Digging for Drama

...whether the relationship went beyond the platonic remains a mystery...

...By ignoring the forces that created Zionism—the movement for the return of the Jewish people to their ancient land—he gives the reader no way to understand why archeology became a national pastime for many Israelis, let alone why the Israelis so stubbornly resist Palestinian demands in the political sphere...

...Despite the devotion to the Palestinian cause that brought him to Birzeit, many of his colleagues and students there distrusted him...

...As for Glock, he was dedicated to creating a "Palestinian school" of archeology that would limit itself to illuminating everyday Arab life in Ottoman Palestine...

...Raised in the unbending fundamentalist Christianity of Missouri Synod Lutheranism and ordained as a minister, he eventually broke completely with the religion of his youth, replacing it with what Fox calls "a heretical personal theology from which faith and hope had been strictly eliminated, and all that remained was an austere, angry and self-sacrificing Christian love...

...Now Birzeit University is located within the autonomous area run by Yasir Arafat's Palestinian Authority, but on January 19,1992, it was still under direct Israeli military control...

...But not even the most fervent Israeli hawk denies the Arab habitation of Ottoman Palestine, so Glock's findings could have no political significance whatsoever...

...One can only wonder, too, where Fox got the idea that "the Biblical story of Joshua's conquest was very popular in Israel" after that country's successful 1948 War of Independence...

...Why does this particular crime receive book-length treatment...

...That was the day Albert Glock, a 67year-old American-born professor and director of the Institute of Archeology at the university, was shot to death not far from the campus...

...In Juneof that year, as a coalition of Arab states was set to launch a war against Israel and wipe it off the map, the Jewish state carried out a pre-emptive strike and, in what would be known as the Six-Day War, took the entire West Bank (as well as Egyptian ruled Gaza and the Syrian Golan Heights...

...Glock was shot just outside her home...

...Albert Glock was merely one of hundreds of people killed during the original Palestinian intifada against Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, a wave of violence that began in late 1987 and petered out before the Oslo Accords of 1993...

...But there was at least one Palestinian Glock liked...

...Associate Director of Research, American Jewish Committee Palestinian Birzeit University is on the West Bank of the Jordan River, an area controlled by the Hashemite Kingdom from 194 8 until 1967...

...The journals show that he was obsessed with her...

...He ascribes Great Britain's issuance of the Balfour Declaration in 1917, favoring the creation of a "Jewish national home" in Palestine, to "the powerof irrational ideas"—i.e...

...What Fox terms "a dark current of emotional turmoil and depression" manifested itself in an infatuation with a young woman, one of his students, whom he planned to train to replace him when he retired from Birzeit...

...Although Fox tries hard to inflate the significance of Glock's contributions to the field of archeology, they are not any more exciting than his personality...

...Fox further reports a visit to the Holy Land in 1898 by Frederick II (who died in 1786) the "emperor of Prussia" (which was a kingdom, not an empire, and in any case ceased to exist with the unification of Germany that culminated in 1871...

...Student protesters at Birzeit, the faculty union and the local Arabic press charged that dock's negative evaluation of this younger colleague amounted to treason against the Palestinian cause...

...In truth, most archeologists today, while certainly not Biblical fundamentalists or Zionist ideologues, recognize that ancient written sources can supplement the findings of archeology, and do try to fit the pieces that they find into a coherent whole...

...So far as can be determined from Fox' account, Glock was neither likable nor particularly interesting...

...The other simply describes what is found, avoids fitting the findings into any conceptual framework, and rejects the validity of nonarcheological sources...

...Fox even comes up with the transcript of an Israeli interrogation of a Hamas operative who said "the American doctor," presumably Glock, was a target of the terrorist outfit...

...Fox, eager to spice up the story, finds this daringly political, and cites people who think Israel had Glock assassinated because he "was literally digging up facts potentially embarrassing to the Israelis...

...Fox deserves much credit for tracking down and interviewing Israelis and Palestinians—law enforcement officers, academics, archeologists, Glock's acquaintances, Arab militants—who may have known something about the case and were willing to talk...

...Indeed, how Fox' admiration for the Palestinian cause survived his discovery of the numerous pathologies plaguing Palestinian society may be the more interesting mystery of Sacred Geography...

...The reader will surely sympathize with both...

...Fox pads the book with two chapters—36 pages—on the history of archeology in the Holy Land...

...areligious belief in the return of the Jews to their homeland—rather than to the hardheaded political calculations of a nation engaged in a world war and eager to bring world Jewry over to its side...

...On the contrary, it was Arab forces from outside the country that were bent on conquest of the fledgling Jewish state, and the historical model the Jews conjured up for themselves was that of Chanukah, when a relatively few beleaguered Jews regained independence in their land by fighting off the armies of the mighty Seleucid Empire in 165 BCE...

...He seems to have had no real friends, and his own children considered him distant and cold...

...The woman, now married and living in the United States, refused to talk to the author...

...To the end of his life, however, his salary was paid by American Lutherans, who listed him as one of their missionaries...

...Fox, whose acknowledged pro-Palestinian sympathies mirror those of Glock, clearly admires his subject but has difficulty evoking much sympathy for him...

...Witnesses described the assassin—who escaped and has never been identified—as a young man m a dark jacket, jeans, sneakers, and a kaffiyeh...

...With breathtaking oversimplification he claims that there are two schools of archeological methodology: One uses archeology to "prove" ideologies—such as the literal truth of the Bible, or the antiquity of Jewish roots in the land...

...Glock was "gruff and undiplomatic" in his personal contacts...

...But the tedious welter of charges and countercharges—Israelis blaming Palestinians and vice versa—obfuscates rather than clarifies...

...Moreover, not only were all of his excavations approved beforehand by Israeli authorities, but few Palestinians showed any interest in his discoveries...

...She had two objectives in mind: to enable herself to achieve "a sense of emotional closure," and to stimulate "public interest in the unsolved crime at the heart of the story...

...Reviewed by Lawrence Grossman Co-editor, "American Jewish Year Book...

...We find out only at the very end of the volume, in the author's Acknowledgments...

...Glock's widow gave Fox "unrestricted access" to all relevant documents in her possession...

...Fox' chapters on the archeology of the Holy Land also betray a surprisingly shallow grasp of the area's history...

...In Sacred Geography British journalist Edward Fox investigates the case through extensive interviews and the use of Glock's papers and journals...

...Perhaps they sensed what Fox proves from Glock's private journals, that he tended to dislike Palestinians as people (he considered his students "irresponsible, intellectually inadequate, lazy, untruthful") even as he championed their historical grievances...

...He earned a doctorate in 1968 at the University of Michigan, completing his dissertation under the direction of the eminent Professor George Mendenhall, and then worked as an archeologist and educator on the West Bank...

...The only drama of the book lies in the unsolved murder...

...Though Fox maintains an agnostic stance throughout, his own evidence points to the guilt of Hamas, the extremist terror organization...

...Right before Glock's murder, he was fighting to deny tenure to a Palestinian archeologist who had been his student...