and in the winter the thermometer could reach forty below zero. This is the house in which, in 1925, Albert Ernest Glock was born. A few months later, the family moved to Grangeville, a larger town not far away. They spent another three years in Idaho, before Ernest accepted a ‘call’ to a church in Washburn, Illinois, a small dot on the map north-east of Peoria, with a population of 900. This was where Albert and his two brothers grew up.

It was a claustrophobic, confining upbringing for the three boys, who were each a little more than a year apart in age. As the preacher’s children, they were always on show, expected to be models of good behaviour. Their father maintained discipline with a rod. Like most clerical families, their social status was proportionately higher than their income, and the rigour of their upbringing was mirrored in the plainness of their material circumstances. The house was heated with wood in the winter, and they bought their groceries on credit. Every day, their mother served supper at five o’clock. The meal was preceded and concluded with prayers. Until they went to grade school at the age of six or seven they spoke only High German at home. Their mother effaced herself in the duties of a minister’s wife and said little. ‘But she was the really intelligent one,’ Albert Glock’s younger brother Delmer remembered.

There was little in this upbringing to stimulate the minds of the three intelligent boys. The town itself – inhabited mostly by retired farmers, and surrounded by expanses of flat farmland – offered nothing. Their father, Ernest, was a practical man with few intellectual interests outside his vocation, and he disapproved of popular amusements like movies and dancing. His library was dominated by dry volumes of Lutheran theology.

Temperamentally, the boys were not rebellious. They were hewn from the same rock as their parents. They were obedient sons because it was in their nature to be obedient. They knew that they would upset their father deeply if they told him that they didn’t believe the Pope was the Antichrist, as Missouri Synod doctrine held, so they didn’t. When Albert sought a means of escape from this restricted world he quietly found one for himself in the voracious reading of books.

Delmer Glock was convinced that Albert’s interest in the archaeology of Palestine originated not in the text of the Bible but in the swashbuckling children’s adventure stories of Richard Halliburton, which were published in America in the 1920s and 1930s. In one of these books, Richard Halliburton’s Second Book of Marvels: The Orient, first published in 1938 when Albert was thirteen, one finds, after descriptions of the ancient Seven Wonders of the World, ‘Timbuctoo’, the discovery of Victoria Falls by Livingstone, a meeting with ‘Ibn Saud’ (King ‘Abd al-‘Aziz al-Sa’ud, the ruler of Saudi Arabia) in a tent outside Mecca, and visits to Petra and the Dead Sea, a swaggering account of an attempt to explore a ‘secret tunnel’ in the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. This may have been the spark that ignited Albert’s curiosity, kindled on the dry wood of an already abundant knowledge of the Bible. Exploration of the Temple Mount, the seat of the biblical Temple, also known as the Haram al-Sharif in Arabic, was and remains the holy grail of biblical archaeology, its central mystery, its ultimate prize, and a subject so thickly encrusted with myth and legend that the facts about it are easily lost. The cult of exploration of the Temple Mount, of which Halliburton was giving a simplified children’s version, could turn the homely familiarity with the Bible that Albert Glock already had into a genuine adventure. Halliburton wrote:

The more I heard about the caverns and tunnels and shaft, the more curious I became about them. How exciting it would be if someone could explore the entire passage, the passage lost all these centuries. If someone found the tunnel, it would lead – if the legend turned out to be true – right into the treasure-caverns from underneath. The reward of such an adventure might be the long-lost Ark of the Covenant, or the mummy of Israel’s greatest king.

I resolved to be that someone myself … Was I about to make one of the greatest discoveries in Bible history?

It may be a long shot to conclude that Albert Glock found the inspiration for his career as an archaeologist in the pages of the famous American adventure writer. But when he was still a teenager, he travelled on a freighter to Europe, just as Richard Halliburton had done, and years later he was excavating an ancient mound in Palestine, seeking to make discoveries in Bible history himself.

Albert showed a determined independence of mind that was unusual in a place where few aspired to individualism. ‘He was always off doing something,’ his brother Richard recalled; ‘we were never sure what it was.’ He remembers being mystified by the sight of his older brother writing Sanskrit and cuneiform characters on a piece of paper. ‘I don’t know where he got it from.’

At the age of thirteen, Albert told his father that he wanted to enrol at a residential pre-seminary high school for boys in Milwaukee, 200 miles away. The school was a German-style gymnasium where students learned Latin, Greek and Hebrew. Its purpose was to prepare boys for the Lutheran ministry. Albert’s parents could afford the fees, which were $200 per year, but not the cost of transportation, so from the age of thirteen, and for the next five years, Albert would hitchhike the 200 miles between Washburn and Milwaukee. Later, he announced that he wanted to specialize in the Old Testament, source of the legends of Solomon and the Temple and the ancient civilizations of the Near East.

Albert Glock’s motive in going to school in Milwaukee was as much a dedication to the Lutheran ministry as a desire to get out of Washburn. Later, his younger brothers Delmer and Richard followed Albert along this path, to the Missouri Synod ministry via the gymnasium in Milwaukee. By the time they had reached their late teens, the three boys had hitchhiked to every state in the Union. By the time they had reached their mid-twenties, they were Lutheran ministers.

Lutherans of the Missouri Synod subscribed unconditionally to the version of Christianity embodied in the classic works of Martin Luther, and were unimpressed with anything written later. Drinking from this pristine well of pure doctrine, based on a belief in the Bible as ‘the inspired, inerrant and infallible word of God’, Missourians saw themselves as forming ‘the only true visible church on earth’. Although it was the plan of the Missouri Synod leadership gradually to adopt English in church rites as soon as most of its members had acquired the language, and the work of translating the Lutheran classics could be completed (a process that began around the time of the First World War), the cultural and doctrinal conservatism of most members of the church were inseparable: to them, their native German tongue was the divine language of the Bible, as translated by the blessed Luther himself, and they only reluctantly gave it up completely in church services as late as the Second World War, spurred on by popular anti-German feeling in the United States.

The Missourians remained apart and solitary in their righteousness: it was not until the 1960s that they would agree to join Christian organizations that included other denominations. This attitude was reinforced by their social and cultural homogeneity: they were almost all German-Americans (there was also a Scandinavian element), and they were in and of the agricultural Midwest: two-thirds of them lived within a 300-mile radius of Chicago. Their separateness and common identity were not just ethnic. Members of the church did not need to look outside for education: the Missouri Synod had institutions that provided both. LCMS pastors were trained at an LCMS seminary – Concordia Theological Seminary, St Louis – and the children of LCMS members attended LCMS elementary schools, whose teachers were trained at an LCMS teachers’ college. As late as the 1930s, lectures in theology at Concordia Seminary were in Latin.

In 1932, they published a synopsis of their beliefs, bearing the plain title A Brief Statement of the Doctrinal Position of the Missouri Synod, which articulates everything a Missouri Lutheran believes or ought to believe. It completes the edifice of the all-encompassing Missouri world view with a Lutheran cosmology. This proposes a universe that came into being in exactly six twenty-four-hour days. ‘Since no man was present when it pleased God to create the world,’ it argues, ‘we must look for a reliable account of creation to God’s own record, found in God’s own book, the Bible.’ They reject any scientific explanation of the origins of man and the universe that contradicts the biblical account, whatever intellectual difficulties this may cause.

