Introduction to "Palestine,A Photographic Journey" (University of California Press)

PALESTINE, a photographic journey

Introduction

My grandfather, "Jiddo" Halim, often spoke of a place where by custom, a hungry traveler could pick fruit from orchards, 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 red brick row house in South Philadelphia was crowded with visitors playing backgammon, cooking and talking. Aunts and uncles sat in heavy, overstuffed armchairs while I 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 those stories, which resembled myth and fairy tales, as much as real life.

One of them told of a potter in the Damascus souk, or marketplace, who could make water jugs, which when filled from the bottom, then turned upside down, would never spill a drop. Jiddo claimed to have seen the Qur'an engraved on a single grain of rice. And loved to tell how as a young man walking the dirt road from his village to the port of Tripoli, he fought five bandits away using the limb of a a tree.

Jidda lived until he was over one hundred years old. In his room he kept a black iron safe which held a land deed from "the old country". On top of the safe sat a shrine which had two simple, unchanging features: a burning white candle and a gold framed icon. The icon depicted the old man Elijah, with his 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 my relative Michael Aboud that hung on the walls of the tiny Syrian Orthodox church on the corner of our street. I studied them for clues of the world my grandfather described really looked, checking for hills, streams, trees, animals. The people pictured in the biblical stories and the portraits of saints had long dark faces and almond shaped eyes. The faces looked like those of my relatives and the other Lebanese and Syrian immigrants who lived in the small neighborhood where I grew up.

I was drawn to these paintings because they were practically the only pictures of the Arab world we had. The Arab world was a mystery. At that time, we never heard about it in school, in films or on television. From the icons and stories I heard at home I knew a secret world which I carried close to my heart.

For a few days in 1967, during the Six Day War and later in 1975, during the Lebanese Civil War, Jidda's world came alive through images on television. It was the first time I had ever seen the Arab world on T.V. The contrast between that footage, and the Arab world we knew, could not have been more profound.

I could not reconcile Jiddo's world with the the nightly images of Phantom jets, tank battles and masked gunmen. I watched television with my family and saw bodies blackened by napalm and scattered like lumps of charcoal in the sand. We saw young men, shot through the head at checkpoints, being dragged through the streets of Beirut behind speeding B.M.W.'s.

Each week I searched the pages of the news magazines for information about what was happening in the Arab world, but found precious little human depth in the news reports from those countries.

As a child I became aware that I was the descendent of a people considered to be the enemy of America.

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In 1981, I graduated from the University of California, Berkeley and lived in a small apartment above Telegraph Avenue, preparing to attend graduate school in International Relations. In July, the Israeli Air Force bombed a neighborhood in Beirut called Fakhani, sending stacks of 700 -pound bombs slamming into densely packed apartment buildings. Four hundred civilians were killed by the explosions or crushed by the weight of the fallen buildings. I read about it in the newspaper, clipped the short article, and taped it onto the refrigerator door so my friends could see it.

Throughout the summer I would look at this article and become overwhelmed. I could imagine the press coverage that would have followed if 400 Jewish civilians been killed in a Palestinian attack. Yet, in 1981, the killing of 400 Arab civilians by Israel hardly caused a ripple in the American public mind. Progressives in the Bay Area and around the country -- outspoken in defense of human rights in El Salvador, Nicaragua and South Africa -- were silent when it came to Lebanon and Palestine.

In the weeks following this incident I grew increasingly troubled by how removed we students were from the real world. We sat in university lecture halls listening to our professors and engaged in heated debates around cafe tables cluttered with cups and newspapers. I wondered how the tone of our discussions might change if we could hear the cries of men and women trapped under the rubble of a collapsed building. By the end of the summer I decided to see, first-hand, the world I had only read about in newspapers.

In September 1981, I departed for Beirut with my friend and college roommate, Michael Nelson. We bought the least expensive airfare we could find to Europe, taking us to Brussels by way of Iceland. We rode buses and hitchhiked to Paris, made our way across Europe and then to Istanbul. We slept in youth hostels and in the stairwells of unlocked buildings along the way. From Istanbul we traveled across Turkey and through Syria. We entered Lebanon on Thanksgiving Day. We each had $75 left.

