Authors: Mark LeVine
Abeer is adamant about the negative role organized religion—but not, she’s quick to point out, Islam or the Qur’an—plays in Palestinian Israeli society. Her flouting of “traditional” Arab cultural norms—dressing provocatively, titling a song “I’m a Witch,” and boasting in her lyrics that she casts spells and can enslave listeners—has meant that despite her presence on YouTube, MySpace, and several Dam videos, her work and identity must remain, for the most part, underground. “My family doesn’t know what I do. I have to be sure who’s at a gig and if it’s being covered on TV. But at least I have a choice.”
And it’s the choice that matters to her. Abeer would rather be a closet witch who sneaks out every now and then to a gig or recording session than be like so many other Palestinian women who, despite having some of the highest educational levels in the Arab/Muslim world, remain trapped in what is still a patriarchal culture that values them primarily for their roles as mothers and housewives, rather than as individuals with the power and creativity to contribute to their society and change it in a positive way.
Channels of Rage, but Where Do They Lead?
If Tamer Nafar is one of the most famous rappers in the Arab world, the biggest rapper in Israel is his Jewish doppelgänger, Subliminal, born Kobi Shimroni. If you saw them on the street, it would be hard to tell which one was Jewish and which one “Arab.” That’s because Subliminal is Tunisian and Iranian by heritage. “We’re not white like Europeans. We’re the sand guys from the Middle East,” he explains.
As recounted in the 2003 Israeli documentary
Channels of Rage
(
Arotzim shel za’am
), when Subliminal and Tamer first met, around 2000, the more established Subliminal—perhaps the biggest pop artist in Israel—took Tamer under his wing. It was an incredible learning experience, Tamer admits, and the two became good friends for a time. But then the al-Aqsa Intifada erupted in October of that year, thirteen Palestinian citizens were killed by the police in protests that occurred in Palestinian towns and neighborhoods inside Israel, and a string of suicide bombings in Israel left scores of young Israelis dead. As with Jewish-Palestinian relations more broadly, Subliminal and Tamer’s relationship quickly deteriorated into open hostility.
In an age of constant national soul-searching, Subliminal uses hip-hop to provide a renewed and largely uncritical nationalist narrative for Israelis, one that appeals especially to working-class Mizrahim (Jews whose families immigrated from Muslim countries), whose Middle Eastern heritage and culture the European-dominated Zionist movement and then state worked for generations to delegitimize. Not surprisingly, Subliminal’s raps depict Israel as the main victim and the weaker side in the conflict with the Palestinians, “dangling like a cigarette from Arafat’s mouth,” according to a lyric from one of his biggest hits. This belief is very attractive to young Israelis conflicted about serving in an occupation army, for whom the idea of a powerful Palestinian leader manipulating Israel into signing on to its own destruction justifies the routine humiliation and violence that Palestinians suffer at the hands of the IDF.
But Subliminal’s narrative has little basis in reality—Arafat was imprisoned for the final years of his life in his decrepit Ramallah compound, while Palestine disintegrates into chaos more each year. Since this fact doesn’t fit into Subliminal’s narrative, however, it is ignored. Moreover, any criticism of Israeli policy by Palestinians, including citizens of the state, is illegitimate in Subliminal’s opinion, because in the end all Palestinians want not just to “divide and conquer us…they want us dead. That’s it.”
Yet while Subliminal’s language and rhetoric can be harsh, he is not an especially right-wing Israeli. He even raps about “respecting Islam,” and when fans at a concert started chanting “death to Arabs” he shouted, “Fuck you!” back at them, declaring, “Not death to Arabs, but life for Jews.” But for Subliminal and his fans, Israel’s life-or-death conflict with Palestinians justifies continued discrimination against Israel’s Palestinian population, and worse for Palestinians across the Green Line.
With such an attitude, there is little wonder that when he took the stage after Tamer had performed at one of their last joint appearances, Subliminal asked the crowd, “What do you say if we make Palestinian ID cards for Tamer” and then shouted, “Fuck you if you badmouth Zion. You’re in Zion, in Israel, in Tel Aviv, you asshole.” The crowd went crazy. Tamer just sat at the back of the club staring at the stage. Four years later, however, it is Tamer who’s the bigger international star, bringing his no-holds-barred critique of Israeli society and its Palestinian policies to Europe and the United States in almost monthly tours outside Israel.
