Authors: Mark LeVine
Today the drive to Ramallah can take hours. The hundreds of checkpoints set up by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in the Occupied Territories, some permanent and heavily fortified, others temporary, have nearly destroyed the Palestinian economy by making it impossible for Palestinians to move freely throughout the West Bank and (before the Israeli pullout in 2006) Gaza, or between them and Israel. Meanwhile, 400,000 settlers speed between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and the settlements on Israeli-only bypass roads.
Once you get across the Green Line—the internationally recognized border of 1949 that separated Israel from the West Bank and Gaza until 1967—the roads are a disaster, having been crushed under the weight of innumerable sixty-five-ton Merkava tanks since the outbreak of the al-Aqsa intifada in September 2000. The situation and the roads have become even more surreal in Gaza, as I had discovered the previous day on my way to the town of Khan Younis, capital of “Hamastan” and perhaps the most dangerous town in the Middle East after Baghdad or Fallujah.
I was trying to see the Gaza Strip’s most famous rapper, Mohammed Farra of the group Palestinian Rapperz. Mohammed is a lanky twenty-two-year-old with close-cropped hair, who favors well-creased hip-hop clothing (baggy pants, sports jerseys) over the Eastern European–looking slacks, jeans, and dress shirts most of his peers wear. Mohammed has never been able to find a real job, thanks to the disastrous economic situation in Gaza, and now he’s finding it impossible to finish his degree in English at Gaza’s al-Quds Open University, thanks to his burgeoning music career.
Considering the amount of violence Mohammed has experienced in his brief life, I am still surprised at how warm and open he is to anyone who shows interest in his music, in Gaza’s plight, or in both. Unfortunately, on the day I was first to meet him, Mohammed’s cousin, an Islamic Court judge and Hamas leader named Bassam al-Farra, was gunned down. With the family gathering at his house to pay their respects, and with Gaza even more tense and violent than Ramallah, it was clearly not a good time to visit.
Gaza is home to at least 1.5 million people, the large majority of whom are descendants of Palestinian refugees who live in overcrowded and woefully underdeveloped camps that were established in 1948 as temporary shelters. Today it has the dubious distinction of being one of the most densely crowded, fetid, violent, and poverty-stricken places on earth, and one of the youngest demographically (more than 55 percent of Gaza’s residents are under nineteen, and 76 percent are under thirty).
Seeing friends and relatives killed almost weekly was taking a toll on Mohammed. Physically he was still recovering from being shot by Israeli snipers, and emotionally he was reeling from the refusal of the Israelis to allow his band to travel to France for a tour. It was, Mohammed explained, “hard to see into the future.” The growing Palestinian-on-Palestinian violence only added to the general level of despair for Gaza residents. “But what can I do?” Mohammed asked me rhetorically. “This is, in fact, why I became a rapper. Rap came from struggle, and at least being a rapper allows me to take the realities of the occupation and transform them into songs.” And when local producers and technology can’t quite capture the intensity of his experiences, Mohammed heads to Egypt—which, tellingly, is easier to get to from Gaza than is the West Bank—to collaborate with underground MCs and producers in Cairo.
But wherever they’re writing, recording, or performing, Mohammed and his fellow rappers cannot escape the social and political context of their music. And taking any political stand automatically puts them into conflict not just with Israelis, but also with their more conservative elders and peers in Palestinian society who hold different and often more violent views than theirs. Slowly, religious leaders are beginning to recognize that the music of Palestinian Rapperz inspires young people to continue a seemingly hopeless struggle, rather than simply providing an escape from the realities of life in what remains of Palestine.
Cosmopolitan Ramallah’s rap scene is naturally more open and innovative. There, rappers work with visual artists and poets in collectives that stretch the boundaries of art as a means of resistance. Boikutt, a rapper who’s part of the “Ramallah Underground” collective of MCs, visual artists, and “soundcatchers” (sound engineers who roam the streets recording random sounds to incorporate into songs) that Sami and I were going to see when the Hamas-Fatah firefight erupted, explains the situation this way: “Ninety percent of what I rap is political because eighty percent of life in Palestine is political.” (The heading of his MySpace site begins by declaring that “Palestine is not listed [in the official MySpace countries list], so FUCK United States.”)
