Palestine Twilight: the murder of Dr Albert Glock and the archaeology of the Holy Land Edward Fox HarperCollins, 283pp, £19.99 ISBN 0002556073

One of the books of our age waiting to be written could be called The Uses and Abuses of History. So many books, from the coarsest potboilers to seemingly scholarly works, hum with overtones and hidden political themes; so much "history" is nationalist propaganda in not very heavy disguise. Eric Hobsbawm's favourite example is a book that he came across called Five Thousand Years of Pakistan - this of a country that was not born 60 years ago or dreamed of 20 before that. Mine is the book that the Irish nationalist Mrs Stopford Green published in 1925 under the magnificently absurd title A History of the Irish State to 1014. Even now, any historian knows well what a perilous business it is to write about Ulster or Bosnia.

Or the Holy Land, for that matter, and what applies to history applies there with even more force to archaeology. Albert Glock learned that the hard way. He was an American, a Lutheran missionary who had given up that calling for archaeology, and for Palestine. He had spent 17 years working in Jerusalem and on the West Bank, where he was the director of the Institute of Palestinian Archaeology at Birzeit University. One Sunday in January 1992, at the age of 67, he was shot dead by unknown assassins near his campus.

At the time of the killing, Edward Fox had never heard of Glock. Fox is an American journalist and author living in London, who happened, two years after the murder, to read an article on "Archaeology as Cultural Survival" in the Journal of Palestine Studies. In an astonishing footnote, written with little pretence of scholarly detachment, Fox read that Glock had been shot "by a masked man using an Israeli army gun who was driven in a car with Israeli licence plates". Fox's first reaction was, "Why would anyone want to kill an archaeologist?" That query prompted this book, a real-life whodunnit.

In search of an answer, he took himself to the West Bank and enrolled in the university. Whatever he discovered about Glock's own life and character, his astonished question was not quite so baffling as it might seem. Everyone quotes Sir Mortimer Wheeler's saying that archaeology isn't a science, it is a vendetta, but he was speaking merely of ferocious feuding and jalousies du metier among professionals with no profound ideological differences. In the Holy Land (that newly convenient expression, which avoids the question-begging of "Israel" or "Palestine"), the vendettas are more bitter still because they go to the heart of whose land it is. There, "archaeology" has indeed been a continuation of religious and communal struggle by other means, perhaps since the Empress Helena embarked on her search for the True Cross.

From its own early days, the Zionist movement included enthusiasts who gave "dig for victory" new meaning, by way of research designed to establish the Jewish origins of the land, much overlaid by later conquest and settlement. Several Israeli politicians have been keen archaeologists, and anyone who has visited the pinnacle fort of Masada, for example, will have realised that it is as much political statement as antique monument. Then, more recently, there had been what Fox calls a Copernican revolution in the subject, with the familiar world of biblical archaeology turned upside down by a conscious attempt to remove religious bias.

In his lifetime, Glock's work had all sorts of political implications. Not least, he believed that the local bodies which were relics of empire - the British School of Archaeology and the Ecole Biblique - would and should diminish in importance compared with the home-grown institutions, although those, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and his own university, were inevitably seen as academic flagbearers for their respective nationalisms. At the same time, and for all his Palestinian sympathies, Glock wanted to be an honest man. He may not have been a scholar of world renown (his Israeli enemies denigrated him by pointing out how little he had published) but he did know the difference between scholarship and propaganda, and thought that limiting Palestinian archaeology to the glories of the Islamic age, as some of his students wanted, was no better than the Zionist-biblical interpretation.

In other words, there was a variety of groups with grudges against him. And after his death he became a political football. Israeli newspapers quoted "Palestinian sources" who suspected that Glock was killed by Hamas terrorists trying to derail the peace process, while the PLO denounced the murder of a man who had "contributed with his technical research to the refutation of the Zionist claims over Palestine", and saw in the murder "new proof of Israeli attempts to tarnish the reputation of the Palestinian people in American and international opinion". But politics was not the whole story: as with all the best thrillers, the book also has a love interest. Glock had developed a deep infatuation with Maya al-Farabi, an intelligent, politically aware Palestinian, zealous and rebellious, who had become "his personal holy grail of Palestine and Palestinian archaeology". He educated her academically, nurtured her, took her on as his assistant, groomed her as his successor. And all the while, as he wrote in his diary, "I can hardly deny that I am deeply in love with her."

So whodunnit? Fox tiptoes round the question intelligently and reflectively. His book is pleasingly written, and if the style is sometimes dry to the point of desiccation, that is better than the lurid attitudinising the subject would have drawn from some writers one can think of. His sleuthing takes him to the Israeli police, to the CIA, which confirms that Glock was not a spy, and to the human rights organisation Al-Haq, which offers what is often the only legal channel available to Palestinians, as "law and order was virtually non-existent in the West Bank and Gaza". The Israelis were unforthcoming, and the Arabs continued to hint darkly that Glock was killed as "a warning to Americans not to come here to help the Palestinians".

An alternative theory that he was bumped off by disgruntled Palestinians had some plausibility, but was discounted for the bleak reason that he had been shot so neatly, while "anti-collaborationist" killings on the West Bank tended to be much messier. Then there was Maya, and a report from the American consul in Jerusalem to Washington that said: "There has also been speculation that some of the family members of the research assistant felt obliged to defend family honour." In the end, Fox provides a denouement of sorts, but no absolute conclusion, because "in the Glock murder case, as in archaeology, no answer will ever be final". If that makes this fascinating book incomplete as a detective story, it remains an absorbing, and very sad, sidelight on the world's most bitterly intractable conflict.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft's The Controversy of Zion (Sinclair Stevenson, £17.99) won a 1996 US National Jewish Book Award

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