George Azar

Azar was born in Philadelphia on February 3, 1959, the middle child of George Azar, Jr. and Gladys Saddic, both the children of Lebanese immigrants. He has three siblings, an older sister, Madelynn, and two younger brothers, Michael and Habib. When he was eight years old, the family relocated to San Diego, California, where he spent the remainder of his childhood.

Between 1977 and 1981, Azar attended the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of California, Berkeley, where he received a Bachelor of Arts in political science, history. He graduated magna cum laude.

Having grown up in a Lebanese American household, and visiting Lebanon several times throughout his youth, Azar was always extremely interested in the Middle East. In the introduction to his book, Palestine: A Photographic Journey, Azar writes:

"My grandfather, 'Jiddu' Haleem, 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...the Arab world came alive for me through those stories."[6]

Then in July 1981, the Israeli Air Force bombed a neighborhood in Beirut called Fakhani, sending stacks of 700 pound bombs slamming into densely packed apartment buildings. Some 400 civilians were killed by the explosions or crushed by the weight of the fallen buildings. Azar read about it in a newspaper, clipped the short article, and taped it onto the refrigerator door so his friends could see it. Throughout the summer he would look at this article and become overwhelmed. This Israeli bombing campaign in West Beirut was part of the early stages of what would eventually transform into the 1982 Lebanon War. Azar writes, "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."[6]

By the end of the summer, shocked and troubled, Azar decided to see, first-hand, the conflict he had read about in newspapers. So, in September 1981, he departed for Beirut with his friend and college roommate, Michael Nelson. They hitchhiked across Europe to Lebanon, with the goal of pursuing careers in photojournalism. They finally arrived in Beirut in November 1981. And it was there and then that Azar's career began.

Once in Beirut, Azar became a news photographer, covering the Lebanese War as a stringer for the Associated Press (AP), United Press International (UPI) and later for the French photo agency, Gamma. From 1981 to 1989 Azar 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, The Druze-Maronite war in the Chouf mountains and the Syrian siege of Mount Lebanon.

During the early days of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June 1982, Azar was trapped under an intense bombardment, abandoned by his driver in a small town on the Lebanese coast, called Jieh. He was covering the war for Newsweek. When the Israelis overran the town there was a brief, but intense fight. Jieh was left in ruins.

Azar was taken by the Israeli army, and marched to the outskirts of Damour. Because he held press credentials and U.S. citizenship he was not blindfolded, handcuffed and beaten, as were the other Arab men he saw. He was kept with a group of paratroopers in a large house overlooking the ocean, which, unknown to them, was owned by former Lebanese president Camille Chamoun.

After three days he was taken to the local Israeli command center where he was interrogated. His cameras and pockets were emptied and his film destroyed. Upon the insistence of an Israeli photographer, Shalomo Arad, who was serving in the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) he was put on a military helicopter and flown out of the war zone to Israel. Azar wrote about the experience:

"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 taxis, 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."[6]

Azar was taken to the Newsweek office in Jerusalem, where he handed over two rolls of color film he had taken of the Israeli assault on Jieh, and hidden from the Israelis in his underwear. On the rolls were photographs of terrified Palestinian refugees trapped in a building as it was being shelled, and Israeli battle-tanks leveling Lebanese houses at point-blank range. When the magazine appeared the following week it carried two of Azar's photographs. One was of two Lebanese militiamen firing a machine-gun at Israeli jets, and the other of a PLO guerrilla walking past a destroyed building. The photographs of the Israeli assault on Jieh were never seen again. Newsweek claims they were lost.

After delivering his film to Newsweek, Azar was free to go on his way. But before returning to Beirut, he traveled to the Palestinian Occupied Territories. Azar was horrified by the devastation he saw. And so began a fascination with Palestine and a desire to document and report the plight of the Palestinian people; a desire that would shape and dominate his career in the following years.

When the First Intifada erupted in Palestine in the winter of 1987, Azar was living in the United States, working as a photographer for The Philadelphia Inquirer. He had left the horror of Beirut, Damour and Tripoli behind almost two years before and resisted the thought of ever going back. But as he watched images on the news of the people of the villages, refugee camps and towns of Palestine taking to the streets, protected by nothing save the cloth of their keffiyehs, and armed with stones, he finally decided to return to Palestine. The photos he took during that stay in Palestine would become his first book, the critically acclaimed Palestine: A Photographic Journey, published in 1991.

In December 2012, Al Jazeera English flagship documentary series "Witness" aired "Beirut Photographer" Directed by George Azar and Mariam Shahin. The film is about Azar's return to Beirut 30 years after his first visit and documents his journey to the past and how he finds and reconnects to many of the people he photographed in 1982.[7]

• George Azar: Middle East Photographer Retrieved 2012-12-12
• George Azar's Middle Eastern Journeys: 16 years of photojournalism from the Arab world Retrieved 2012-12-12
• Jadaliyya, November 29, 2012: Beirut Photographer: Interview with George Azar Retrieved 2012-12-12
• New York Times article by George Azar, June 12, 2006: Errant Shell Turns Girl Into Palestinian Icon Retrieved 2012-12-12