When I moved to Beirut, Lebanon, in 1968, one of my early assignments was to photograph people living in the Baqa’a Refugee Camp outside Amman, Jordan — a dark, muddy, sprawling tented camp of thousands of olive-skinned Palestinian refugees and displaced people forced from their homes during the 1967 Six-Day War between Israel and the Arab States.
Upon my arrival, I was overwhelmed not by the mud, despair, anger and poverty of what I was witnessing, but by the hospitality of those whom I was meeting – Palestinians who had lost almost everything, many for the second time in their lives. People forced to flee under the guns of war, desperate to keep their families safe and together, dependent upon the generosity of others, welcomed me into their lives in spite of the fact that many of them blamed the United States for their misfortune.
They shared stories and meals. They found me a blanket and a place to sleep. I watched over a couple of toddlers while their mother went to queue in the rain and mud for cooking oil. They told me how, amidst war, they kept families together — helped others to survive. Certainly, I could not have imagined, to paraphrase the Gospel of Matthew 8:11, that when many came from the east and the west to feast with Abraham and the prophets they would be sorted by color.
Certainly, I could never have imagined that decades later I would still be called upon to witness, over and over again, this time from Exeter, N.H., refugees, migrants, asylum-seekers, friends and myself being judged, sorted, embraced or separated by the color of our skin, by the orientation of our daily prayers, by the politics of the day.
I remember the moment, in November 2015, when Gov. Maggie Hassan, joining with President Barack Obama’s Republican opponents, called for a complete freeze of Obama’s plan for Syrian refugee resettlement in America, adding “… the federal government should halt acceptance of refugees from Syria until intelligence and defense officials can assure that the process for vetting all refugees, including those from Syria, is as strong as possible to ensure the safety of the American people.”
Today, Hassan, now a member of the U.S. Senate who thankfully is in full solidarity with the need for Ukrainian refugees to be safe and sheltered, is being opposed by Ret. Brig. Gen. Don Bolduc, who believes, in spite of all the evidence, that the 2020 election was fraudulent and that America should have an actual military presence in Ukraine, perhaps using the CIA or “special operations troops.”
A pox on all their houses.A pox on all those who, intentionally or not, build walls based on ethnicity, class and color, on those who become complicit with racism because of their prejudices, lusts or ambitions. A pox on any who believe that the survival of migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers should be dependent upon skin color, religion and class.
Last Wednesday night, the 14th night of Russia’s barbaric invasion, I was on the phone for more than an hour with a young person I’ve known for years. A Dartmouth grad, their mother is Ukrainian, father Palestinian, and they have many relatives in the war zone — some sheltering in place, some relocated to Ukraine’s west — all with children, all fearful of what’s to come. Of one relative, half-Palestinian, half-Ukrainian, we wondered which half would have to prevail in order to safely cross Ukraine’s border with Poland or Hungary.
When people can come together in radical hospitality, whether in refugee camps in Palestine or Pakistan, whether in churches, mosques or synagogues in New Hampshire, and commit to ending violence, then perhaps healing will follow. Today, in spite of deliberate efforts to keep America white by denying refuge, asylum or immigration to many people of color, there are still glimmers of light emitting from within the American Dream.
Today, I embrace among my friends in New Hampshire descendants of the Jewish Holocaust and the Armenian genocide, friends born in Baqa’a Camp, friends displaced by civil war in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon; all living alongside newly arrived Afghan families starting their lives over again after surviving decades of terrorism and occupation in their homeland.
All waiting to sit alongside each other and feast with the prophets.
All overwhelmed by radical hospitality.
Robert Azzi, a photographer and writer who lives in Exeter, visits frequently in the Monadnock Region. He can be reached at theother.azzi@gmail.com. His columns are archived at theotherazzi.wordpress.com.