Robert Azzi is a photographer and writer who lives in Exeter. His columns are archived at robertazzitheother.substack.com.
This past Monday, as I fasted to mourn what has befallen lands where I have lived, where peoples whom I know and love are struggling from the River to the Sea to be free, I was conflicted between either grieving in silence or sharing with you my thoughts about mourning, about remembering, about why nothing has changed.
I tried writing to you on Oct. 3 about mourning. I tried writing to you on Oct. 4 about remembering.
I tried writing to you on Oct. 5 about how I once lived in Beirut and that I still have family and friends in Lebanon; a land where the death toll from recent Israeli aggression has now risen above 2,200.
I tried writing to you on Oct. 6 to tell you that, regardless of how Oct. 7 would be remembered, nothing has changed.
A study published by George Washington University in January 2024, a time when Hamas’ horrors were still fresh in people’s memories, while Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing was accelerating, while President Biden and Antony Blinken were becoming increasingly complicit in war crimes, America’s four Sunday talk shows — Meet the Press, Face the Nation, This Week and Fox News Sunday – collectively interviewed 140 outside guests on camera between Oct. 8, 2023 and Jan. 14, 2024. Only one was Palestinian.
Only one was Palestinian. As I write today so little has changed.
I was actually in the process of writing to you on Oct. 7 when I got an email from a local resident who occasionally, unsolicited, writes to me. On Monday morning they chose to offer:
“I’ll be downtown, today – quietly and peacefully celebrating Oct. 7– but probably for different reasons than you … I’ll be celebrating the resilience of the Jews. And I will be praying for Peace. I will be praying for the innocent people of Gaza… ‘From the River to the Sea…’ …You know what they say – ‘be careful what you wish for, it may come true’ … My University room-mate and great friend is a Muslim – I don’t recognize or support all this hatred; neither [do they] …. I sincerely hope someone can pray away your hate … Have a blessed day.”
They said they would be celebrating: I ask, what is there for anyone to celebrate?
They say they have a Muslim friend. Good for them. Out of nearly 2,000,000,000 Muslims they have a friend who is Muslim and who doesn’t support hatred.
I wonder what they think the other 1,999,999,999 Muslims — Sunni, Shia, Ibadi, Sufi, Ahmadiyye, non-observant, etc, — support?
I wonder if they will write to them, too. Do they think all Muslims need hate prayed away?
Do all Palestinians murdered and maimed, in Gaza since 2007, the time when Israel first imposed a deadly land, air and sea blockade on the Gaza Strip turning it into the world’s largest “open-air prison,” need hate prayed away?
Are Palestinians not allowed to be resilient?
Are Palestinians and Arabs and Muslims not allowed to resist settler-colonialism, apartheid, genocide, ethnic cleansing, occupation, annexation, torture, administrative detention?
Shouldn’t all children have equal rights to an education? Are Palestinians not allowed to long for freedom?
Did the children and women murdered in Gaza, who make up the vast majority of the over 42,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza, with tens of thousands still missing, need their hate prayed away because they longed for freedom and liberation from the River to the Sea? Freedom and liberation that has been denied to them for decades.
Sadly, they’re not the only person who presumes to have some insight into what I must feel or think, or hate, after all; I am a person of color and minority so I must be predictable, readable, knowable.
They all presume to know us well.
Two weeks ago, as a pro-Palestinian, pro-peace vigil in Exeter was breaking up, a man on a BSA motorcycle ( I love BSAs, I once owned a 350cc single when I lived in Lebanon) rode up and started screaming, literally screaming, at me and a fellow Lebanese colleague, telling us we had no idea what we were doing and that all the people we were supporting — not just Palestinians — were horrible, hateful people who did terrible things to women and children and deserved to die.
He claimed that we had no idea what we were doing and that we were ourselves full of hate, or that we were deliberately conspiring with evil.
With that, he lowered his visor and rode off into the darkness.
I am so used to this “subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture,” so described by Edward Said in “Orientalism,” that reinforces prejudices that not only have historically prevailed but which are today being weaponized and used to justify continued Western colonial and imperial exploitation, not just on Arabs and Muslims globally but on people of color and minority peoples, on people like me, here at home.
It’s been a year since Hamas, committing war crimes, breached the Israeli-enforced separation barrier, if one wants to call it that, between the imperial state of Israel and Gaza, one of the most densely populated places (I call it a concentration camp) in the world, and is there where, since 1967, a calorie-counting Israel has determined who eats, who starves, who lives, who dies, who stays and perishes, who gets polio, who gets to leave the apartheid state that Israel has created for itself to assure that Palestinian Arabs — Christian, Druze, Muslim — will never have rights equal to the rights of Jewish Israelis, either in Israel itself or in the occupied territories.
However, that was not the beginning of the war which is today being extended into the rest of occupied Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran.
The truth, however, is far more complex and without understanding a shared history that dates back over a century, without recognizing that Israel is a non-democratic state practicing apartheid and genocide against peoples it occupies, without recognizing the illegal occupation of East Jerusalem, West Bank and Gaza, and without recognizing that America is complicit in yet more war crimes being inflicted upon peoples of color, this war will persist.
Understand this clearly: Where there is oppression and the lack of fundamental human rights, the Other will continue to resist.
“What were you hoping,” Jean-Paul Sartre asked in “Black Orpheus” as France was entering its last decade of colonial domination in Algeria, “when you removed the gags that stopped up these black mouths? That they would sing your praises? … Here are black men standing, men looking at us, and I want you to feel, as I do, the shock of being seen. For the white man has, for three thousand years, enjoyed the privilege of seeing without being seen.”
What were you hoping?