Salvation is achieved exclusively by divine grace: this is their primary doctrine. The Gospels and the Sacraments are the divine tools given man to promote access to this divine grace. Good works alone are insufficient for salvation: the idea is anathema. They also believe that the Pope is the fulfilment of biblical prophecies of the Antichrist. Anabaptists, Unitarians, Masons, ‘crypto-Calvinists’, ‘synergists’, and above all papists are held to be in dangerous error. They repudiate ‘unionism’, ‘that is, church-fellowship with the adherents of false doctrine’. These tenets were the result of decades of collegial deliberation by these pious, solitary, scholarly Lutherans, conducted in earnest conferences in small towns on the Midwestern plains, based on faith in the Bible as the infallible word of God. It is a Protestantism of the American farmer: pure, primitive, austere, unworldly, defensive. When it speaks at all, it speaks plainly.

So sincere and original is their study of the Scriptures that they declare in the Brief Statement, with poignant honesty, that there are matters on which they have not been able to reach a firm position. They acknowledge themselves stumped by the dilemma of why if ‘God’s grace is universal’, ‘all men are not converted and saved?’ ‘We confess that we cannot answer it.’ This is the doctrine – transmitted via the golden chain of Christ, the Bible, Luther and the Missouri divines – that Ernest Glock taught his sons at their family devotions. Albert later admitted that he had privately scorned his father’s world view, seeing it as narrow and exclusive of all but the concerns of his Missouri Synod flock.

Ernest Glock was unenthusiastic about his son’s scholarship: he thought basic seminary training was enough. But Albert, young and intellectually hungry, continued to enlarge his field of study. In 1949 he spent a year in Europe studying theology, and took classes in biblical criticism at the University of Heidelberg, and then returned to America to study Near Eastern Languages at the University of Chicago.

His study of biblical Hebrew would set Glock in opposition to one of the most intellectually constraining articles of the Brief Statement: ‘Since the Holy Scriptures are the Word of God, it goes without saying that they contain no errors or contradictions, but that they are in all their parts and words the infallible truth, also in those parts which treat of historical, geographical, and other secular matters.’ Historical and geographical matters were precisely what interested Albert Glock. His scholarly intellect was too keen, and his nature too individualistic to accept this traditional dogma unquestioningly. Nevertheless, he graduated from Concordia Theological Seminary in St Louis in 1950.

The following year, he married Lois Sohn, also a German-American, the daughter of a professor of Lutheran theology, and his life seemed set for the quiet and stable life of a Lutheran clergyman. He spent the next seven years as a pastor in Normal, Illinois, not far from where he had grown up, and seemed happy enough in his vocation. In the earnest, collegial spirit of Lutheran pastors, he closed his letters ‘yours in Christ’, ‘agape’ and ‘peace’.

But his more secular studies in ancient Hebrew continued. While still serving as a pastor in Normal, he enrolled at the University of Michigan, where his thesis advisor was George Mendenhall, a biblical scholar who introduced the Marxist-oriented ‘peasants’ revolt’ model of the origin of ancient Israel. Mendenhall’s theory was opposed to the traditional biblical view which held that Israelite tribes invaded Canaan and defeated the indigenous Canaanites. Mendenhall believed that a kind of theocratic liberation movement emerged within Canaanite society, gradually transforming it into what would ultimately be called ‘Israel’. His theory, revolutionary in its day, was an early instance of a history of ancient Israel that was distinct from the biblical account. Mendenhall’s approach was an important formative influence on Albert Glock, who received his doctorate in 1968. Thirty years later, Albert wrote in his diary that he ‘had wasted seven years in Normal, Illinois’. He didn’t have the patient personality a clergyman must have, who as part of his daily business must suffer gladly the lonely, the pedantic and the boring. In 1956, he was offered a job – or ‘answered a call’, to use the Missouri idiom – to teach, the following year, Old Testament history and literature at Concordia College, River Forest, Illinois, the teachers’ college for the Missouri Synod elementary school system.

The Missouri Synod’s insistence on the infallibility of the Bible created a tension among its scholars that developed in the late fifties and early sixties into a controversy and finally into a split in the church, a trauma from which it has only recently recovered. A liberal wing, acknowledging the ‘higher criticism’ of German biblical scholars like Julius Wellhausen, believed their faith in scripture was not undermined by analysing the Old Testament historically, and seeing it as the work not of Moses, but of later authors, writing from the eighth century BCE and afterwards. The Brief Statement breathes fire on this approach: ‘We reject this erroneous doctrine as horrible and blasphemous.’ The leadership of the Missouri Synod, representing the conservative mainstream, sought to stamp out this heresy, which was threatening to engulf the entire church. To put reason before faith in studying the Bible was the beginning of the end of religion, they argued. Worst of all, this heretical fire had broken out in the church’s theological engine room, the Concordia Theological Seminary. One of the means the leadership used to extinguish it was to demand allegiance to the Brief Statement by the forty or so dissident professors at Concordia, which the professors were unwilling to do, arguing it infringed their right to academic freedom.

Although Glock was teaching elsewhere, he took the side of the dissidents, since this was the direction he too was following in his biblical studies. His eldest son, Albert Glock Jr, recalled later that in the family devotions he led with his own children, he would teach them about the ‘Yahwist’ and the ‘Deuteronomist’, as two of the biblical authors were named in Wellhausen’s analysis: an approach that defied his own father’s stern literalism.

In 1960 (aged thirty-five), he wrote an article in defence of the dissidents entitled ‘A critical evaluation of the article on Scripture in A Brief Statement of the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod’. The tone of the article was conventionally and respectfully pious, but the criticism it contained attacked the Missouri Synod’s uncompromising doctrine at its heart. The church’s theology is locked in the seventeenth century, he wrote, resulting in ‘a serious breakdown of communication when speaking to our age’. He then went on to propose a tectonic shift in the church’s doctrine, away from its most distinctive feature, its stubborn belief in the literalism of the Bible, towards an emphasis on its meaning and spirit, aware that it was a product of human authorship.

After Glock read the article at a meeting of his department at Concordia Teachers College, they insisted that it be locked in a safe and not allowed to circulate. For Albert, the episode was his first public act of opposition. He saw it as the symbolic sealing of his fate. Henceforth, he would always be a dissident.

The rebels of Concordia Seminary eventually accepted defeat. They left the church, and founded Seminex, a ‘seminary in exile’. Their departure strengthened the conservatives’ grip on Missouri Synod doctrine. Seminex survived in the wilderness, training Lutheran pastors who were not recognized by the Missouri Synod until 1988, when it voted itself out of existence and joined the more liberal Evangelical Lutheran Church of America.

In an essay unpublished during his lifetime, written when he was at Birzeit, Albert Glock described himself as ‘a skeptical white American tending to minority views’. Taking the side of the liberals in the Missouri Synod split was like rebelling against his father. Taking the minority view was an instinct that he was to follow at every crossroads in his life.

‘It has occurred to me more than once,’ he wrote, ‘that I have chosen usually the losing side, the down side, in whatever I have done. I suppose the two most notable examples are the left side of the church and the Palestinian side of politics.’ This is the motive that drove him through an intellectual, political, spiritual and personal evolution that he began as a Lutheran pastor, becoming, in succession, biblical scholar, biblical archaeologist, Palestinian archaeologist, and, finally and improbably, intellectual commissar for Palestinian cultural nationalism, which ended in his assassination. All of this was done in a robustly Lutheran spirit of earnestly working things out in the tribunal of his own conscience. In this he was following the example of Luther himself. Glock was always nailing his theses to the door, and taking the consequences.