In Beirut, I became a news photographer, covering the Lebanese war as a stringer for the Associated Press and United Press International. I began walking the streets of Beirut, following the sound of gunfire.

Along the demarcation line running through the city center, the Green Line, block after block of elegant Ottoman homes built of cut stone and red tile stood raked by thousands of rounds of machine-gun bullets and gutted by fire. Walls dangled in the air, suspended by twisted strands of iron rods. Houses, cleaved in two by high explosives, displayed their contents -- pots and pans, furniture and toys. Personal belongings spilled into the street among the broken masonry. Pictures from family albums, and airmail letters lay half burnt and buried among the rubble.

Teenage militiamen, with rocket propelled grenades and machine-guns, carried out the physical destruction of the country. They carried their weapons with the same kind of confidence and schoolyard grace that my boyhood friends back home carried footballs. I carried a camera, but in every other respect I looked like them. I felt at ease with them. and they with me. Fascinated and horrified, I wanted to photograph these young men and tell their story.

They took me into their world. I photographed them smiling, seated on balconies with their families. They washed their dogs and played cards in their spare moments. I photographed them, too sitting in their snipers' nests watching for pedestrians on the streets below. They waited patiently, smoking cigarettes and listening to cassettes of Tom Jones on a battered tape player. I saw them leave innocent civilians, lying in pools of blood. I went to their funerals.

From 1981 to 1984 I chronicled the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the destruction of the U.S. Marine compound, the civil insurrection in West Beirut, the vicious inter-factional war among the Palestinians in North Lebanon. I witnessed car bombs and gun battles so numerous I can no longer remember them all. The political slogans I had once used with ease, began to ring hollow. The blood baths flowed one into another until my perceptions of them became a blur. When I finally left Lebanon there was no more room in the graveyards.

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I first saw Palestine from the sky. I hadn't planned to go there. I never imagined that when I did go, it would be aboard an Israeli military helicopter.

During the early days of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June 1982, I was trapped under an intense bombardment, abandoned by my driver in a small town on the Lebanese coastal town called Jiye. I was covering the war for Newsweek. The only other people in the town were a handful of refugees and a squad of D.F.L.P. guerrillas (Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine) When the Israelis overran the the town there was a brief, but intense fire fight. The the squad of guerrillas was wiped out. Jiye was pulverized and left in ruins. I was taken by the Israeli army, and marched to the outskirts of Damour. Because I held press credentials and U.S. citizenship I was not blindfolded, handcuffed and beaten, as were the other Arab men I saw. I was kept with a group of paratroopers in a large house overlooking the ocean, which, unknown to them, was owned by former Lebanese president Camile Chamoun.

They kept me there for three days, as artillery batteries fired rounds of high explosives into Damour. The soldiers were tense, awaiting the order to invade the town, knowing the fighting would be fierce and house to house. At night, one of the soldiers would bring out a guitar and they would gather in a circle singing songs by John Lennon. At midnight of my second day with them we came under rocket attack by a group of Lebanese or Palestinian resistance fighters hidden somewhere in the hills. The rockets missed by about a hundred yards and landed in the sea, causing it to boil.

After three days I was taken to the local Israeli command center where I was interrogated. My cameras and pockets were emptied and my film destroyed. Upon the insistence of an Israeli photographer, Shalomo Arad, who was serving in the I.D.F, (Israeli Defense Forces) I was put on a military helicopter and flown out of the war zone to Israel.

Peering from the helicopter window, I felt, in a strange way like Elijah in his flaming chariot, flying among the clouds above the Holy Land. Looking down I could see funnel clouds of black smoke billowing from a hundred different points along the Lebanese countryside. Houses lay smashed by artillery fire. Burned out cars and taxi's, strafed by fighter-bombers were strewn upside down, or lying in bomb craters along the coast highway. Lebanon burned below. Armored columns of tanks snaked northward from Israel, laying waste to the land.

