Palestine: A Photographic Journey

By George Baramki Azar

An unforgettable photographic journal of the "shadows" of the Arab world--at turns invisible, unknown, and threatening to some--this work gathers images of the Palestinians during the first few months of 1988 when the intifada was beginning to gain momentum. We have come to visually associate the terms "intifada" and "Palestinian" solely with images of young men wrapped in kafiyyehs hurling rocks at Israeli soldiers. The photos gathered here are different. They grant us the rare opportunity to see facets of the Palestinians not portrayed in the popular media: the beauty of the land, the life of the sheepherders, the joy of the children, the quiet defiance of the elders, the dignity they all salvage. From 1981 to 1987 George Azar chronicled the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the destruction of the U.S. Marine compound, the civil insurrection in West Beirut, the Iran-Iraq War and the interfactional war among the Palestinians in North Lebanon. He saw gun battles and deaths so numerous that his memory of them has become a blur. Leaving the horror of Beirut, Damour, and Tripoli behind, he resisted the thought of going back. But in early January 1988, news reports showed the people of the refugee camps, the villages, and the towns in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip taking to the streets. He returned to the occupied territories later that month and began taking these pictures. This book bears witness to Palestinian lives and by doing so gives the Other a human face. The texts that accompany the photographs are taken from eyewitness testimonies, open letters, news clippings, interviews, and Arabic poetry. An introductory essay by Ann M. Lesch describes the genesis of the intifada movement and its interactions with the Israeli government. Despite death, deportation, and the destruction of their homes, the Palestinians remain steadfast, convinced that one day the horror of military occupation will end and they will be able to live once again. This work is a testament to that conviction.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1991.
An unforgettable photographic journal of the "shadows" of the Arab world--at turns invisible, unknown, and threatening to some--this work gathers images of the Palestinians during the first few months of 1988 when the intifada was beginning to gain moment

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Dec 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520324954

George Baramki Azar

Enter the Author Bio(s) here.

Book preview

PALESTINE

Young Palestinians in a cave, hiding from the Israeli army in the hills of

the West Bank.

PALESTINE

A PHOTOGRAPHIC

JOURNEY

George Baramki Azar

Introduction by Ann Mosely Lesch

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley Los Angeles Oxford

An earlier version of the Introduction by Ann Mosely Lesch was published in Field Staff Reports, no. i (1988-89), a publication of UFS1 (Universities Field Staff International). Professor Lesch was a UFSI Associate in the Middle East from 1984 to 1987.

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

Oxford, England

© 1991 by

The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Azar, George Baramki.

Palestine: a photographic journey / George Baramki Azar; introduction by Ann M. Lesch.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-520-07384-3 (alk. paper). — ISBN 0-520-07544-7 (pbk.: alk. paper)

i. Intifada, 1987—Pictorial works. I. Title.

DS110.W47A98 1991

956.95'3—dc2o 90-24310

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Fouzi al-Asmar, Mahmoud Darwish, and Fadwa Tuqan, whose poems are reprinted in this volume, as well as to the publishers of the collections in which some of the poems first appeared: KNOW Books, New York; Free Palestine Press, Washington, D.C.; Three Continents Press, Washington, D.C.; Penguin Books, New York; and Zed Books, London.

Printed in Singapore

987654321

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI z39.48-1984. ®

For my parents, George and Gladys, my sister, Madelynn, my brothers, Michael and Habib, and my wife, Randa

We take this opportunity to extend warm greetings to all others who fight for their liberation and their human rights, including the peoples of Palestine and Western Sahara. We commend their struggles to you, convinced that … freedom is indivisible, convinced that the denial of the rights of one diminishes the freedom of others.

Nelson Mandela, deputy president of the African National Congress, addressing the United Nations General Assembly, June 22, 1990

Territories occupied by Israel since June 1967.

CONTENTS

CONTENTS

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

1 PALESTINE

2 THE ISRAELI OCCUPATION

3 SEIZURES AND DEMOLITIONS

4 INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY, MARCH 8, 1988

5 THE UPRISING

6 SUNDAY IN BAYT SAHUR

7 ARREST AND DETENTION

8 THE FUNERAL OF KHADR MUHAMMAD HAMIDAH

9 AL-AMARI REFUGEE CAMP

10 HAMZA

BIOGRAPHIES OF THE POETS

PREFACE

My grandfather Jiddo Halim often spoke of a place where by custom a hungry traveler could pick a ripe fruit from an orchard, where snowy mountaintops overlooked the Mediterranean, and where villages with red-tiled roofs nestled in forests of cedar and pine. He called that country biladi, my homeland.

On Sundays Jiddo’s redbrick row house in South Philadelphia was crowded with visitors playing backgammon, cooking, and talking. The parlor was filled with stories. My aunts and uncles sat in heavy overstuffed armchairs. I sometimes sat on the floor, playing with my cousins and listening to my grandfather weave tales of cities built of gold-colored stone: Beirut, Jerusalem, Damascus.

The Arab world came alive for me through these stories, which sounded more like myths or fairy tales than like real life. One of them told of a potter in a tiny shop in the Damascus souk, or marketplace, whose water jugs, when filled from the bottom and turned upside down, would never spill a drop. Jiddo claimed to have seen an entire Qur’an engraved in Arabic on a grain of rice. And he loved to tell how once as a young man walking the dirt road from his village to the Lebanese port city of Tripoli, he chased away five bandits with a tree branch.

Jiddo lived to be over a hundred years old. In his room he kept a heavy black iron safe that held a land deed from the old country. On top of the safe a white candle burned before an icon framed in wood. The icon depicted Elijah as an old man with a white beard swept by the wind as he flew to heaven in a chariot with flaming wheels.

I often studied this icon and others, painted early in the century by a relative, Michael Abbud, that hung on the walls of the tiny Syrian Orthodox church in my neighborhood. I searched the painted landscapes for clues that would tell me how the world my grandfather described really looked—the hills, streams, trees, and animals. The faces in these biblical scenes and portraits were long and dark, with almond-shaped eyes. They looked like my relatives’ faces and those of the other Lebanese and Syrians in the immigrant neighborhood where I grew up. I was drawn to these icons less for religious reasons than for what they told me of the Arab world, which otherwise remained a mystery. At that time, we never heard about it in school or saw it in films or on television. From the icons and the stories I heard at home, I understood a secret world and carried it close to my heart.

For a few days in 1967 during the Six Day War and later, in 1975, during the Lebanese civil war, Jiddo’s world came alive through images on television. But news footage of the fighting showed an Arab world profoundly different from the one I knew—I could not reconcile Jiddo’s world with one of Phantom jets, tank battles, or masked gunmen. I watched television with my family and saw bodies blackened by napalm, scattered like lumps of charcoal in the sand. I saw young men who had been shot through the head at checkpoints being dragged through the streets of Beirut behind speeding jeeps and BMWs. When I scanned the weekly news magazines, eager to learn more, I found they offered little information about events in the Arab world and said almost nothing about the lives of the Arab people.

After I graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1981, I spent the summer living in a