Keep Doing What You’re Doing
“I was at the Wailing Wall one day and I met a rabbi,” Orphaned Land singer Kobi Farhi recounted between sips of organic tea. “I explained what we did as a band, and he listened very intently. ‘You must keep doing what you’re doing,’ he said. ‘Even with all my Kabala and power and religious training, I can’t reach the kids like you.’ And he’s right. We take songs from the synagogue and get thousands of metalheads to bang to them. It’s a religious experience.”
In Morocco and Egypt, metalheads and religious authorities view each other with great suspicion, if not outright hostility. In Israel/Palestine, the relationship between rock and religion is more complicated. For one thing, Judaism doesn’t have the obsession with Satan that Christianity and Islam do. But an even more important reason metal and hip-hop aren’t looked down upon by many religious authorities is that the musicians are seen as serving their interests, whether it’s Kobi leading otherwise secular metal fans toward religion, or Subliminal supporting the government’s policies and propaganda.
There is, as far as I can tell, only one Palestinian metal band today in Israel/Palestine: Khalas. They have not had many problems with Muslim religious figures, perhaps because they don’t have enough Palestinian fans to be on their radar. Hip-hop is a different matter. When Palestinian rappers first started out in the late 1990s, they encountered a lot of hostility from religious forces. In Gaza, Mohammed Farra received death threats, and his band’s concerts were forcibly stopped by Hamas, even when the band performed at “liberation” rallies.
Israeli Palestinian rappers like Dam and Saz haven’t received death threats, but early religious opposition has left them wary. Yet as rappers have become more popular, religious leaders have started to view them in ways reminiscent of the rabbi at the Wall. Explained band member Mahmoud Jreri, “Now some sheikhs support us and tell us to keep doing what we’re doing. ‘You deliver a message we can’t.’” Israeli Palestinian artists can bring hope and galvanize into action kids who might otherwise turn to drugs or crime.
The road to social acceptance has been harder in Gaza. As Mohammed recounted to me, “At first people in Gaza didn’t know about rap, and when we started they thought we were just trying to be American. They didn’t like us because of the way we looked and dressed. They didn’t understand that we were doing this for Palestine. But once they hear our lyrics, most people start to like us, and now we have a lot of fans in Gaza.”
When Mohammed raps “Allahu Akbar” (“God is Greater”), it is a chant of defiance against the occupation. When Kobi Farhi of Orphaned Land hears Muslims say the same phrase before every
sallah,
or prayer, he “feels Muslim.” In fact, in his songs Kobi invokes “Allah”—the name he frequently uses for God—to save Israel from the “damnation” of endless violence. But moving beyond such generalizations to direct criticism of the occupation, he and guitarist Yossi agree, would be counterproductive. “If we become political and make statements, we will lose our audience,” Kobi explains. Yossi adds, “Music can be a cure, but only for those who want to listen. We can’t make the blind see.”
What Orphaned Land’s music can do, Kobi explained, is help humanize Muslims and Jews in the eyes of the other. “One Saudi fan came up to me at a show and said, ‘Dude, I was brought up to hate you, but I love you, man.’ Then he showed me a tattoo of our logo on his arm. What can you say to that? They listen to us, hiding in their basements.” At the end of the day, Kobi and Yossi are operating under the same paradigm as Marz and the metaliens of Egypt: in a situation where it seems impossible—or at least not worth the considerable risk—to take on an oppressive or corrupt system, you can opt out of it so that at the very least you’re not part of the problem. What remains to be seen is how bad it will have to get before, like their acolytes in Hate Suffocation, the members of Orphaned Land decide to say “fuck it” and, to quote Marz, become “activists as well as musicians, and suffer the consequences.”
Enough with Silence!
Mohammed Farra raps in his song “History Book” that Palestinian history is like “an outdated book” that refuses to go out of print. Instead, it just “repeats itself day after day.” The group that has best memorialized Palestinian history is not Dam, Palestinian Rapperz, or any other Palestinian band. Rather, it’s the Israeli hard-core band Dir Yassin, the most famous product of the Israeli punk scene. Formed in 1997, Dir Yassin was a punk “supergroup,” made up of members of some of the best (or at least most notorious) punk and hard-core bands in Israel.
