Digging Up Conflict

A true murder mystery. Controlling the past is owning the future.

2) Assassination in a land as old as murder itself

In investigating the forces that set the #murder victim in the crosshairs of an unknown assailant, Fox uncovers the key role the study of #ancient #civilization has played in #Palestine’s tumultuous #history.

The tableau:

In a land as old as murder itself, American #archaeologist Dr. Albert Glock lay assassinated on the #WestBank doorstep of his favorite #Palestinian assistant.

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2001/jun/02/highereducation.uk

#Israeli authorities stationed nearby took three hours to arrive at the scene, and ten years later, have yet to solve the real-life #crime.

Jerald Teeson

Digging Up Conflict

1) The Arab-Israeli conflict is the riddle of our age

(Salim Tamari, a professor of sociology at Birzeit University, writes:

7475type76i77contents78type79text80contents81The replacement of the main British title of the book

Jerald Teeson

Digging Up Conflict

3) 'Spy thriller with touch of Indiana Jones'

In a smart and gripping manner, the author begins an admirable job of digging up the psycho-political terrain, and the dirt on the professor from P.L.O.-funded Birzeit University in the West Bank.

Admittedly not a political nor archaeological specialist but armed with a graduate degree in Arab language and culture and more than ten years’ interest in Palestine, Fox pored over Dr. Glock’s papers, interviewed his associates, and enrolled at the university where the slain man directed the Palestinian Institute of Archaeology.

Jerald Teeson

Digging Up Conflict

4) Enemies of the missionary archaeologist: Jewish settlers to intifada vigilantes

The #journalist literally becomes an #archaeologist as he sifts through the mute artifacts of the case, and tries to put them into context.

The arrogant and undiplomatic 67-year old Glock, an ordained Lutheran minister on the payroll of a #missionary group, had cultivated many enemies in his two decades in #Palestine.

Jerald Teeson

Digging Up Conflict

5) A tradition of holy relics launched Biblical tourism, added layers of myth

#Biblical #archaeology provides context for the #crime.

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2013/nov/18/st-peters-bones-christian-relics

An opportunistic sub discipline founded on the idea that the #Bible is a true chronicle of #history, its finds have been shrouded in #mysticism and light on #science, and its field replete with religious charlatans and swashbuckling adventurers, generals and statesmen, all mining #Palestine for biblical wonders to advance their own causes.

Jerald Teeson

Digging Up Conflict

6) Negative cosmopolitanism: many people identifying with one place

In a particularly dense chapter, Fox illustrates the dizzying spiral of zealotry affecting the Holy Land’s focal point of Jerusalem, where holy spots were enshrined, demolished, replaced, wrested from rulers with differing beliefs, and given new histories and new futures.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-is-beneath-the-temple-mount-920764/?no-ist

For example, the last straw that spurred the first Crusade, a 1099 military campaign of a Pope to wrest the Holy Land from Muslim rule, was a Caliph’s demolition of the Holy Sepulchre, rumored to have held the cup that Jesus drank from at the Last Supper, and underneath it, the tomb of Adam himself, considered the center of the Christian cosmos, says Fox.

Jerald Teeson

Digging Up Conflict

7) Making the landscape fit the map

Biblical archaeology’s predilection for making the landscape fit the map has served the modern state of #Israel, Fox adds, offering examples of well-timed finds like the #DeadSeaScrolls legitimizing its ownership of the land.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/who-wrote-the-dead-sea-scrolls-11781900/?all

Yet it was Glock's keen interest in #history and #geography that led him to see that the land did not fit the map.

Jerald Teeson

Digging Up Conflict

8) Recording the Palestinian past is against the law

Glock watched every-day Palestine sink into history as its villages were abandoned or ruined.

Restoring a connection to the land would not be easy.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4134091,00.html

Pro-Palestinian #archaeology had been literally outlawed since the 1967 #Israeli occupation, Fox relates, as Israeli censors stamped out anything that “contained a #Palestinian version of the #history of the country, and [ruled] that recording the Palestinian past was considered an act of sedition.”

Jerald Teeson

Digging Up Conflict

10) Palestine suffers from a kaleidoscope of bias

SACRED GEOGRAPHY underscores the fact that to have an interest in Palestine is to have a preconception about the place.

As the author pieces the case together, it’s clear that Palestine suffers from a kaleidoscope of bias and all the author can offer is a stark looking-glass, the sum of the region’s shattered parts.

Jerald Teeson

Digging Up Conflict

More instances of making the land fit the map

In this review I mention Biblical archaeology’s predilection for making the landscape fit the map and how that has served the modern state of Israel's claim to the place.

Here are two more examples of just such a use of archaeology in the news today.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/31/the-big-dig

Elif Batuman writes in The New Yorker about the treasures under Istanbul.