Glock’s journey from the plains of the Midwest to the concrete slope of his assassination was an odyssey of gradual, determined metamorphosis. As soon as he completed one stage of personal transformation, he would renounce it, seeing on the horizon a clearer and sharper image of truth; and once a new image of truth appeared to him, he would head towards that, regardless of the consequences. Glock’s goal was to throw off the burden of his own past, his own background. At sixty-seven, he was on the verge of reaching it. And then he was shot.

His life was an odyssey, but when he died it was unfinished. An odyssey is a process of the maturation of the self, a narrative whose meaning and purpose become clear once it is at an end, once it has come full circle. Ulysses, the hero of the original Odyssey of Homer, goes on a long journey, undergoes trials, and returns home fulfilled. The homecoming completes and resolves the process. Without it, the odyssey is not complete, and its meaning and purpose are not realized. Glock’s long odyssey was violently ended before it reached that point of fulfilment.

FOUR

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.’

FIVE

TO UNDERSTAND FULLY what Nabhan Khreisheh meant in his cryptic remark about the significance of archaeology in this murder; to understand how Albert Glock, an American archaeologist, came to be assassinated in a driveway in the West Bank, one has to go back a long way, to the very beginning of archaeology in Palestine.

In about the year 325 of the common era, shortly after he acquired the eastern provinces that included Palestine, the Emperor Constantine – the first Christian emperor and the founder of Byzantine civilization – sent his mother, Flavia Julia Helena Augusta, the Empress Dowager, at the head of a mission to Palestine. Its immediate political purpose was to assert Constantine’s authority in the province, and implement his policy of promoting Christians and Christianity in the imperial state among a mostly non-Christian population. As physical signs of this new dispensation, a number of churches and basilicas were commissioned, including a church over the Holy Sepulchre, the presumed tomb of Christ. A local cult of the relic of the cross on which Christ was crucified had already come into existence at some point in the intervening three centuries, though how and when remains obscure. Albert Glock worshipped at a church a stone’s throw from this place on the morning of the day he was murdered.

The Empress Helena died in about 328, in her eighties. Some fifty years after her death, a legend began to circulate about her and her visit to Palestine. It appears in the Ecclesiastical History of Tyrannius Rufinus, written towards the end of the fourth century:

Helena, the mother of Constantine, a woman of outstanding faith and deep piety, and also of exceptional munificence … was advised by divinely-sent visions to go to Jerusalem. There she was to make an enquiry among the inhabitants to find out the place where the sacred body of Christ had hung on the Cross. This spot was difficult to find, because the persecutors of old had set up a statue of Venus over it, so that if any Christian wanted to worship Christ in that place, he seemed to be worshipping Venus. For this reason, the place was not much frequented and had all but been forgotten. But when … the pious lady hastened to the spot pointed out to her by a heavenly sign, she tore down all that was profane and polluted there. Deep beneath the rubble she found three Crosses lying in disorder. But the joy of finding this treasure was marred by the difficulty of distinguishing to whom each Cross belonged. The board was there, it is true, on which Pilate had placed an inscription written in Greek, Latin and Hebrew characters.

Helena was unsure that what she had found was the True Cross. To allay her doubts, the bishop of Jerusalem, Macarius, determined that divine proof was needed. He led Helena and her entourage to the house of a woman who was mortally ill with a serious disease. One by one the crosses Helena had found were shown to the sick woman. When the third cross was brought to her, the woman leapt out of bed, cured. This miracle identified the third cross as the True Cross.

When the queen saw that her wish had been answered by such a clear sign, she built a marvellous church of royal magnificence over the place where she had discovered the Cross. The nails which had attached the Lord’s body to the Cross, she sent to her son. From some of these he had a horse’s bridle made, for use in battle, while he used others to add strength to a helmet, equally with a view to using it in battle. Part of the redeeming wood she sent to her son, but she also left part of it there preserved in silver chests. This part is commemorated by regular veneration to this very day.

This legend has been woven into later historical narratives as if it were fact, but it is a pious fiction, emanating from the imperially supported church in Jerusalem. (In his account of the life of Constantine, written in about 338, about the time of her death, the Bishop Eusebius, chronicler of the early church in Palestine, mentions Helena’s piety and her commissioning of churches, but says nothing about finding the Cross.) The purpose of the legend is to burnish Constantine’s reputation as a Christian emperor. Note the symbolism in what happened to the nails: incorporated into the Emperor’s helmet (other versions of the legend say diadem or crown) and his horse’s bridle. The sacred power of Christ is incorporated into Constantine’s imperial implements of war and governance, giving supernatural legitimacy to his military and civil authority.

The legend also enhances the reputation of Jerusalem as the home of sacred relics, and reflects the beginning of a tradition that persists to this day of the search for the physical remains of biblical history as a dimension of Christian spirituality. It establishes the idea of the Holy Land as one of the universal features of the Christian faith: a transcendental geography imposed on the mundane geography of southern Syria. In subsequent centuries, Jerusalem and surrounding sacred sites were the prized destinations of Christian pilgrims, and splinters of Helena’s True Cross and other relics were sold as sacred souvenirs for the pilgrims to take home with them. This account was an advertisement, intended to promote the pilgrimage industry, not a report.

Helena’s excavation techniques have been improved upon, but her archaeological assumptions have proven remarkably durable, persisting well into an age of scientific rationalism. She knew what she was looking for, and – with divine inspiration – she found it.

Before Helena’s visit, Christian pilgrimages to Palestine originating from outside the country were unknown. Visiting sacred sites was a local cult, preceding Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The Church’s earliest authorities considered it theologically unnecessary for Christians to tread the land that Jesus’s feet had trodden. Besides, the anti-Christian policy of the Roman authorities that governed Palestine discouraged Christian visitors. After Constantine’s institutionalization of Christianity in the Roman empire, pilgrimage was encouraged as a natural expression of piety. Monasteries and hostels were built to accommodate pilgrims. In the first centuries after Constantine, the numbers of pilgrims travelling to the Holy Land rose and fell in response to changing political conditions in the Mediterranean and the countries through which they were obliged to pass.

These early pilgrims were either very rich or very determined, as the journey was long, arduous and expensive. Pilgrimages would often take several years to complete. One of the earliest pilgrims to leave a written account was a nun named Egeria, probably from Spain, who visited Palestine in the years 381 to 384. Her narrative, of which only a fragment survives, shows her conducting her pilgrimage as a kind of liturgical ritual. Accompanied by monks, she and her party would offer prayers at every point of interest. She ascended Mount Sinai, where Moses received from God the stone tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments, as if she were performing the ceremony of the Stations of the Cross.

Throughout her narrative she describes little that was not related to the network of hundreds of minor and major Christian shrines that by the time of her visit had been established in the region. Where a sacred site had previously been pagan, a Christian legend would be created to absorb it into the new landscape of religious meaning. From her point of view the whole country was like an enormous church. It was a land whose holiness, combined with its unfamiliarity to a European, rendered it unreal: pilgrims depended on local guides and story tellers, who wove inspiring tales of miracles and marvels about the sites on the pilgrim circuit, more or less closely based on familiar stories in the Old and New Testaments, sometimes wholly original. The folkloric impulse to create religious marvels was irresistible: the rock inside the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, for example, bears a mark that is interpreted as both the footprint of Christ and the handprint of Muhammad.