The helicopter flew southward along the Mediterranean coast. When we crossed the Lebanese border into Israel, we seemed to be entering another world, a continent away. Gone where the stone houses, green countryside and rural farming villages. Rows of suburban ranch houses suddenly appeared below. Small cars rolled down freshly paved black asphalt streets and stopped at traffic lights. I could see people below, clipping hedges, sun bathing and watering lawns, while their dive-bombers pounded Lebanese cities to dust just a few miles away.

At the Newsweek office in Jerusalem, I handed over two rolls of color film I had taken of the Israeli assault on Jiye. On the rolls were photographs of terrified Palestinians refugees trapped in a building as it was being shelled, and Israeli battle-tanks leveling Lebanese houses at point-blank range. I had hidden the film in my underwear. When the magazine appeared the following week it carried two of my photographs. One was of two Lebanese militiamen firing a machine-gun at Israeli jets, another of a PLO guerrilla walking past a destroyed building. The photographs of the Israeli assault on Jiye were never seen again. The magazine claims they were lost.

After delivering my film to Newsweek I was free to go on my way. But before returning to Beirut I traveled to the Occupied Territories. The fighting was raging in Lebanon, but the despite the desperate plight of the Palestinian resistance, no Palestinian flag could be seen flying in the territories. No demonstrators took to the streets. No one attempted to the block roads to disrupt the movement of troops from the territories to the war front. At a time of profound national crisis, the people of the West Bank and Gaza were paralyzed by the military occupation, resigned to another, in a long history of defeats.

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When the Intifada, or Palestinian Uprising erupted in the winter of 1987, I was living in the United States, working as a photographer for the Philadelphia Inquirer. I tried my best to avert my eyes from the images on television news of muscular soldiers, pining young Palestinian men and women to the ground and methodically smashing their bones with clubs and iron bars.

I had left the horror of Beirut, Damour and Tripoli behind me and resisted the thought of ever going back there. Now, night after night, I watched the people of the villages, refugee camps and towns of Palestine taking to the streets. Protected by nothing save the cloth of their kafiyyas, and armed with stones, they sought out and confronted an army of vastly superior power. They were utterly alone.

I watched this for several weeks. I expected the rebellion to falter, but it grew stronger. It was a time of hope and daring. After watching the struggle for several weeks I went back to Palestine and began working on these pictures.

The territories had changed and hardly resembled the place I had photographed in 1982. The sound pealing from the church bells of Bethlehem, and cried from the tin rooftops of Gaza and echoing in the alleyways of Nablus was the sound of hope. The power of the Intifada was drawn from the collective will of a people no longer willing to be silenced, not by beatings, tear gas nor guns.

It has not been easy for Americans to perceive this will to endure a brutal occupation and emerge as an independent nation. The cries of the Palestinians aren't heard here. After the first few months of the revolt Israel clamped a seal around the West Bank and Gaza, choking off news reports. More significant however, is the dehumanization of Arabic speaking people in the American mind.

There is an relevant Buddhist metaphor. A man observing a rock garden will see the rocks and note their size and shape. Yet this person may never notice the shadows of the rocks, which are equally part of the visual landscape. The shadows do not exist. to the man who does not notice them. It is as though they were invisible.

Many Americans think about the crisis in the Middle East only when events there affect Americans or Israelis. Like the shadow, the Arabs - Lebanese, Palestinians, Syrians - do not exist, except when they threaten American or Jewish lives. For Americans, the Arab world is invisible, or at best a shadow reality, dark, threatening and unknown.

I took photographs of the shadow.

This is my notebook, recorded on color film. The words which accompany the photographs are eyewitness testimonies, poetry, open letters, news clippings and and oral histories. Many are the words of people who I met along the way -- words from the "other" people of the Holy Land, - the native Palestinians, out of the shadow, for once, speaking for themselves.

Book Orders

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A Sampling of the Photographs: