● 161
“We Ain’t Missing”Palestinian Hip Hop—A Transnational Youth Movement
S u n a i n a M a i r a
University of California, Davis
“when privilege will yield indiff erence / like history needs some Ritalin
like misery sees your system as / an accessory for pillaging / meant to be the
end of it
whether you an immigrant or children of slaves
you can see it in the diff erence / of the living in conditions
like missions tortured indians / force ’em to christians
we call ’em Palest-indians / we ain’t missing”
—Excerpt from “No Justice,” Arab Summit1
I n t r o d u c t i o n : A P e d a g o g y o f E m p i r e
An honest, accurate, and open discussion of the history and reality of the
vexed Palestine question has long been missing in the U.S. public sphere.
© Michigan State University Press. CR: Th e New Centennial Review, Vol. 8, No. 2, 2008, pp. 161–192. issn 1532-687x
“ We A i n ’ t M i s s i n g ”162 ●
In the last few years a new force has attempted to counter the silence in
this larger arena slowly and sonically, and has infused Palestine-centered
movements with a new aesthetic idiom and a new genre of music: Palestin-
ian and Palestinian American hip hop.2 Th e emergence of what is a largely
underground phenomenon of rap produced by Palestinian and Palestinian
American youth is linked to a larger phenomenon of a growing Palestinian
and Palestinian American hip hop generation that has come of age listening
to the sounds of rap both in the United States as well as in Palestine, and that
has taken up the cause of Palestinian self-determination as well as issues of
racism, inequality, and imperialism.
Th e globalization of U.S. popular culture and the diff usion of hip hop into
the Arab world has been accompanied by the mainstreaming of hip hop in
the United States and its increasing embracement by new groups of young
people inside and outside the United States who have used it as a medium
to express their political and cultural concerns (Osumare 2007). Given the
mainstreaming of hip hop in recent years, it is also by now a pervasive, even
global, signifier of being “cool” or simply being young or youthful. If hip hop
was described as “the Black CNN” by Chuck D of Public Enemy, suggesting
its role as a tool for sharing news of the social and political realities of urban,
disadvantaged youth of color since the 1970s (Rose 1994; Forman 2002), it is
possible to argue that today, hip hop has become the “Palestinian Al Jazeera”
(knowing what we know about CNN)! In this paper I will off er a transnational
perspective on Palestinian and Palestinian American hip hop, situating it in
the context of a political movement and youth culture that spans national
borders and that links the United States and Palestine, and exploring how it
is shaped by the politics of both locations.
To speak of the question of Palestine in the U.S. public sphere is to note
that the public sphere, by definition and in debates about its constitution, is
marked by relations of power. Silencing and exclusion are built into the struc-
ture of who and what can and cannot legitimately be a part of the public sphere
and what can and cannot be spoken or, as Talal Asad points, cannot be heard
by “publics” that are always politically constructed (2003, 184–85). I would
argue that the politics of collective denial and repression of the Palestine ques-
tion in the United States is linked to the larger politics of “collective amnesia”
S u n a i n a M a i r a ● 163
about the United States as an empire and that the two processes need to be
considered together to understand why Palestine so often goes “missing” in
mainstream public debates about the Middle East or international politics
(Finkelstein 2005; Said 1979).3 Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease, in their edited
volume Cultures of U.S. Imperialism (1993), advanced an analysis of U.S. empire
that they argued had long been absent, or evaded, in American studies as well
as in postcolonial studies, and off ered a framework that would connect cultural
politics and popular representations to the politics of late U.S. imperialism.
Th ey also argued that repression and subordination of marginalized groups
within the nation (women, minorities, immigrants, workers, queers) is linked
to U.S. overseas hegemony, and that the domestic and global frames of U.S.
empire needed to be connected rather than focused on as separate spheres of
analysis. Th is framework helps us understand how the repression of Palestin-
ian and Arab Americans and their racialization as threatening “others” to the
nation is inextricably intertwined with U.S. imperial policies in the Middle East
and, in particular, the U.S. role in the Palestine question.
Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim Americans are demonized and criminal-
ized as suspect “citizens” or the “enemy within” not only because of cultural
marginalization and religious diff erences with the West, but also because of
historic processes of Orientalism tied to U.S. interests in remapping the Mid-
dle East and in suppressing pan-Arab nationalism and movements opposing
its hegemony. Th e Palestine movement in the United States is caught in the
linkages of domestic racial, gender, and class politics within the nation and is
deeply shaped by U.S. foreign policies as well as by particular historical shifts
and events in the Middle East. Th e Palestine question is key, for it represents
a crucible in which some of these domestic and transnational dimensions
linked to U.S. imperialism emerge most sharply. Th e evolving Palestine move-
ment, the forms and rhetoric it uses and the alliances it generates, off ers a
political pedagogy of U.S. empire that reveals the linkages between various
struggles against colonialism, imperialism, and racism.
I am particularly interested in the ways that Palestinian, and Palestinian
American, youth understand and express these linkages and shape these
alliances, especially based on my experiences in the San Francisco Bay Area,
a locality that has its own particular race politics and political culture, and
“ We A i n ’ t M i s s i n g ”164 ●
in the case of Palestinian youth inside Israel, a location that reveals some of
the most acute contradictions of citizenship and settler colonialism. I will
focus here on youth culture, particularly hip hop, as a site of resistance and
solidarity in relation to the Palestine movement in order to understand how
politics is expressed outside of the realm of formal politics or official political
organizations. Th is paper is based on my interviews with Palestinian and
Palestinian American hip hop artists and analyses of their music and lyrics;
since I am not a musicologist, I focus less on the musical elements and more
on exploring the politics of this youth culture. I use this music to demon-
strate some of the issues facing the current generation of Palestinian and
Palestinian American youth and the possibilities and challenges of Palestine
movements in the U.S. public sphere.
P a l e s t i n i a n a n d P a l e s t i n i a n
A m e r i c a n H i p H o p
An emerging generation of Arab and Palestinian American youth is using
popular culture, particularly hip hop, as a medium through which to raise
awareness of the Palestinian question. Hip hop emerged in the United States
in the late 1970s as a subculture created by marginalized African American
and Puerto Rican youth in the South Bronx who responded to urban restruc-
turing, deindustrialization, poverty, and racism by producing a new cultural
expression of their experiences of political abandonment and alienation and
imaginings of the past, present, and future (Chang 2005; Rose 1994). Hip hop,
which consists of rap (MCing), graffiti, deejaying, and break dancing, has
been described by Tricia Rose as a hybrid cultural form that mixes Afro-
Caribbean and African American musical, oral, visual, and dance practices
with contemporary technologies and urban cultures to create a “counter-
dominant narrative” (1994, 82) Th e “heavy reliance on lyricism” makes hip
hop a genre that can be powerfully used for social and political commentary
by layering poetry over beats (Youmans 2007, 42).