A pilgrimage was not a fact-finding mission. The point was to be amazed. The pilgrim beheld a holy site to enhance the faith that had brought him there, not to remove doubt through the acquisition of data.

This corpus of religious folklore, which as a whole constituted the holiness of the Holy Land, grew prolifically in the centuries after Constantine, and became part of what it meant to be a Christian. In the case of Jerusalem, the Holy Land’s focal point, the physical city came to be totally overshadowed by an idealized version that bore little resemblance to the original; the sacred geography became stylized and symbolic, existing purely in a realm of spiritual meaning. In maps, Jerusalem was often depicted as a circle, with a round wall enclosing the sacred sites, as if it were one of the celestial spheres. Besides the tomb of Christ and the site of his crucifixion, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre came to include the tomb of Adam (directly underneath the Cross), and the centre of the world itself: the shrine became a model in miniature of the Christian cosmos.

To increase the pilgrim’s sense of awe, the interior of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was improved and augmented, with further spiritual power conveyed by ritual and art, and by the hallowed objects that had come into contact with the body of Christ in the course of his passion and crucifixion. A seventh-century account by a monk of the Scottish monastery on the island of Iona (basing his account on what a fellow monk told him) records that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre contained the cup that Jesus used at the last supper (made of silver, with two handles, and large enough to hold ‘a French quart’), the vinegar-soaked sponge that was thrust into Jesus’s mouth by a soldier, the spear that was used to stab him and the cloth that was placed over his body.

The power of the cult of the Holy Land was such that reverence for the Holy Sepulchre was not extinguished after the church and its contents were systematically destroyed in the year 1009. The demolition was carried out by soldiers based in Ramla acting on the order of the mad Fatimid Caliph Hakim bi Amr Allah, who was waging a particularly eccentric campaign of persecution of Christians and Jews in his dominions, which included Palestine. (At one point he required the Christians of Cairo to identify themselves in public by carrying large wooden crosses; Jews were compelled to carry wooden posts. He also banned the sale of mulukhiyya, a vegetable like spinach, fish without scales, wine, beer, grapes and honey, forbade women from going out of doors or even looking out of the window, and eventually came to believe himself to be God incarnate.) The destruction was thorough: according to an Arab historian, the Arab governor ‘did all he could to uproot the Sepulchre and to remove all trace of it, and to this effect he dug away most of it and broke it up’. The destruction of the shrine stopped the pilgrim trade temporarily, but once the church was rebuilt (1042–8) by the Byzantine Emperor Constantine Monomachus, with the destroyed Tomb of Christ replaced by a replica, the pilgrims returned in greater numbers than ever.

Al-Hakim’s destruction of the Holy Sepulchre spurred the launch of the First Crusade, a military campaign decreed by Pope Urban II at the Council of Clermont in 1095, to seize the Holy Land from Muslim rule. The Pope’s call ignited the popular imagination in Western Europe, and the subsequent capture of Jerusalem in 1099 inspired a new burst of growth in Christian geo-piety. The Dome of the Rock, the Islamic shrine built on the site of the Israelite Temple, was now seen as the Temple of Solomon itself, and the place where, in the Gospel narrative, Jesus was presented to the priests. The ‘Temple’ was absorbed into the ‘way of the cross’, the pilgrims’ tour of the sites associated with the life and death of Jesus. In the Jerusalem of the Crusaders, a new cult of the Temple came into being, established by the Knights Templar – the Poor Knights of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon to give them their full, formal name – a monastic military order who made their headquarters inside the Dome of the Rock. They developed a system of gnostic mysticism – secret religious knowledge – based on a sacred geometry of the octagon, after the octagonal shape of the Dome of the Rock, and on a concept of God as the architect of the world, as Solomon had been the architect of the Temple.

The Christianization of the Holy Land was accomplished through the discovery, or ‘invention’, of countless new sacred relics, most of which were carried back to Europe. Besides further fragments of the True Cross, Christians ‘found’ the nails of the True Cross (again), Jesus’s crown of thorns, the lance used to pierce Jesus’s side (which became the Crusaders’ battle standard), the bones of the Old Testament patriarchs (at Hebron) and the bones of numerous saints. The typical method for finding relics was for a monk to find an object and then ‘discover’ its sacred identity in a dream. The proliferation of fragments of the True Cross famously prompted the Protestant reformer John Calvin to scoff, at the close of the Middle Ages, that if all these fragments were collected, they would be ‘comparable in bulk to a battleship’ (an assertion that is carefully refuted in the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia, which argues that they would all add up to no more than about a third of a whole cross weighing 75 kilograms).

This corpus of legend was always changing and growing, surviving the Reformation and a powerful Protestant critique. The Crusader ‘way of the cross’ evolved, by the fourteenth century, into the tradition of the Via Dolorosa: the route through the streets of the Old City of Jerusalem that Christ took on his final procession to his public execution. The discovery of such sites as the spot where Jesus fell for the third time was ascribed to Empress Helena, although the configuration of the sites (conforming to the traditional narrative of the Stations of the Cross) changed over the centuries, and the locations the modern tourist sees were fixed only as recently as the nineteenth century.

Layer upon layer of popular myth, legend, tradition, pious fantasy and delusion and endlessly repeated second-hand scholarship have accumulated in the sacred geography of the Holy Land over the centuries, like artefacts in an archaeologist’s mound. The facts were lost in the obscurity. The biblical archaeology that began in the nineteenth century, of which Albert Glock was an inheritor, was a Protestant critique of the traditions and legends that had accreted in the course of centuries of pilgrimage by European Christians. The corpus of medieval tradition that began with Helena seemed primitive and pagan to the Protestant sensibility: nineteenth-century biblical archaeology was an attempt to impose the Reformation on how Christians saw the Holy Land. The first notable expedition in this reforming spirit was made by the American biblical scholar Edward Robinson and his colleague Dr Eli Smith, an Arabic-speaking missionary, in two journeys to Palestine, the first and most substantial in 1838, the second in 1852. Robinson is important because he introduced Protestant rationalism, and Protestant piety, into the Western encounter with Palestine. ‘We early adopted two general principles, by which to govern ourselves in our examination of the Holy Land,’ he wrote. ‘The first was, to avoid as far as possible all contact with the convents and the authority of the monks; to examine everywhere for ourselves with the Scriptures in our hands; and to apply for information solely to the native Arab population. The second was, to leave as much as possible the beaten track.’

Emphatic typography expresses the principle Robinson followed in his three-month journey through the biblical landscape: ‘all ecclesiastical tradition respecting the ancient places in and around Jerusalem and throughout Palestine, IS OF NO VALUE, except so far as it is supported by circumstances known to us from the Scriptures, or from other contemporary testimony’. This was a radically new approach. For the first time, a respected scholar was able to say and to demonstrate that a good many of these traditions didn’t make sense historically or rationally. Most conspicuously, the complex of shrines inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City of Jerusalem, which it was claimed, contains both the site of the Crucifixion and the tomb of Christ, not to mention the stone on which the body of Christ was anointed for burial and related sacred attractions, is manifestly unrealistic and convincing only when seen through the most powerfully filtered lenses of faith. ‘I am led irresistibly to the conclusion’, he wrote, ‘that the Golgotha and the tomb now shown in the church of the Holy Sepulchre, are not upon the real places of the crucifixion and resurrection of our Lord. The alleged discovery of them by the aged and credulous Helena, like her discovery of the cross, may not improbably have been the work of pious fraud.’