In such a hyperpolitical environment as Palestine today, it’s not surprising that crews like Ramallah Underground and Gaza’s Palestinian Rapperz have hit a cultural nerve by weaving together the postindustrial protest sounds of hip-hop, with its commitment to using words as weapons, and the Palestinian tradition of passing down history through music and storytelling. And they’re reaching young people around the world at a time when the mainstream media rarely presents an unfiltered Palestinian point of view.
Ramallah Underground’s MCs rap over some of the most haunting tracks I’ve heard since the early days of gangsta rap. The grooves evoke early 1970s funk, but its discordant tonality is generated by descending chromatic bass lines, crackling soundscapes, Arab instruments like the oud or nay (flute), and the sounds of gunfire recorded by local soundcatchers. A mélange of Arabic and English rhymes can be incredibly unsettling—especially if you’re listening to them in the Occupied Territories, during a gunfight, which is when many of them were inspired and even recorded. Capturing both the complexity and violence of the occupation, they rap in their song “Almadeel Mustamerr” (Past Continuous):
“They attacked, they endured, they bombed…They built, they destroyed, they parked and honked. No one moved out of the way so they kept going…And while you’re sitting here contemplating…They widened their borders.”
But Boikutt, Stormtrap, and their comrades don’t just rap as an alternative to throwing stones or building bombs. Being musicians offers these artists opportunities that most Palestinians are denied. They are able to travel outside the country (something Mohammed and the other members of Palestinian Rapperz have a harder time doing because they’re from Gaza), tell their stories to a wide audience, and meet with people from around the world.
With Jerusalem increasingly out of reach for most Palestinians, Ramallah has become the de facto capital of Palestine. It is the epicenter of what the Palestinian sociologist Salim Tamari terms the age-old conflict between “the mountains and the sea” that has defined Palestinian culture and identity for centuries. If you stand on one of its hills and look eastward, the biblical landscape of the West Bank opens before you. If you look to the west, the Mediterranean Sea and the lights of Tel Aviv and Jaffa glimmer in the distance. In the mid-1990s, the early years of the Oslo process, Ramallah became home to the majority of the Palestinian elite and thousands of foreign NGO workers. Other than Bethlehem, Ramallah is one of the few Palestinian cities where one can openly drink alcohol, or go to a nightclub dressed in the latest b-boy attire and bump and grind the night away. As Stormtrap said, “Without music we wouldn’t have much hope for the future. We don’t want to end up leading boring office lives. We’re looking for something beyond that—and music is the key.”
Hardly any Israelis travel to Ramallah or anywhere else in the Occupied Territories these days, unless they’re soldiers, settlers, or peace activists. The peace activists have the hardest time, because their presence makes it more difficult for soldiers and settlers to carry on with the business of occupation. But the drive is worth it, if only because it brings into clear relief the differences between Israel, with its First World living standards (the country ranks twenty-third in the Human Development Index, far above almost every country in the Arab/Muslim world) and cookie-cutter Jewish settlements on either side of the Green Line, and the much poorer and densely populated Palestinian towns of the West Bank (whose HDI ranking sinks further below 100 with each passing year).
Equally disheartening are the permanent checkpoints like Qalandiya. Little more than an ad-hoc series of barriers a decade ago, today it is a permanent border crossing with hours-long lines and soldiers who scream and point their weapons at any car carrying a Palestinian, even when it’s approaching from the Israeli side and the Palestinian is an eighty-year-old woman, as Sami and I learned when we picked up an old woman carrying a huge package on her head a few hundred meters from the checkpoint on our way to lunch with May.
Long, Hard History
Fifty years of Zionist colonization of Palestine, and with it intensifying intercommunal conflict, culminated in the first full-scale war between Israelis, Palestinians, and the surrounding Arab countries in 1948. The result: the establishment of the Jewish state on 78 percent of Palestine, and the exile of three-quarters of a million Palestinians. This was followed by four wars in four decades, resulting in the conquest of the remainder of Palestine in 1967, the rise of the PLO, the signing of the Israeli peace accords with Egypt, the transformation of Israel from a heavily state-managed economy to a neoliberal one, and the outbreak of the first intifada in December 1987. Finally, in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War, the Oslo peace process began in 1993 and continued until the outbreak of the al-Aqsa intifada in 2000.