Palestinian and Palestinian/Arab American rap is a poetics of displace-
ment and protest. In fact, some scholars such as Joseph Massad (2005)
situate the political rap produced by Palestinian youth in a longer tradition of
S u n a i n a M a i r a ● 165
revolutionary, underground Arabic music and political songs that have sup-
ported Palestinian liberation since the 1950s and that mix nationalist poetry
with hybrid Arab-Western musical instrumentation. Others, such as Will You-
mans (2007, 46–47), who is himself a hip hop artist (“Iron Sheik”), acknowledge
that, although some forms of improvised and folk poetry that are performed
by Palestinians and Arabs (such as zajal, mawwal [mawwaliya], and saj’) that
could be likened to Arabic spoken word—not to mention the percussiveness
and lyricism of Arabic music—but argue that the impetus for Arab American
hip hop is the mainstreaming and globalization of rap. Th e question of cultural
influences is not an either/or one; clearly Palestinian and Palestinian American
rappers are responding to both the global popularity of hip hop and to Arab
musical and poetic traditions they have grown up with and are incorporating
into a new cultural form. Th ese artists acknowledge this hybridity themselves;
for example, DAM, a Palestinian crew from Israel, notes that its influences
are “Jamal Abdel Nasser, Naji al-’Ali, Ghassan Kanafani, Fadwa Tuqan, Tupac
Shakur, Toufiq Ziyyad, Malcolm X, Marcel Khalife, Fairuz, El Sheikh Imam, Th e
Notorious BIG, George Habash, Edward Said, Nas, and KRS One.”4
As hip hop has crossed ethnic and class boundaries, it has become a multi-
ethnic and globalized art form even as it has become increasingly mainstream.
Many fans of political or so-called conscious rap lament that the oppositional
thrust of hip hop has waned as it has become increasingly commercialized;
some argue that this is part of the “politics of containment” directed at youth
of color in the post–civil rights era (Chang 2005). It is apparent that, although
hip hop culture may in some instances be critical or implicitly subversive of
consumerism, it is always engaged with the realm of commerce and does not
exist outside of U.S. or global capitalism, like all other forms of popular cul-
ture that are marketed, distributed, and consumed (Lipsitz 1994; Kelley 1997).
Palestinian and Palestinian/Arab American and Palestinian hip hop is getting
increased attention, but it is still, for the most part, an underground music
that has not yet entered the mainstream music industry and is distributed via
the Internet and Arab/Arab American stores.
Yet young Palestinian and Arab American rappers who are part of the hip
hop underground are getting increasing attention, such as Iron Sheik ( from
Oakland but now based in Ann Arbor, Michigan), Excentrik (Oakland), the
“ We A i n ’ t M i s s i n g ”166 ●
Philistines (Los Angeles), the NOMADS (also from L.A.), and the Brooklyn-
based Hammer Brothers, who wrote a “Free Palestine” anthem. Numerous
other Palestinian and Arab American MCs around the United States do
political rap, such as Masari (San Francisco), MC Shaheed (New Orleans),
Gaza Strip (New York), ASH ONE (New Jersey), and Arabic Assassin (Hous-
ton), not to mention well-known music producers such as Fredwreck (Los
Angeles) and spoken word poets such as Suheir Hammad (New York), star of
Def Jam Broadway (Alim 2005; Davey D 2007; Youmans 2007).5 In fact, Iron
Sheik, who was inspired to produce and write rap in high school because of
politically conscious groups such as Public Enemy and A Tribe Called Quest,
suggests that the “message rap” produced by Palestinian American youth is
reinvigorating the progressive potential of hip hop: “I feel ambivalent about
what hip hop has become in the U.S. and I’m happy to see messages in rap
again” (2008). Arab and Palestinian American hip hop artists are part of a
transnational hip hop movement that includes young artists in Palestine/
Israel—such as DAM and MWR in Israel; the Ramallah Underground, Check-
point 303, and Boikutt in the West Bank; PR (Palestine Rapperz) in Gaza; and
Clotaire K, Aksser, and DJ Lethal Skillz in Lebanon—as well as MCs in the
larger Arab diaspora (such as I AM and MC Solaar in France, and Palestine
a.k.a. Ref-UG in Sweden) who increasingly perform all over Europe and North
America (Gross et al. 1996).
A new generation of Palestinian and Arab American youth have grown up
identifying with the experiences of racism shared with other youth of color in
the United States, and are increasingly vocal about critiquing their profiling
after 9/11 and linking it to older structures of Orientalism and anti-Arab racism.
Similarly, a politicized generation of Palestinian youth inside the 1948 borders
of Israel (the ’48 Palestinians) are critical of the painful and paradoxical condi-
tion of being “citizens without citizenship” or without the full rights of Jewish
citizens in Israel (Sultany 2003). Tamer Nafar of DAM identified with the rap
of African American artists such as Tupac Shakur, who commented on the
poverty and racism aff ecting inner-city youth that Nafar, too, experienced
growing up in Lid, Israel: “My reality is hip hop. I listened to the lyrics and felt
they were describing me, my situation. You can exchange the word ‘nigger’
S u n a i n a M a i r a ● 167
with ‘Palestinian.’ Lid is the ghetto, the biggest crime and drug center in the
Middle East. When I heard Tupac sing ‘It’s a White Man’s World,’ I decided to
take hip hop seriously” (in El-Sabawi 2005). Th e music created by these Pales-
tinian youth—in the diaspora, the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel—demonstrates
transnational and cross-ethnic linkages among Palestinians, Palestinian and
Arab Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, Native American, and
Latino/a youth through popular culture, as I will demonstrate.
In 2007, a new Arab American musical project called Arab Summit
was formed and released an eponymous album. Arab Summit consists of
Excentrik (Tarek Kazaleh of Rogue State); Ragtop who is part of the Filipino-
Palestinian American hip hop crew, the Philistines; Omar Off endum, a Syrian
American member of the NOMADS (who says he is from “Los Shem-geles”);
and Narcycist of Euphrates, an Iraqi Canadian artist from Montreal. Members
of Arab Summit have performed at political and community events around
the country, including at the inauguration of the Edward Said mural at San
Francisco State University in 2007, where I saw Excentrik and Narcycist
perform for an enthusiastic crowd of Palestinians of all ages while students
waved Palestinian flags in the middle of the campus. For Narcycist (a.k.a
Jamal Abdul Narcel), the agenda of the collective is “to speak on the issues
that have touched us and aff ected our lives indirectly or directly. I want to
further investigate the study of Arab identity in the West vis-à-vis hip hop
cultural belonging” (in Christoff 2007). Hip hop becomes a tool not only for
documenting but also for analyzing the conditions of growing up Arab in
the diaspora and an archive of the historical memories and collective experi-
ences of Arab and Palestinian youth.
H i s t o r y : “ A t O d d s w i t h L e s s o n s W e L e a r n ”
Tell me why all our children gotta die, why our mothers and fathers gotta cry?
Ramallah-wide born in California, seen a potent portion of the pride.
Even if you see the evil with your 3yn [eye], it can only be deflected with your pain.
Always at odds with lessons we learn. It’s a beautiful thing we can’t explain.
—Excentrik, “Somebody Please,” Arab Summit (2007)
“ We A i n ’ t M i s s i n g ”168 ●
Th e Palestinian American youth who are part of this growing Arab American
hip hop movement are the second or third generation of Palestinians living
in the United States and are grappling with the painful as well as “beautiful”
aspects of their experiences that are “always at odds” with official narratives
in the United States that erase and deny Palestinian histories. As Excentrik
suggests, this generation is asserting its Arab and Palestinian pride through a
new idiom—hip hop and youth culture. Th e websites of Palestinian American
MCs from New Jersey to Texas, who have names like Palestine Free 4 Eva and
Palestine Till Death, are adorned with red, white, green, and black proclama-
tions of their love for Palestine and contain weblinks to Palestine solidarity
campaigns. Like Excentrik, who is part of a large community of Palestinians
from the Ramallah area that lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, they identify
not only with exiled Palestinians but also with Palestinians currently living
under occupation or facing apartheid-style discrimination.
Juliane Hammer (2005, 83) writes of a politics of nostalgia among Pales-
tinian youth in the diaspora but also shows how these youth use collective
memory and nationalist symbols of the “homeland” to connect to tangible
issues such as the politics of return and the rights of refugees. Hammer’s
ethnographic study, Palestinians Born in Exile, touches on the music and
poetry used by Palestinian rap and spoken word artists to raise awareness
of the Palestine question. Th e cause of Palestinian liberation is obviously a
key touchstone of identity for Palestinian youth in the diaspora, and their
music deals not only with issues of cultural identity but also of global politics.
On his first underground album, Camel Clutch, Iron Sheik recorded songs
such as “Olive Trees” and “194” that he sings at political events to educate
and galvanize youth; these songs address issues of displacement, the right of
return, the history of Zionism, Orientalism in the media, and anti-Arab rac-
ism. Iron Sheik’s songs (Weir 2004) also make links to the genocide against
Native Americans (“As a Palestinian / feel more like an Indian / driven into
reservations / living under occupation / as a shattered nation / a Western
creation”), a persistent theme in Palestinian and diasporic hip hop that ar-
ticulates a critique of settler colonialism in the United States and in Israel
(Wimsatt 1994). Th e refrain of “Olive Trees” is: “Th ey exiled us and stole our
homes / Now all we have is old keys and new poems” (Camel Clutch, 2003).
S u n a i n a M a i r a ● 169
Th e song evokes the dispossession of refugees in the past but also the politi-
cal expression of future generations of Palestinians. Iron Sheik’s lyrics reflect
neither a romanticized vision of homeland nor an easy invocation of liberal
human rights discourse, but he uses hip hop as a political tool that connects
diff erent movements and speaks musically and aesthetically to the growing
culture of hip hop fans in the United States and globally.
Palestinian immigrant communities in the United States and other parts of
the diaspora have obviously always been shaped by the politics of their home-
land and its relationship with Israel and the United States. Arab migration
from what is today Syria and Lebanon formed the bulk of migration before
World War I, and the first Palestinian immigrants came to the United States in
the early twentieth century. Th e second major wave of Arab immigration and
of Palestinian refugees was after World War II and the Nakba in 1948, which
led to the exodus of more than 700,000 displaced Palestinians (Abraham 1983).
Th e Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973, as well as the U.S. Immigration Act of
1965, were followed by a third wave of Palestinian immigration to the United
States. Whereas many early immigrants from the Levant became peddlers
who traveled to rural areas, later immigrants lived predominantly in urban
areas and were employed in the industrial sector, particularly the automobile
industry centered in Detroit, Michigan, which is home to the Ford company
(Abraham 1983). Kazaleh’s family was part of this migration to Detroit; his
great-grandfather came to the United States in the early twentieth century
and worked in a paper factory there (Excentrik 2007). His grandfather then left
Ramallah to join his father in Detroit in the 1930s and went back to Palestine
to have children, but returned in 1952 when he lost all his land. Kazaleh is thus
fourth-generation Palestinian American; his father worked at two jobs, at the
store and at the Ford factory in Detroit. Kazaleh, who remembers the older
generation of Arab immigrants who were still working in the auto factory, lived
in an Arab American neighborhood before moving to the Bay Area. In San
Francisco, he found a community of Palestinian Americans who owned small
businesses, such as liquor and convenience stores, and a diverse, progressive
community that was less ethnically segregated than Detroit, in his view.
Although Palestinian immigrant communities have grown through chain
migration and the sponsorship of relatives, and have traveled to and from the
“ We A i n ’ t M i s s i n g ”170 ●
homeland across generations like many other transnational communities,
they were marked by an identity that was rendered invisible and from a place
whose history was not recognized in the United States (Said 1979, 2000).
Moreover, Arab identity was racially ambiguous in the United States, and
Arabs and Palestinians were variously classified as white, Asiatic, Syrian, and
“Mohammedan” throughout the twentieth century, being “not quite white”
within the prevalent black/white racial polarity (Samhan 1999). As Iron Sheik,
who grew up between black and white neighborhoods in the Detroit area,
notes, “Th ere is a very ambiguous racial positioning for Arab Americans. Hip
hop is a way to . . . express solidarity with people of color. A good example
is Suheir Hammad, whose book of poems was titled, Born Palestinian, Born
Black” (2008). In using a cultural form such as hip hop, which was created by
marginalized African American and Latino youth and is identified with an
oppositional youth subculture, some Palestinian and Arab American youth
have been aligning themselves with other youth of color, culturally and po-
litically. Yet both Excentrik and Iron Sheik are very aware of the racial and
class tensions that exist between African and Arab Americans in urban areas
such as Dearborn and Detroit, Michigan, commenting on issues of mutual
suspicion, prejudice, and racial segregation, and do not romanticize this
cross-ethnic affiliation and solidarity.
In my previous research on second-generation South Asian youth drawn
to hip hop in New York (Maira 2002), I argued that this cultural affiliation was
perhaps a way for young Asian Americans to negotiate the contradictions of
being neither black nor white, of being part of an upwardly mobile commu-
nity, and of appropriating the styles and sounds of a subculture associated
with youth of color. Yet hip hop has increasingly crossed ethnic, racial, and
class boundaries, and even national borders, so its identification with black-
ness is increasingly contested in debates about what defines “authentic” hip
hop and keeps it “real” (see, for example, Flores 2000; Wang 2007). As Ex-
centrik observes, “People of diff erent voices find a place in hip hop because
there’s so much room for voices in hip hop. . . . Hip hop . . . is so accessible,
it’s trendy, and so people gravitate toward that” (2007). It is possible that
this is the allure for some Palestinian and Arab American youth, who grow
up in suburban, middle- or upper-middle-class families and who identify
S u n a i n a M a i r a ● 171
with what has become a pervasively American subculture. At the same time,
working-class Arab Americans such as those in Dearborn, were aff ected by
the same politics of deindustrialization that aff ected African American and
other blue-collar workers struggling to live in depressed urban areas similar
to those where hip hop was created (Abraham et al. 1983). Excentrik, who
began doing spoken word while he was in high school, commented, “We
were ridiculed for being into hop hop in high school. . . . I don’t see it as an
over-important cultural phenomenon, I grew up in hip hop in the city. . . . I
grew up in cities—many Palestinians in the suburbs don’t know what gave
birth to hip hop” (2007). Whereas some Palestinian and Arab Americans may
be ignorant of the history of hip hop and of the struggles of people of color
in the United States, it is also true that many Americans do not know the
full history of the Palestinian struggle. It is this experience of being white yet
not white, urban and suburban, immigrant and second- or third-generation,
Arab Muslim or Arab Christian, and still without a nation-state that shapes
the politics expressed in Palestinian American hip hop.
Th e post–civil rights discourse of ethnic pluralism and the emphasis
on multicultural diversity in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s pro-
moted the popular expression of ethnic identity in music, dance, and the
arts. Yet Arab American identity, let alone Palestinian identity, was not
really promoted or celebrated by this rhetoric of inclusion, even within
the confines of a liberal multicultural model. Arab identity has historically
been difficult for Arab Americans to express in the public sphere because of
repressive domestic policies targeting Arab Americans that have accompa-
nied U.S. overseas interventions and support for Israel. State surveillance
and repression of Arab American political activity began well before 2001;
as early as 1972, President Richard Nixon launched Operation Boulder, a
little-known FBI program targeting Arab American students and activists
for surveillance; and the notorious case of the L.A. Eight was initiated in
1986 and not resolved for the Palestinian activists involved until 20 years
later (Cole and Dempsey 2002; Orfalea 2006).6 In general, there has been
a persistent strand of anti-Arab racism in American culture, heightened
during events such as the Arab-Israeli war, the OPEC oil crisis, the first Gulf
War, the 9/11 attacks, the current war in Iraq, and the ongoing, U.S.-backed
“ We A i n ’ t M i s s i n g ”172 ●
Israeli occupation and incursions into the West Bank and Gaza (Abraham
1994; Salaita 2006; Saliba 1994).
Some scholars suggest that this repression and broader anti-Arab racism
led to a general cautiousness within Arab American communities about pub-
licly displaying Arab identity; this cautiousness, in turn, partially dissolved
in later generations and with the growth of Arab nationalism in the 1960s
(Abraham 1983; Orfalea 2006). Newer immigrants from the Arab world also
helped forge a pan-Arab identity and a heightened political consciousness
about the Palestine situation that was more overtly expressed in Arab Ameri-
can communities such as Dearborn (Abraham et al. 1983, 177–78). Th e 1967
Arab-Israeli war and the anti-Arab representations in the U.S. media at the
time galvanized a younger generation of Arab Americans who supported the
Palestinian struggle and formed pan-Arab American political organizations,
such as the Arab American University Graduates in 1967 and the American
Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee in 1980 (Abraham 1983; Orfalea 2006).
During the October Arab-Israeli War in 1973, 2,000 Arab Americans from the
Southend, a largely working-class community in Dearborn, staged a demon-
stration in front of the United Auto Workers’ office to demand that the UAW
divest from Israel, and later organized a massive protest at a B’nai Brith event
that involved Arab high school students and auto workers (Abraham et al.
1983, 178–79). In fact, Gregory Orfalea describes the 1972–1981 as a period of
“political awakening” for Arab American collective organizing and entry into
U.S. electoral politics (2006, 216).
Th ese events are important for situating the Palestine movement and
youth activism in a larger historical context that has shaped the ebb and
flow of mobilization around the Palestine issue in the United States. As other
scholars have pointed out, Palestine activism spearheaded by Arab national-
ists has a long history in the United States that is rarely acknowledged and
that predates the Six Day War of 1967; for example, Lawrence Davidson (1999)
has documented the attempts of Arab nationalists in the United States to
mobilize around the Palestine question and in opposition to the Balfour
Declaration from 1917 to 1932. Contemporary political hip hop focused on
the Palestine issue seems to be, in part, an expression of the politicization of
a new generation of Palestinian Americans who are countering the message
S u n a i n a M a i r a ● 173
of some of their parents and families to stay away from politics and to avoid
raising controversial issues in public (Orfalea 2006). Iron Sheik says, “I also
want Arab Americans . . . to gain a view that it’s cool to be political, it’s OK
. . . to speak truth to power” (Weir 2004). Clearly, the fear of taking a public
stance on an issue that is considered highly controversial and is repressed
in U.S. mainstream discourse, such as the Palestine question, is justified
by that very repression. If, as Said (2000) observed, speaking of Palestine
from a Palestinian perspective in the United States is the “last taboo,” then
breaking that taboo has a price, and it is a very high one for narratives that
challenge dominant or official histories. In the wake of the surveillance,
detentions, and deportations targeting Arab and Muslim Americans after
9/11, and the charged climate for political speech challenging U.S. govern-
ment policy in the Middle East, many Arab and Palestinian immigrants,
parents, as well as youth understandably experienced a heightened fear of
engaging in political activism that might endanger them or their families
(Cainkar and Maira 2005) .
R e s i s t a n c e
Despite the repressive political climate, Palestinian American youth have
chosen not to remain silent but to challenge the racist profiling and Ori-
entalist images of Arabs and Muslims as terrorists and fundamentalists
that suff use mainstream U.S. discourse, implicitly and explicitly. Excentrik
remembers being harassed while growing up and being called “terrorist”
and “Saddam” (2007). Ragtop, whose MC name is a play on the racist slur
of “camel jockey” and “raghead,” comments, “Th e inspiration to do what
we do definitely came from a mixture of personal and political feelings . . .
for me it was the backlash following 9/11, both in the media and [against]
our communities, that really drove me to try and make my voice heard” (in
Christoff 2007). Ragtop mocks the surveillance of the privatized national
security state in the song “We Need Order,” which alludes both to the do-
mestic criminalization and deportation of youth of color in the “law and
order” regime and the global criminalization of those who resist the New
World Order:
“ We A i n ’ t M i s s i n g ”174 ●
Order in the court—order him deported, it’s plethoras of his sort up in our
borders . . . hook them to the corporate pursuit of new suits and profits,
use they dollars to shoot launch bombs into orbit more troops—Cameras
on every front stoop, and they porches. GPS systems in they coupes and
Porsches so their movements is tracked don’t lose the coordinates. Me?—I’m
a MC—I’ll never forfeit. Catalogue it on an analog disc—record IT . . . (Arab
Summit 2007)
Ragtop and Narcycist both speak of the profiling and “special security”
searches they have experienced while traveling across borders in the United
States, Canada, and Israel. At the same time, Off endum is acutely aware
that the detention suff ered by many Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim political
prisoners, from Guantánamo to Israel, is far graver (Christoff 2007).
Palestinian and Arab American hip hop counters Orientalist stereotypes
of Arabs, subverting gendered and racialized representations of sheiks, ter-
rorists, harems, and “camel jockeys” through their names and album titles.
Th ey play with the hysteria about Arab terrorism and reappropriate signifiers
of the “exotic” Middle East in the imagery on their albums, websites, and
music videos. For example, the cover of Arab Summit album is imprinted
with the motto, “Arabs at it again!” and a slyly mocking seal for the “De-
partment of Arab-man Security.” NOMADS actually stands for “Notoriously
Off ensive Arab Males Doing S—,” a tongue-in-cheek play on images of Arab
male terrorists as well as on exotic wandering tribes. Iron Sheik takes his MC
name from the name of a 1980s wrestling star who used to wear a red kaffiyeh
and represent the “bad guys” (Weir 2004). Th ese artists seem to be aware of
the pitfalls and contradictions of self-Orientalization and commodification
of a culture that is simultaneously maligned as backward, anti-modern, anti-
democratic, and fundamentally “other” to the West (Said 1978). Excentrik
also hints at the dangers of liberal Orientalist responses to Arab music: “If
I’m playing my ‘oud, some old Berkeley lady wants to take my picture, talking
about my ‘exotic’ culture” (in Christoff 2007).
In their music, these young Arab American artists speak of anti-Arab rac-
ism and Islamophobia in the United States, particularly after 9/11 but also in
ongoing Orientalist representations of Arabs, and connect it to the racism of
S u n a i n a M a i r a ● 175
occupation and apartheid in Palestine and the war in Iraq. Referring to the
Arab Summit’s song, “No Justice,” which layers a sample from a Bob Marley
song over Fairuz’ stirring ode to Jerusalem in “La Fleur Des Cities,” Ragtop
insightfully observes, “Get up stand up is of course a reference to the classic
Bob Marley line recorded before Fairuz . . . [which] reinforces the idea that
little has changed” (in Christoff 2007). Th e sampling of songs from diff erent
historical moments and political struggles allows hip hop artists to articulate
an analysis of historical continuities across time and place. “No Justice” be-
gins by tracing the links between Palestinian, Haitian, and post-Katrina New
Orleans refugees and poverty in Los Angeles and the Philippines, suggesting
that there will always be injustice as long as the ravages of imperialism and
global capitalism persist:
Nope—ain’t none left. Knock down house make build up stress. Ain’t no jus-
tice, ain’t no peace, ain’t no place safe left to be. We got refugees from Haiti
to the P. to those fleeing toes freezing wet from New Orleans, we got people
waiting for their piece of the cake and it’s a long line of empty plates—From
L.A. to the Bay to Wastes of Manila, where your waste is they food, shit that
you’d throw away gets consumed with a little bit of regret, whole lotta not
enough yet get your dollars anyway that you can. (Arab Summit 2007)
Th e politics of solidarity espoused by Arab Summit, Iron Sheik, and other
young hip hop artists is very important for Palestine activists who do not
want to remain focused on single-issue politics and who see the Palestine
movement as intertwined with other movements for self-determination
and social justice. However, Iron Sheik comments that, in his view, most
Arab American youth do not make alliances with other groups; he finds this
problematic, for he is critical of the Zionist discourse of “unique victimhood”
and of Palestinians who respond with their own discourse of exceptional-
ism. Iron Sheik thinks it is important for Palestinian and Arab American
youth to show greater solidarity with other causes, for as he points out, “Th e
Palestinian experience is not unique in the twentieth century. Displacement
and dispossession have happened throughout world history” (2008). What
is unusual, if not unique, is the silencing of the Palestinian struggle in the
“ We A i n ’ t M i s s i n g ”176 ●
United States, and underground Palestinian and Palestinian/Arab American
hip hop helps shatter this silence. Th is growing genre is allowing Palestinian
and Palestinian American youth to make the connections between racial
profiling, surveillance, segregation, militarism, warfare, and police brutality
in the United States and the Palestinian diaspora as well as in the Occupied
Territories and Israel, off ering a musical critique of global structures of co-
lonialism, racism, and war.
H i p H o p f r o m P a l e s t i n e ’ 4 8 :
“ W e W a n t a G e n e r a t i o n o f G i a n t s ”
We want an angry generation
To plough the sky, to blow up history
To blow up our thoughts
We want a new generation
Th at does not forgive mistakes
Th at does not bend
We want a generation of giants . . .
—DAM, “Mali Hurriye” (I Don’t Have Freedom), 2007
Rappers from Palestine are part of a Palestinian and Arab youth movement
that spans national borders and that allows Palestinian youth in the diaspora
to communicate with one another and share their stories and views. Th ere is
a transnational connection between Palestinian/Arab American youth and
hip hop artists from the Arab world, such as from Palestine and Lebanon
( for example, DJ Lethal Skillz from Beirut has collaborated with Omar Of-
fendum of the NOMADS, and Excentrik has performed with MWR), as well
as Arab artists from Europe (DAM has a song with My Hood, a Moroccan
French rapper, in which they link “the ghettos of Palestine to the ghettos
of France”). DAM has performed with the Philistines in Los Angeles, and
Ragtop speaks of how “cats like our boys the Palestinian [MCs] DAM” are
engaged in a similar project of creating an “honest expression of their lives”
(in Christoff 2007). DAM did their premier concert in the United States in
2005, at a New York benefit for the album “Free the P,” dedicated to the youth
S u n a i n a M a i r a ● 177
of Palestine and released to support a documentary film about Palestinian
hip hop, Slingshot Hip Hop: Th e Palestinian Lyrical Front, directed by Jacque-
line Salloum (Kanazi 2005). DAM shared the stage with Latino and African
American hip hop artists and with Invincible, an Israeli American woman
from Detroit whose song on the album, “No Compromises,” addresses issues
of occupation, resistance, and the apartheid wall, as well as police brutality
and racism in Detroit.
DAM (or Da Arabian MCs; dam also means “persisting” in Arabic and
“blood” in Hebrew) became globally famous with their first single, the sear-
ing song “Meen Erhabi (Who’s the Terrorist?)” released in 2001 and report-
edly downloaded more than a million times from their website until 2008
(Charnas 2008). In the powerful video for the song produced by Jacqueline
Salloum and circulated on the Internet, they rap over images of the occupa-
tion and the Intifada:
Who’s a terrorist?
Me, a terrorist?
How am I a terrorist
When you’ve taken my land?
You’re the terrorist!
You’ve taken everything I own while I’m living in my homeland.
You want me to go to the law?
You’re the witness, the lawyer, and the judge.
I’ll be sentenced to death,
To end up the majority in the cemetery.
. . .
You attack me but still you cry out,
When I remind you it was you attacked me
You silence me and shout,
“Don’t they have parents to keep them at home?”
DAM, who released their first full album, Dedication, in 2007 consists of
Tamer Nafar, his younger brother Suhell Nafar, and Mahmoud Jreri, all of
whom grew up in “the slums of Lod [Lid],” between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.7
“ We A i n ’ t M i s s i n g ”178 ●
Th eir music combines Arabic instrumentation and melodies with rap in
Arabic and Hebrew, sampling speeches by Nasser and poetry by such Pales-
tinian poets as Tawfiq Zayyad. DAM’s music is a powerful commentary on
the contradictions of being Palestinian citizens of Israel, the so-called ’48
Palestinians who represent 19 percent (1.2 million) of the Israeli population.
In “Meen Erhabi,” they astutely critique the notion that Israel is a democracy
with equal rights for all its citizens by pointing out that there is no neutral
arbiter of justice in a state where discrimination is built into citizenship and
the law itself. Th is is acknowledged even in an Israeli government report
issued by the Orr Commission in 2003, which noted that specific rights
granted only to Jewish citizens are encoded in “the Law of Return and the
Laws of Citizenship; in the normative definitions of the educational, media,
and judiciary systems, and . . . the Jewish Agency and the Jewish National
Fund. Th ey were also expressed in the very legal definition of the state as a
Jewish state” (in Rabinowitz and Abu-Baker 2005, 160). In the song “G’areeb Fi
Biladi” (Stanger in My Own Country, 2007), DAM notes the paradox inherent
in the notion of a state that claims to be both democratic and Jewish:
Who cares about us? We are dying slowly
Controlled by a Zionist democratic government!
Ya,’ democratic to the Jewish soul
And Zionist to the Arabic soul
Th at is to say, what is forbidden to him is forbidden to me
And what is allowed to him is forbidden to me
And what’s allowed to me is unwanted by me . . .
In fact, the Orr Commission’s report was issued after an investigation of a
historical event that was a turning point in the consciousness of Palestinian
youth inside Israel: Black October. Th irteen young Palestinians were killed by
Israeli police within two weeks in October 2000 during demonstrations and
acts of civil disobedience that broke out in support of the Intifada that had
begun in the Occupied Territories and that galvanized political resistance
among a younger generation of ’48 Palestinians. Th e Orr Commission’s anal-
ysis was surprisingly frank, yet it failed to hold the Israeli police accountable
S u n a i n a M a i r a ● 179
or to make practical recommendations to address the ongoing problems
(Rabinowitz and Abu-Baker 2005).8 DAM commemorates the deaths of these
13 shaheeds (martyrs), naming each one: “When the stones are in the hand,
13 shaheeds / Th e ALA (highness) of our land, and the EMAD (base) of it /
Black October proved that the EYAD (support) is in our blood . . .” (2007).
Th e events of October 2000, like the deaths of Palestinians in Galilee who
were protesting Israel’s land expropriation policies in 1976 and that are com-
memorated annually as Land Day, deeply aff ected what Dan Rabinowitz
and Khawla Abu-Baker call “the Stand-Tall Generation.”9 Th is generation of
Palestinians, who are the grandchildren of the generation that experienced
the Nakba and the children of those who mobilized the Palestinian minority
in Israel in the 1970s and 1980s, is assertively challenging the fundamental
definition of Israel as “the state of the Jewish people”; they are demanding
full citizenship and equality, building on the Palestinian national movement
within Israel that has been developing since the 1990s, if not earlier (Rabi-
nowitz and Abu-Baker 2005, 2–3). Many in this generation reject the illusion
of civil rights and citizenship as promised by the Israeli state. Saz (Samih
Zakout), a young rapper from Ramleh, which is also a mixed Jewish-Arab
town like Lid, raps: “Th e authorities give you freedom of expression? No! / Are
you an Israeli citizen? Of course not! / It’s about time we faced the facts / We
deserve equal rights, lift your head up, stand tall” (2006; emphasis mine).
In the documentary film about his life and music, Saz articulates a deeply
skeptical view of the notion of inclusion of Palestinians in the Israeli state
as it is currently constructed: “I don’t consider myself Israeli, I don’t have
a relationship with Israel. What’s Israeli citizenship to me? My blue ID?”
Later he reflects, “As time goes by, I realize I have nothing to do with this
country. I have nothing here, but the land is mine. Th e police, the school,
nothing is mine, nothing belongs to me.” For Saz and others of the Stand-Tall
Generation, “the state of Israel has failed and it is now their turn to put it on
probation” until it off ers them “genuine equality, including the recognition of
collective rights and the rectification of past wrongs. Until then, they see the
state as a mere provider of services, not a locus of true affiliation. . . . Th eir
point of departure—a clear sense of not belonging—is their first step toward
emancipation” (Rabinowitz and Abu-Baker 2005, 137). Th is sense of radical
“ We A i n ’ t M i s s i n g ”180 ●
alienation of youth, who reject the deliberate erasure of their Palestinian
identity in the state’s label, “Israeli Arabs,” and of their history in the Israeli
educational curriculum, is expressed in DAM’s “G’areeb Fi Biladi” (2007):
’Cause it’s denying my existence
Still blind to my colors, my history and my people
Brain-washing my children
So that they grow up in a reality
Th at doesn’t represent them
Th e blue ID card worth nothing to us
Let us believe we are a part of a nation
Th at does nothing but makes us feel like strangers
Me?? A stranger in my own country!!
Palestinians within the 1948 borders have an acute sense of estrange-
ment from a national project that was built on the erasure of their history
and grapple daily with the paradox of being a minority in their own land,
surrounded by an alien culture and society, and living with the contradic-
tions of settler colonialism.10 In the documentary, Saz talks about being
beaten by the Israeli police simply for not having his ID card while shop-
ping in the market, and of being watched by bystanders “like an animal,”
observing, “It’s time Arabs woke up, especially here in Lid, Ramleh . . . I’ve
had it, I don’t want to live this life. So I chose rap. . . . I especially want the
young Arabs to be able to walk down the street and lift their heads up
without anyone marking them with an ‘X’” (2006). Rappers from ’48 Pales-
tine “sing about racism and living as third class citizens, police brutality,
and wanting to be united with all Arabs around the world” (in El-Sabawi
2005). MWR’s song, “Because I’m an Arab,” echoes similar themes of racism
against Palestinian citizens of Israel, and their music addresses issues of
“religious and class divisions fostered by Israeli policies” and the need for
greater unity among Palestinians (Massad 2005, 193). Th e songs of DAM,
MWR, and Saz are, in fact, full of the same outrage about police brutality,
inner city poverty, and the failure of the state to protect the rights of its
minority citizens that infuses political rap in the United States, exposing
S u n a i n a M a i r a ● 181
the hypocrisy and racism of “national security” and “anti-terrorist” policies
in both Israel and the United States.