The band took its name from the Palestinian village Dir Yassin. Located a few miles west of the old city of Jerusalem, it was the site of the worst massacre of the 1948 war, when members of several Jewish militias, including those led by future prime ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, killed more than a hundred Palestinians, most of them women, children, and old men. In taking the name of the village as its name, Dir Yassin explicitly chose to force fellow Israeli Jews to remember an event that has been excluded from, or at best explained away in, the country’s history, and in doing so “question the legitimacy of Zionism itself…It’s a positive provocation.”
With few exceptions, questioning the legitimacy of Zionism is rarely good for one’s career in Israel. It’s equivalent to questioning American values and motivations the day after September 11, 2001. Except that most days in Israel are treated as if they are September 12. But the band struck a nerve with young Israelis at the precise moment Oslo was falling apart. During its heyday from 1999 to 2002, Dir Yassin concerts were exercises in the cathartic futility that characterizes life in a permanent state of 9/12. Mosh pits steamed with anger against the very system most fans would soon be joining when their military service began. Lyrics screamed with a piercing honesty and clarity of style that few journalists or activists can rival. As the band sings in “All Our Planes Have Returned Safely,”
We are better than them, because we apologize when we kill innocent people.
We are better than them, because we…work the land dropping bombs from airplanes.
Dir Yassin’s lyric sheets even come with a short explanation after each song that describes the historical or political event to which it refers. In a sense, Dir Yassin decided, like Abeer, Dam, and other Palestinian artists, that the best way to confront the Israeli occupation was not through physical terrorism, but through what could be called “cultural terrorism,” a practice first adopted by Dadaists and Surrealists almost a century ago. Judging by the failure of Palestinian violence to achieve even the minimum Palestinian goals, the powerfully in-your-face message of Dir Yassin and Dam at least forced their fans—and occasionally politicians—to confront their role in creating the mess in which Israelis and Palestinians continue to find themselves.
The problem is that it’s extremely hard to keep up that level of anger without either burning out, which is what happened to Dir Yassin, or getting “lazy” about forefronting the conflict in one’s music, as other political punk bands admitted to me had happened with them. Meanwhile, Orphaned Land lets its music do the talking, its members satisfied if their songs keep one more Israeli soldier from shooting a Palestinian, and one more Muslim from hating Jews.
“It Keeps Getting Harder…”
It used to take about seven minutes for me to drive from Jerusalem’s Old City to Abu Dis; now it’s impossible to reach it directly because the Separation/Apartheid Wall cuts across the main road right at the entrance to the village. The town, which is slated to become the official Palestinian “Jerusalem” if a peace agreement is reached, has today become a Palestinian village-sized jail, completely cut off from Jerusalem.
Despite four roadblocks, Sami and I took the long way to Abu Dis to see one of the people who inspired this book, my old oud teacher Ghidian Qaymari. Ghidian can ring more sustain out of a cheap, Syrian-made oud than can Eddie van Halen out of his custom-made Kramer guitar and a stack of Marshalls turned to full volume. He’s also one of the few traditional Arab musicians I know who can hold his own with (and is willing to play next to) an American rock guitar player, and an Israeli accordion virtuoso and singer, such as the esteemed world music artist Sara Alexander, with whom we both played for several years.
Ghidian has thick black hair, a typical Palestinian mustache, and a face that reflects unfailing kindness mixed with weariness and anger at a situation that has grown worse each year since he was born, just weeks after the Six Day War in 1967. When the Israelis first put up the wall a block from his house, it was only about eight feet high. Palestinians quickly used rubble and garbage to build makeshift steps up to the still-unfinished top and climb through an opening between two of its support beams. Ghidian was too big to fit easily through the hole. He couldn’t do the weekly gigs at weddings and hotels in Jerusalem that had made him one of the most sought-after musicians in the Jerusalem region. Now the wall is about twenty-five feet high and no one can climb over it. The most direct available route from Abu Dis to Jerusalem takes a half hour and usually involves at least two checkpoints.