It’s impossible to understand Israeli and Palestinian music today apart from the abysmal failure of Oslo to deliver on its promises of peace, independence, and development for either Palestinians or Israelis. As important, and linking Israel/Palestine to similar trends across the MENA, was that Oslo coincided with increasing globalization along neoliberal lines of the Israeli and Palestinian economies. This had the predictable consequences of creating increased wealth for some Israelis and for their clients among the Palestinian elite (especially senior officials of the Palestinian Authority). But the majority of citizens in both societies faced a sharp rise in inequality and poverty and a decrease in average salaries for blue collar/unskilled workers. (Israel’s poverty rate jumped from 10 to over 25 percent between 1990 and 2005; today, half of all Palestinian citizens live below the poverty line. Palestine fared worse, especially with the constant closures of the territories that decimated the economy.) The squeezing of both the Israeli and Palestinian working and middle classes created fertile ground for conservative or radical movements on both sides to preach violent confrontation as the best way to solve their problems. More positively, it helped produce some of the best hip-hop and heavy metal in the world.
Finding Your Way in an Orphaned Land
Palestine might be burning, and Jewish and Palestinian workers might be suffering, but you’d never know it sitting in a café at the beach or your apartment in southern Tel Aviv, where Kobi Farhi is working on a new song. Kobi is the lead singer of the Israeli Oriental death-doom metal band Orphaned Land, whose vibrant Arab and Muslim fan base surprised me during my trip to Egypt. The day before I was supposed to meet Mohammad Farra in Gaza, I had dinner with Kobi at a fashionable restaurant in Tel Aviv’s Florentin neighborhood. Tel Aviv is known the world over as the White City because it has more ultramodern International Style buildings than any other city in the world. But in its southern part, near its mother town of Jaffa, Tel Aviv gets funkier and more bohemian. Florentin has the feel of New York City’s Tribeca, but with even more picturesque buildings and the added bonus of a warm Mediterranean breeze.
The restaurant was filled with good-looking Israelis in their twenties, but even in that company, Kobi stood out when he walked through the door. With his long, dirty blond hair and a two-day beard, he looks as though he could have played Jesus in the movie version of
Hair.
“I actually used to try to look like Jesus,” he admitted to me. “And why not? He was a great person, a great Jew.” Not to mention that Orphaned Land is steeped in religious symbolism, so having the lead singer look like Jesus (or more accurately what most people imagine that Jesus looked like) doesn’t hurt the band’s image.
Kobi exudes the kind of aura that comes with being, if not a rock star, then a successful musician in the prime of his creative life. He’s in one of the most influential bands in the world metal scene; he believes that his music can help bring peace between Jews and Muslims; and, most important, he doesn’t need a day job. He is, refreshingly in this country, at peace with himself and the world, and has none of the arrogance, ego, or anger that seem to be staple personality traits among successful rock-’n’-roll musicians.
But then, Israel’s metal scene has been a study in contradictions for more than twenty years. The music began with the extreme metal band Salem in 1985, who made it onto regular rotation on MTV’s
Headbanger’s Ball
as one of the ten best up-and-coming metal bands in the world. Salem brought the headbanging and mosh-pit experiences to Israel, and were soon followed by bands like Substance for God, Executer, Explicit, Betrayer, Providence, Amxxez, Phantom Pain, and Sword of Damocles, and the Palestinian Christian band Melechesh. The early 1990s were perhaps the biggest years for heavy metal in Jerusalem. At least half a dozen bands, with names such as Seppuku, Leviticus, and Incarnation could fill up theaters, while the local press reviewed new albums by local Death, Doom, Thrash, Grind Core, and even progressive thrash metal.
Orphaned Land was formed in 1991 in what Kobi and lead guitarist and primary songwriter Yossi Sassi-Sa’aron affectionately refer to as their marriage. Kobi’s long hair and Ashkenazi looks are balanced by Yossi’s darker hair and Mizrahi (that is, Middle Eastern Jewish) face and vibe. With a father from Libya and a mother from Iraq, Yossi grew up in an Arabic-speaking house where Oum Kalthoum mixed with just enough Jewish rituals to create the aesthetic sensibility behind Orphaned Land.