Even a reviewer from the Washington Post acknowledged that, whereas
in mainstream hip hop, “successful American rap artists squandered their
political bully pulpit long ago,” DAM’s powerful music and growing popular-
ity is evidence that “hip-hop is still the voice of the oppressed, influencing
politics and moving the masses” (Charnas 2008). When I interviewed Nafar
on the phone (2007), he was getting ready for a series of ten shows around
Israel as part of a campaign to resist the government’s call for Palestinian Is-
raelis to sign up for national service. DAM had written a song that addressed
the contradiction in this recruitment of a dispossessed minority for national
duty, with a line that would resonate with American minorities resisting re-
cruitment by the U.S. military, for it notes wryly: “For the national service, we
want Arabs that left behind their memory” (2007). DAM and other rappers
are successfully using their music as a tool for political critique and mobi-
lization, though Nafar seems frustrated with the lack of a music industry in
Israel that supports Palestinian rap. Yet MCs from Israel, the West Bank, and
Gaza have managed to use the internet and new technologies to distribute
and publicize their music through the Palestinian hip hop underground. Th is
follows in the tradition of underground Arabic music on cassettes and radio
broadcasts from the 1960s and 1970s that supported the Palestinian guerrilla
movement and also the Palestinians suff ering inside Israel.11
Palestinian Israelis are discriminated against, directly and indirectly, in
the provision of social services by the state, and many, including college
students, have waged legal and political battles to fight for equality, so the
state is not seen even as a minimal source of social support by many (Ada-
lah 2001; Rabinowitz and Abu-Baker 2005; Sultany 2003). Nafar says that
his generation of ’48 Palestinians is concerned with “finding [their] identity,
getting an education, finding jobs” and housing and struggling to assert their
Palestinian identity (2007). In DAM’s “Ng’ayer Bukra” (Change Tomorrow), a
song which features children from Lid and is focused on issues of education,
employment, identity, and historical memory aff ecting Palestinian Israeli
youth, they rap: “Don’t grab a gun but grab a pen and write / i’m an arab like
Mahmoud Darwish did.”12 DAM supports nonviolent resistance but, like Saz,
“ We A i n ’ t M i s s i n g ”182 ●
they are critical of “co-existence” programs, Jewish-Arab youth dialogues,
and “peace” talks that evade structural inequalities: “Th is situation reminds
me of Apartheid and Nelson Mandela / Didn’t he say Gandhi flowers don’t
always work / So to all the people of love and peace / How can we have
coexistence when we don’t even exist? / It takes revolution to find a solution”
( from “Inquilab,” Revolution, 2007).
It is striking that Nafar and DAM are the Palestinian hip hop artists
that are perhaps best known in the United States, and that it is the political
rap produced by groups such as MWR and Arapyat ( from Acca), Saz ( from
Ramleh), and Th e Happiness Kids ( from Jaff a) that has drawn attention to
the politicization of Palestinian youth inside Israel.13 Th ese youth and their
experiences were often neglected in the discourse of the Palestine move-
ment in the United States, which has traditionally focused on refugees and
the plight of Palestinians under occupation but has not always linked the
condition of those on the “outside” (in the West Bank and Gaza) to those
on the “inside” (within Israel). Layered over the critique of segregation and
apartheid in the rap lyrics of Palestinians living inside Israel is also an astute
attempt to link the condition of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza with
those inside the 1948 borders. Afif Safieh noted that Palestinians, as an exiled
people scattered throughout the globe, could use their dispersal across dif-
ferent nations to their advantage and turn their diff erences and divisions
into a source of strength, rather than weakness and fragmentation (2007).
In “G’areed Fi Biladi,” DAM (2007) directly challenges the perception that
’48 Palestinians are somehow less loyal, authentic, and resistant for being
citizens of Israel and comments on the feeling of not being recognized:
And our Arabian roots are still strong
But still our Arabian brothers are calling us renegades!!??
Noooooooooooooooooooooo
We never sold our country,
Th e occupation has written our destiny
Which is, that the whole world till today is treating us as Israelis
And Israel till tomorrow will treat us as Palestinians
S u n a i n a M a i r a ● 183
In addition to helping connect the issues of occupation and settler colonial-
ism to the condition of exile, thus linking ’48 Palestine with the West Bank,
Gaza, and the diaspora, Palestinian hip hop is important for the Palestinian
rights movement, especially internationally, because rappers such as DAM
emphasize core issues of equality and freedom. Th ese are at the heart of
questions of self-determination and are strategic concepts that can be used
to mobilize mass support for Palestine on the fundamental issues. In “Sawa’
Al Zaman” (Driver of Fate) DAM raps: “Drop me in Equality and I’ll walk
alone to Peace / Don’t tell me they are not on the same track . . . Take me
to the unknown place called the ‘United Arabs’ / Take me to the freedom
that was taken from us / Take me to the heart of fighting so we’ll take it
back” (2007). Linking the “inside” and “outside” in the Palestine movement
also helps us link the “inside” and “outside” of U.S. empire—Palestinians and
Arabs “here” and “there,” minorities and native peoples in the United States
and beyond. Th is hip hop movement helps underscore the importance of
taking back the fight for equality, freedom, and justice on a self-determined
conceptual terrain.
T e n s i o n s : B e t w e e n a R o c k
a n d a H a r d P l a c e
Th ere are two major points of potential tension or debate in the political hip
hop produced by Palestinian and Palestinian American youth. One is the
tension that some rap artists feel between their artistic development and
political motivations. Th e Sheik says he is an “‘activist first, then an MC. I
got back into producing hip hop as an alternative way to communicate the
messages and ideas I work with.” For him, there is no tension for he is very
clear that “if it weren’t for the politics, I wouldn’t be doing it” (2008). Iron
Sheik has increasingly shifted to hosting shows and writing articles, rather
than producing hip hop, because he feels this is the most eff ective medium
for political activism at this point in his life, and given the emergence of
Palestinian rap around the United States; he is now in a graduate program
and has a political blog, Kabobfest.14 Nafar, who is clearly passionate about
being a Palestinian artist, is ambivalent about being restricted in the content
“ We A i n ’ t M i s s i n g ”184 ●
of his music and by the expectations that he perform the anthems for the
movement; he says, “Yanni (you know), sometimes I feel selfish but it’s not
always about Palestine. . . . It doesn’t make you feel like an artist, singing
the same thing” (2007). Th ere is no inherent contradiction between art and
politics, but there is a tension that has long been experienced by commit-
ted artists who are part of the global movement of Palestinian resistance
art—such as Mourid Barghouti, who said “poetry is not a civil servant, it’s
not a soldier”—while continuing to use literature, music, film, visual art, and
multimedia technology for “the cause” (in Soueif 2006). Artists such as Nafar
and Excentrik are interested in producing interesting and innovative music,
not merely communicating a message. Excentrik exclaims to me: “We’re
not just Arab hip hop, I’m not f-ing McDonald’s, I’m not going to give you
the same burger every time. It’s art!” (2007). But he also acknowledges that
politics suff uses his art and identity: “I don’t see anything that isn’t ‘political’
in regards to being Palestinian and an artist” (in Christoff 2007).