This conclusion was the most publicly sensational of Robinson’s observations, and it was hotly debated for decades afterwards, with the arguments for and against the historicity of the site falling along sectarian lines: the Catholics (who had maintained a stake in the Holy Sepulchre since the Crusades, and therefore had a vested interest) arguing for it, and the Protestants arguing against. (The best current archaeological thinking favours the traditional location of the Holy Sepulchre as the most probable place of the crucifixion.) The whole superstitious business of the Holy Sepulchre, epitomized by the annual spectacle of fairground spirituality in the ceremony of the Holy Fire at Easter, when crowds thronged the church to witness the miracle of a lamp over the tomb of Christ being lit by divine agency, ‘was to a Protestant painful and revolting’.

Robinson’s work was, strictly speaking, biblical geography, rather than biblical archaeology, since he only conducted a surface survey, and carried out no excavations. Less sensationally than his attack on the tradition of the Holy Sepulchre, his accomplishment lay in the meticulous record he made of his survey, linking biblical place names with their contemporary Arabic equivalents, without reference to legend. He favoured local Palestinian folklore, seeing in it a more reliable, continuous tradition, and by this method he correctly identified the site of Megiddo, for instance, an identification which formed the starting point for the later archaeological study of that site.

Robinson was motivated by a strong Protestant attachment to the text of the Bible, which he took as literally true. In this he was violating an elementary principle of geography, of course, articulated in antiquity by the second-century geographer and astronomer Ptolemy: that the landscape is more important than the map. Instead, he saw the map (the Bible) as more important than the landscape. But the degree of Robinson’s intellectual rigour is impressive, for his time, and there is no obvious instance in the three volumes of his principal work that suggests he distorted anything he saw to meet what he expected, out of reverence for the Bible. The only distortion was that he wasn’t interested in anything in the land and history of Palestine that wasn’t to do with the Bible.

Robinson explains that his journey to the Holy Land was the fulfilment of a lifelong ambition, one that had emerged from his experience of growing up in New England. For the child growing up in the Puritan culture of New England in the early nineteenth century, ‘the names of Sinai, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, the Promised Land, became associated with his earliest recollections and holiest feelings’, he wrote. For Americans from a variety of backgrounds – for Edward Robinson, for Albert Glock and for millions of others – the sacred geography of the Holy Land (itself abstracted from the geography of Palestine) was superimposed on the geography of North America. The notion of America as the new Israel, a God-fearing, perfect society set apart from the rest of mankind, ‘a city on a hill’, was imported with the first English settlers in the seventeenth century, and remains an essential part of America’s idea of itself.

This sentiment gave rise in Edward Robinson to a ‘scientific’ curiosity, to explore the country whose place names were already so familiar to him. In exploring Palestine he was, in a sense, exploring New England: he was fathoming his own experience, his own identity. ‘In no country of the world, perhaps, is such a feeling more widely diffused than in New England.’

But this feeling was widely diffused in a number of places besides New England. Turn, for example, to the earliest report of the Palestine Exploration Fund. This was established in London in 1865 with a purpose similar to Robinson’s: to study, according to its original prospectus, the ‘archaeology, manners and customs, topography, geology, natural sciences (botany, zoology, meteorology)’ of the Holy Land, on the grounds that ‘No country should be of so much interest to us as that in which the documents of our Faith were written, and the momentous events they describe enacted.’ Founded by the great and the good of Victorian Britain, with Her Majesty the Queen herself as its patron, the PEF was launched amidst great popular enthusiasm, combining the adventure of discovery with the high goals of scholarship, Christian piety, and the emotional appeal of national purpose and pride. Its aim was to send expeditions to Palestine that would be funded by public contributions. In its first general meeting, the Archbishop of York, who chaired the gathering, expressed the project’s fundamental motivation.

This country of Palestine belongs to you and to me, it is essentially ours. It was given to the Father of Israel in the words: ‘Walk through the land in the length of it, and in the breadth of it, for I will give it unto thee.’ We mean to walk through Palestine in the length and in the breadth of it, because that land has been given unto us … It is the land to which we may look with as true a patriotism as we do this dear old England, which we love so much. (Cheers.)

So Palestine belongs to the Englishman, as well as to the American. It also belongs, one discovers, to the French, the Russians, the Germans, the Armenians, the Ethiopians, the Jews and the Muslims, and a few other groups as well. Each of these nations has a claim to the Holy Land that is exclusive and incommensurate with the others, because it is based on either a claim to territory or property that overlaps someone else’s, or on an idea, which can’t be argued about because it is entirely subjective and non-rational and cultural. Since the beginning of the Christian era, Palestine has been the focus of this multitude of claims to produce an effect of what one might call negative cosmopolitanism. The usual sense of cosmopolitanism denotes an outlook in which a person from one location identifies with a wide variety of places. Negative cosmopolitanism means the opposite: the identification of people from a wide variety of locations with one place.

The Protestant attachment to the Holy Land was separate from the tradition of Helena but it too was subject to imaginative conceptions of the holiness of the Holy Land, and nowhere more than in Victorian England at the time of the founding of the Palestine Exploration Fund. In its first years, the subject that dominated the pages of the Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement was the location of the sites of the crucifixion and the tomb of Christ, which the earlier Catholic tradition established inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Reason required the rejection of the Holy Sepulchre as the historical location of these sites, but faith required an alternative, and one was soon found. The modern tourist can now visit a walled garden outside the old city, near the Palestinian bus station and the Damascus Gate, known as the Garden Tomb. It contains a pair of stone grottoes that probably were used as tombs at some point in history, but Protestant tradition has settled on one of the grottoes as the likely tomb of Christ, and it has come to be invested with holiness. Its tranquil setting and physical simplicity compared to the hectic Holy Sepulchre reflects the more individualistic and unadorned character of Protestant spirituality. The site had other advantages for nineteenth-century Protestant sensibility as the true site for the tomb of Christ. The rocky mound out of which the tomb was cut bore a physical resemblance to the dome of a human skull, which conforms to the meaning of the biblical word ‘golgotha’ used to describe the place of the entombment: the place of the skull. Like Helena, the Victorian Protestants were seeing what they wanted to see, finding what they wanted to find.

The Orthodox tradition saw no need to identify the ‘true’ sites of the events of the life of Christ. To Russian Orthodox pilgrims, whose liturgy retained the mysticism of an older form of Christianity, the Holy Sepulchre complex was not supposed to be historically realistic. This was a place where the cosmic realm penetrated into the earthly realm. Normal physical reality was pushed aside here by metaphysical reality, and time was replaced by the eternal. The tomb of Christ was a three-dimensional icon, a miraculous object possessing real supernatural power, not just representing it. If it looked like a normal tomb, or was held to be one, it could not be the tomb of the son of God and it would not put the beholder in touch with the divine. In entering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre the pilgrim was entering a zone of divine reality, not a real place but something higher. Like the earliest Catholic pilgrims, he sought to be amazed, not reassured.

The Protestant Golgotha inspired the visionary imagination of one especially eminent Victorian: the British military hero General Charles Gordon, the martyr of Khartoum. Before he embarked on his doomed expedition to confront the rebel forces of the Mahdi in the Sudan, and after his victorious campaign crushing the Taiping rebellion in China in 1864, Gordon spent a year in Jerusalem as a solitary mystic, studying the Bible and the topography of Jerusalem. His research led him to the conclusion that the sacred sites were set out on the landscape of Jerusalem in the form of a vast human skeleton. The skull-shaped hill, with two caves resembling eye-sockets, was its skull, Solomon’s Quarries were its chest, the lower back lay on the Temple Mount, with the Dome of the Rock at its pelvis, the knees at the Dung Gate and the feet some distance outside the Old City. Gordon propounded this theory in the Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement in 1885. Why a skeleton? Because it would represent sculpturally an enormous human sacrifice on the Temple Mount.

Gordon’s idea is of interest mainly for its eccentricity, but it is a good example of the tendency towards biblical mysticism that thrived among members of the ruling class of Victorian England, and motivated the work of the Palestine Exploration Fund, despite the ‘scientific’ nature of its expeditions. A more widespread notion, similar to one held by contemporary American fundamentalist Christians, was the desirability – as the fulfilment of biblical prophecy – of the ‘restoration’ of the Jews to Palestine from their world-wide diaspora, a development which would be followed by their conversion to the true (Anglican) Christian faith and the return of the Messiah as the leader of a thousand-year era on earth of peace and justice, before the end of the world. This belief (called chiliasm) led to the establishment of missionary societies dedicated to the conversion of Jews in England and even in Palestine itself. Although the success rate of organizations like the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews (established 1808) was dismal, making only about six or seven converts a year even after thirty years, its members remained optimistically active throughout the nineteenth century.

The best-known proponent of this movement was the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, better known now for his campaigns for benevolent social legislation, such as the Ten Hours Bill, limiting the working hours of factory workers. The same evangelical Christianity that inspired his social campaigning at home led him to work equally hard for the conversion of the Jews, and he became president of the ‘Jews’ Society’ in 1848. Although he saw little evidence that mass conversion had begun, as he hoped, Shaftesbury had considerable success in influencing British foreign policy in line with his ideas. He persuaded the Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, to establish a British consulate in Jerusalem in 1838, charged with the protection of local Jewish interests, and granting Palestinian Jews British citizenship. A few years later, his lobbying bore fruit in the creation of an Anglican bishopric in Jerusalem, with a converted Jew as its first incumbent.

Eventually, in 1875, Shaftesbury became President of the Palestine Exploration Fund. In his first address to the PEF as its President he called with undiminished enthusiasm for ‘the return [to Palestine] of its ancient possessors’. His mystical belief in Britain’s instrumental role in returning the Jews to Palestine – for the sake of Christianity, rather than Judaism – was the ideological force behind Britain’s increasing political involvement in Palestine throughout the nineteenth century, an involvement which could be seen later in British support for Zionism, as expressed in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, and in Britain itself assuming the government of Palestine in 1921, and holding it for nearly thirty years in the form of the British Mandate. To understand politics it is sometimes necessary to understand the power of irrational ideas.

In its first years, the pages of the Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement were dominated by reports from the field despatched by the leaders of the expeditions sponsored by the Fund. These were eventually published as books which have become the classics of early biblical archaeology. Notable among these is the expedition of Charles Warren, a captain in the Royal Engineers, who used military mining techniques to excavate the tunnels and subterranean chambers under and around the Temple Mount in 1867. His account was published in 1876 as Underground Jerusalem. This was one of the first expeditions sponsored by the PEF, and it nearly bankrupted the Fund, obliging the tireless Warren to postpone excavation work for weeks at a time due to lack of money to pay labourers.

The object of Warren’s exploration was the Temple of Solomon, and in his search for it he exemplifies the mystical tendency of Victorian Englishmen towards anything to do with the Holy Land. His search for the original Temple of the biblical Israelites set in motion a popular obsession which persists to this day. Warren was motivated in his curiosity by his experience as a Freemason, a membership which was common among English military officers. Freemasons consider themselves members of an unbroken tradition of occult knowledge that begins with the builders of the first Temple and its founder, Solomon, whom biblical legend has given the character of an archetypal complete being, supreme in both power and wisdom. The rituals of Freemasonry, in which the individual ascends a hierarchy of esoteric lore through progressive initiation, are based on metaphors of the construction and architecture of the Temple. To Freemasons, Solomon’s Temple is a radiantly meaningful symbol, rich with associations of power and practical knowledge, deepened to a condition of mystical enlightenment, held in the collective hands of a closed fraternal institution. Adding to the sum of knowledge of the Temple would have been of enormous importance to Freemasonry, and Masonic lodges donated regularly and generously to the Palestine Exploration Fund in the years when Warren’s reports were being published.

Warren therefore had a definite object in mind when he began his work. The image of the Temple in his mind formed the template into which all of his discoveries fitted, and almost immediately his expectations were rewarded with results that confirmed them. He dug shafts along an exposed side of the Temple Mount, and then tunnelled under it. Illuminating his way with strips of burning magnesium, he discovered pottery fragments inscribed with the word ‘the king’ and markings in Phoenician characters on stones near the base of the structure, which he took to have been made by the Temple’s original builders. He pronounced the area he was exploring to be the corner of the palace Solomon built for himself adjoining the Temple, in fact a highly dubious attribution. If a Temple built by Solomon ever existed, no trace of it has been found.

In the course of his exploration of the hidden part of the western wall of the Temple Mount, he found a long vault to which he gave the name ‘the Secret Passage’, believing it to be part of a secret tunnel used by King David (Solomon’s father, according to the Bible) to walk from his palace to his place of prayer on the Temple Mount, an idea originating in a fifteenth-century description of Jerusalem that Warren had read: this is an attribution based entirely on pious folklore. No such tunnel could have existed. ‘This passage would have been revealed whenever anyone living on the street above installed a cistern beneath his house,’ the Israeli archaeologist Dan Bahat wrote in 1991.

Further on, Warren found a large hall which was built at the time of the second Temple, commissioned by Herod nearly a thousand years after Solomon is thought to have lived. Warren named it ‘the Masons’ Hall’, and the site, still referred to by the same name, can be visited today as part of the controversial Western Wall complex. Its connection with the masons of Solomon’s Temple lay entirely in Warren’s imagination, but within a few months of its discovery it had been adopted by Freemasons as their own, and a group of American Masons held an initiation ceremony in it.

Freemasonry came to identify even more closely with a cave that can be seen today near the Damascus Gate, which has come to be known as Solomon’s Quarries. Masonic initiation ceremonies are now carried out inside it annually, and during the British Mandate stones were quarried from the rock inside and used as the cornerstones of Masonic lodges around the world. According to Masonic legend, the ritual implements used by the priests of the Temple were hidden in it at the time of the Roman siege of the city.

Later on, Warren uncovered stones in which a long, straight groove had been cut. He took this to be a drain along which blood flowed from the sacrifices in the Temple. His source for this was again a colourful legend that he found in his reading: in this case taken from the traditional Jewish text the Mishnah.

The mythic power of Warren’s work, and the lively prose in which he described it, attracted enthusiastic public interest. Soon after the excavation began, The Times expressed its fascination with Warren’s project of ‘the discovery of the true foundations of the Temple of the Holy City, of the ancient aqueducts, subterranean passages, and grandiose engineering projects of the Scriptural Monarchs’. Warren’s exploration of the irregular system of spaces, passages, water courses and cisterns under the Temple Mount – in the course of which, at one stage, he floated through a channel of sewage on an improvised raft made of wooden doors – contributed to the popular folklore of the Temple Mount as a maze of occult secrets, where a source of supernatural power lay hidden in inaccessible tunnels. The idea, of course, originates in Jewish tradition: the Temple was the earthly seat of God. Jerusalem was the centre of the world; at the centre of Jerusalem was the Temple; at the centre of the Temple was the Ark of the Covenant; at the centre of the Ark of the Covenant, seated invisibly on a throne within it, was God. Warren’s syntax falters with excitement when he contemplates the possibility of penetrating another circle of this great mystery when his exploration took him, as he thought, close to the divine point at the centre of these concentric circles of power, the Ark:

As we pursued our course along the wall to the north, and were opposite the end of the Birket Israil, we came upon a slit about eighteen inches wide and four inches high, formed by cutting away the upper and lower portions of two courses. Here was an exciting discovery: what might not be in this chamber in the wall? the ark and utensils secreted at the destruction of the Temple might here be hidden away.

The Pyramids of Egypt hold a similar place in the popular imagination, with their systems of tunnels and supernatural secrets, but the Temple is in our own religious tradition; the Pyramids are merely pagan.

Although Warren was certainly advancing the archaeological knowledge of the structure of the Temple Mount, he was also adding to the corpus of folklore surrounding it, particularly the fascination with secret tunnels. The narrative of his book, Underground Jerusalem, as its title hints, is driven by the mythic power of his search for the secrets of the Temple Mount through tunnels. His exploration of underground Jerusalem is a search for esoteric knowledge, a gnostic adventure, and one that fully assorts with Masonic tradition.

Among one’s own people, a tunnel is a marvel. Held by an enemy, a tunnel inspires fear and suspicion: it is a sinister thing, and evidence of a conspiracy. In September 1996, about seventy Palestinians were killed by Israeli soldiers in a riot that broke out in the Old City of Jerusalem after the Israeli authorities opened an exit to a connected series of chambers and passages of various ages that followed the length of the Western Wall. (It was the same area explored by Charles Warren.) The exit, cut out of a wall, opened out onto the street beside the Temple Mount. It enables tourists to walk the length of the passage without having to double back to the entrance in the Western Wall plaza. The Palestinians of the Old City and throughout the Occupied Territories, and the Muslim clerics of the mosque complex atop the Temple Mount, were outraged because they believed the Israelis were ‘digging a tunnel’ under the Temple Mount and the shrine of the Dome of the Rock which surmounts it.

There is a charming legend in the Islamic tradition of the holiness of the Holy Land, about a magical secret passage. According to a hadith, a saying of the Prophet Muhammad, the prophet declared that there would be a man, a Muslim, who would enter Paradise on foot while still alive and return to tell the tale. This prophecy came true after the Prophet’s death in the following way. During the caliphate of Omar, who captured Jerusalem and introduced Islam into the Holy Land in the seventh century of the common era, a man named Shuraik ibn Hubashah came to Jerusalem with his tribe, the Banu Tamim. He went to the Temple Mount to fetch water from a well there. He lowered his bucket into the well, and the bucket fell in. So he climbed down into the well to retrieve it. At the bottom of the well he found a door. He opened it, and found himself in the garden of Paradise, exactly as described in the Qur’an. He walked around, amazed at what he saw. The thought occurred to him that no one would believe him if he could not prove he had been there, so he plucked a leaf from a tree, put it behind his ear, and climbed up out of the well, with the bucket. The man showed the leaf to the Governor of Jerusalem, who despatched a letter to Omar, the Commander of the Faithful, in Mecca, seeking advice on the marvel. Omar wrote back with the judgement that if the leaf really did come from Paradise it would not wither or dry up.

The leaf stayed green. It was like the leaf of a peach tree, the size of the palm of a hand, and pointed at the top. Shuraik placed the leaf between the pages of his Qur’an, and when he died the Qur’an, with the leaf in it, was buried with him.

The legend refers to a cistern under the Aqsa Mosque that now bears the name Bir al-Waraqah, the Well of the Leaf. Other Islamic legends refer to miraculous channels of water running under the Temple Mount. According to one legend, the waters of the well Zamzam inside the sacred enclosure at Mecca flow into the spring of Siloam, in Jerusalem on the night of ‘Arafat, an Islamic holiday commemorating God’s transmission of the text of the Qur’an to the Prophet. A further legend tells that the four rivers of Paradise – Sihon, Gihon, the Euphrates and the Nile – originate from the base of the Rock on the Temple Mount. ‘The Prophet said, “All the rivers and clouds and the winds come from under the Rock of Jerusalem … The sweet waters and rain-bearing winds issue from the base of the Rock of Jerusalem.’”

These legends elaborate the fact that the Temple Mount contains a system for supplying water to the Temple for ritual purposes. They claim the tunnels for Islam in the same way that Warren’s tradition gnosticized them. They are separate, dreamlike traditions about the same thing: a response to the marvellous quality of this massive structure.

Jerusalem was built by the Canaanites because it had three physical advantages: it was on a hill, which made it easy to defend; it was close to an established road to the Mediterranean coast; and it had a secure water supply, the Gihon spring, which supplied the original Bronze Age city. (The site of this original city lies outside the familiar Ottoman walls of the Old City of Jerusalem.) The water supply allowed the city’s survival. When the first Temple was built, water was channelled to it from Gihon for the purpose of ritual cleansing. The marvel of water had been turned into something sacred. Once captured by the Israelites, Jerusalem became their political and religious capital. Political and sacred power came to rest in the same place. The whole vast corpus of the contending traditions of the holiness of the Holy Land grows from this.

The original attraction of a securely defended city with a safe water supply developed over the millennia into a tradition that generates traditions, which then become layered over others, occluding their original mythic impetus, clashing with each other, producing a spiritual swarm, swirling chaotically over the ancient city. And so now, for this reason, the Ethiopians – to cite just one example – are among those who believe that the sacredness of Jerusalem is theirs. They have their own way of expressing their claim: they believe that the spiritual leadership of Israel under Solomon has passed to them. In the ancient Ethiopian text the Kebra Negast, Makeda, the Queen of Sheba, travels to Jerusalem to hear the famed wisdom of Solomon from the king’s own lips. After entertaining her sumptuously, Solomon consummates his desire to have a son by her. That night, Solomon had a dream in which the sun, which by divine command had shone over Israel, ‘suddenly withdrew itself, and it flew away to the country of Ethiopia, and it shone there with exceeding great brightness for ever, for it willed to dwell there’. Later tradition holds that it is in Ethiopia that the Ark of the Covenant, the seat of God, came to rest; such is the power of the sacredness of Jerusalem, and the holiness of the Holy Land.

In the same fashion, the Islamic tradition builds on this original strategic attraction of Jerusalem, creating a new idea of holiness. The Dome of the Rock, the city’s most recognizable landmark, an ornate octagonal shrine topped with a golden dome that dominates the skyline of the Old City, symbolizes the Islamic claim that the Qur’an and the religion it enjoins both absorbs and supersedes its two monotheistic predecessors, Judaism and Christianity. The Dome of the Rock is the Temple of Solomon rebuilt. For a few years during the prophetic career of Muhammad, the earliest Muslims prayed towards Jerusalem, and the Rock over which the Dome of the Rock is built – an exposed natural outcrop upon which Abraham bound his son Isaac, and from which Muhammad is held to have risen to heaven – was circumambulated in the way that the Ka’ba, the central shrine at Mecca, is now. The Islamic holiness of the Holy Land (which has been taken up and developed in recent years by the Palestinian Islamist movement as part of its political ideology, arguing that the whole of Palestine is an Islamic trust, occupation of which by modern Israel is a violation of religious law) is expressed in a traditional Arabic literature in praise of Jerusalem.

Texts like ‘The book of arousing souls to visit Jerusalem’s holy walls’ of Ibn al-Firkah, written some time in the late sixth or early seventh century, tell the main Islamic legend of Jerusalem, of how Muhammad was carried supernaturally from Mecca to the Rock on the Temple Mount, where he joined the other prophets of God and led them in prayer before ascending to heaven on a fantastic winged horse, accompanied by the angel Gabriel. Ibn al-Firkah also relates that God created Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem a thousand years before the rest of the world, and that when the waters of the Flood subsided, the first earthly thing to appear was the Rock. The sweet waters of the earth originate from it, and hell-fire is heated here. ‘Who gives alms to the amount of a loaf of bread in Jerusalem, it is as if he gave alms to the weight of earthly mountains, all of them gold. Who gives alms to the value of a dirham, it will be his redemption from the Fire. Who fasts a day in Jerusalem, it will mean his immunity from the Fire.’ This work’s translator notes that ‘Moslem reaction to the Crusades was a potent factor in the development of the Islamic literature on the “merits” of Jerusalem and Palestine.’

Charles Warren evoked a sense of kaleidoscopic dismay in a description of the discord of daily life in the holy city, where these multiple conflicting religious visions overlap, cancel and drown each other out, to produce something ultimately absurd and meaningless.

An Anglican bishop guards the interests of the German church, a Jew, converted by a miracle, adorns with images the walls of the Latin church, whose altar is placed below the arch where Pontius Pilate exclaimed Ecce Homo. The Queen of Sheba’s representatives have sold their birthright in Jerusalem for a daily dole of pottage. The Syrian bishop, feted in India, with a man-of-war at his disposal, here lives in a cellar. The Arab Protestant takes off his shoes in one English church and his turban in another.

The priest of one communion cannot marry; in another, priest’s orders are not given until a son is born to him. German plans of the city show no English buildings thereon; they are all evangelical; but the German buildings are shown as German. The French consul acts for the Italian convents; an Italian consul acts for the Spaniards; a Spanish consul acts for the Mexicans, of whom there are none; the German consul is chairman of the English library. Russian Jews, after six months’ residence in Jerusalem, become British subjects …

This is negative cosmopolitanism in its everyday appearance in the nineteenth century. The passage produces an effect rather like motion sickness, where a multitude of images rushes by too fast for the eye to settle.

About the same time that the Earl of Shaftesbury was exulting in the establishment of an Anglican bishopric in Jerusalem, seeing it as the beginning of the fulfilment of biblical prophecy, a Russian foreign ministry report noted, ‘Jerusalem is the centre of the world and our mission must be there.’ Contemporary with Shaftesbury’s scheme of the holiness of the Holy Land, based on an Anglican New Jerusalem absorbing Jerusalem of old, was an equally potent Russian idea of the holiness of the Holy Land: a belief in a divine role for Russia in Palestine. Proclaiming itself the successor to Byzantium as the world’s Christian empire, imperial Russia encouraged its subjects, mostly poor peasants, to undertake gruelling pilgrimages to Jerusalem and the sites around it. A Russian hospice and cathedral were built for the purpose. It was not difficult for anyone visiting Jerusalem at the time to see that there was a political aim behind this policy: the Russian spiritual claim to Palestine, expressed through its role as the traditional protector of the interests of the Orthodox Church, could without much adjustment be translated into an assertion of political rights. Under Czar Nicholas I, Russia demanded the Ottoman Empire accept a Russian protectorate over all its Orthodox subjects. Within a few years, the Crimean War began.

The Crimean War was a war of negative cosmopolitanism. Its nominal cause was a feud between the Catholic and Orthodox caretakers of the shrine of the Nativity in Bethlehem, priests and monks who in the past had fought each other with broomsticks over the right to adorn and maintain parts of the shrines associated with the life of Christ, mainly in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Church of the Nativity. In 1847, an ornate silver star marking the traditional site of the birth of Christ was stolen. The Catholics blamed the Greeks. The conflict escalated. With its own mystical claim to the Holy Land, expressed in a claim to protection of Catholic interests in Palestine, France took the side of the Catholics. France and Russia needed a war for extraneous political reasons, and so war was joined over the Orthodox-Catholic conflict over control of the holy sites, with France, Britain and the Ottoman Empire on one side and Russia on the other. Russian public opinion viewed the war as a religious crusade.

The religious claims of the imperial states were the means of establishing political footholds in a geopolitically strategic corner of the crumbling Ottoman Empire. Britain had established a consulate in Jerusalem in 1838, as a result of the lobbying of the Earl of Shaftesbury, but with practical political interests underlying Shaftesbury’s millenarian aspirations, and other powers did the same. Where the faith went, the flag followed.

In the years after the Crimean War, Prussia too joined the competition for a political stake in Palestine, again expressing its involvement in distinctive religious terms. Like Britain, a Protestant country with no indigenous co-religionists in Palestine, Prussia established a religious claim to the land by identifying itself with the medieval Crusaders, by searching for the tomb of the German Crusader King Frederick Barbarossa and other Crusader remains, and by encouraging religious colonies modelled on the Knights Templar. In 1898, the Prussian Emperor, Frederick II, consolidated diplomatic relations with the Ottoman state with a ceremonial visit to the Holy Land. An opening was cut in the wall of the Old City of Jerusalem, built nearly 500 years earlier by Sultan Suleiman, so that the imperial party could enter in full pomp, with the Kaiser on horseback. The intended symbolism was that Frederick would enter the holy city like his earlier Crusader namesake. The day was also the anniversary of Luther’s protest against the papacy, and once inside the city, the Kaiser inaugurated a church built on the site of an old Crusader hospice.

Twenty years earlier, a Prussian archaeological institution in Palestine had been established. This was the Palästina Verein, founded in 1878. This organization sent vast amounts of antiquities back to the national museum in Berlin, and established formidable archaeological operations, which caused Britain in particular grave diplomatic and scholarly anxiety. Their main project was the excavation of the biblical site of Taanach, an expedition conducted in 1902–1904 by the Austrian biblical scholar Ernst Sellin. Sixty years later, in a re-excavation of the site sponsored by the Lutheran Church, this was the place where a young and idealistic Albert Glock was to cut his teeth as an archaeologist.

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