Excentrik, who is interested in producing experimental music and
electrifying the oud, seems to be concerned with the burden of representa-
tion that many minority artists feel, especially Arab and Muslim American
artists since 9/11, in always having to speak on behalf of an ethnic group:
“After 9/11, I was no longer just a hip hop artist, I was an Arab hip hop artist.
Now I’m in a box, I’m in a metal cage. Th e media totally puts us in that
box” (2007). As Iron Sheik observes, there is a diff erence between being an
“Arab American hip hop artist,” who speaks to Arab American identity and
politics, and an “Arab American in hip hop,” who does not address Arab
American issues, and although he thinks there is room for both, some feel
it is not always their choice (2008). Th e flip side of this dilemma, however, is
the racism and backlash that Palestinian hip hop artists have experienced,
especially those who do progressive rap. Iron Sheik and Excentrik have had
some of their shows cancelled because of Zionist pressure, and Excentrik
was almost attacked by a white man with a crowbar at a club in Detroit.
Th e African Americans in the audience threw the assailant out, and said,
“You’re the new niggaz, welcome to our world! We’ve dealt this with for
years” (Excentrik, 2007).
S u n a i n a M a i r a ● 185
A second issue that deserves more reflection is the seeming absence of
Palestinian women MCs in the United States. Interestingly, although there are
female Palestinian rappers from Israel, such as Abeer from Lid and Arapyat,
most Palestinian American women in hip hop seem to be DJs (such as DJ
Mutamissik in New York and DJ Emancipation in San Francisco) or spoken
word poets (most famously Suheir Hammad, but also younger figures such
as Tahani Salah from New York). Th ere is also a queer Lebanese hip hop
crew, NaR (comprised of two men), in the Bay Area. When I asked Iron Sheik
about this striking absence of women rappers in the United States, relative to
Palestine, he suggested that male-dominated Palestinian American hip hop
was still behind the times, and compared it to “early 1990s hip hop” in the
United States, which became hyper-commercialized and male dominated
(see Chang 2005, 445–46). Interestingly, Safa’ Hathoot, a young female rapper
from Arapyat, has a song with Nafar on Dedication, “Al Hurriye Unt’a” (Free-
dom for My Sisters), in which they address multiple levels of discrimination
by Zionists and Americans “against the Arabs” as well as internal discrimina-
tion among Arabs and against women, suggesting that freedom comes only
when liberated from all these prisons.15
Th is is a topic that requires more research for it is possible that the rela-
tive absence of Arab and Palestinian American female MCs, in particular,
who occupy a role that is seen as more rebellious than that of a deejay or even
spoken word artist, arises partly from the cultural conservatism that gener-
ally shapes all immigrant communities, who tend to uphold more traditional
social and gender norms than in their home countries ( for example, Maira
2002). It is also apparent that the image of the “angry Arab” man, however
oppositional, is more marketable in American (and global) popular culture
than that of a defiant and militant Arab woman MC, not to mention the
gendering of hip hop that is evident for all artists, not only Arab Americans
(see Guevara 1996; Rose 1994). At the same time, the poetry performed by
young women in hijab who speak unflinchingly about Palestine and express
their rage and sorrow using the idioms of urban poetry, such as Tahani Salah
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJArzOTZ8LU) in “Hate,” also challenge the
dominant images of passive, voiceless, and veiled Muslim and Arab women.
“ We A i n ’ t M i s s i n g ”186 ●
C o n c l u s i o n : A c t i v i s m , S o l i d a r i t y ,
R e p r e s s i o n
Palestinian and Palestinian/Arab American hip hop is a site of political edu-
cation and alliance-building for youth through everyday popular culture. It is
also a form of aesthetic bridging, translating the Palestine movement into a
medium that has the potential to resonate with the experiences of diff erent
groups of youths who have an oppositional critique of colonialism or racism
in the United States and globally; for example, M.I.A., a British Sri Lankan
hip hop artist who has ties to Tamil Tigers, raps in “Sunshowers,” “Like PLO,
I don’t surrender,” and has pictures of tanks on the cover of her album, Aru-
lar (Sissario 2007). In connecting to diff erent local movements, Palestinian
American youth are using their diasporic condition to promote the cause of
Palestinian liberation in a variety of locations.
Political alliances between Arab American youth in the Palestine move-
ment and other groups of youth exist to varying degrees, but in the Bay
Area, where I am based, there is still much work to be done in educating
and translating the struggles of Palestinians for other communities. Th is
is where the idiom of youth culture is important: it helps bring awareness
of the Palestine question through the sounds, images, and symbology of
spoken word and hip hop that permeate and cross cultural spaces. For
many American college youth and activists, the kaffiyeh denotes a visual
symbol of solidarity with Arabs (in relation to Palestine or now Iraq), as it
has at other moments, and one can purchase a range of products that ex-
press or embody solidarity with Palestine, from T-shirts to wristbands and
pendants of Handala (Naji al-Ali’s iconic figure of Palestinian resistance).
But politics and cultural production have to go hand in hand; cultural resis-
tance, or resistance through symbols, such as wearing the kaffiyeh, cannot
be substitutes for political resistance and political education. Activism,
and also solidarity, are not simply identities to be performed. At the same
time, young Palestinian and Arab Americans are resisting the pervasive
silencing and distortion of the Palestine issue by openly expressing their
political critique and vocalizing their Palestinian identity. Political Pal-
estinian American rappers challenge hip hop’s conflation with American
S u n a i n a M a i r a ● 187
consumerist lifestyles and perform at anti-war and pro-Palestine rallies
and political events, on college campuses, and at community festivals in
spaces that are Arab American as well as multiethnic.
Th ere are inspiring examples of cross-ethnic alliances in the Palestine
movement among youth in the Bay Area and in the Asian American com-
munities that I work with; for example, the solidarity shown by Filipino
American youth involved in transnational movements for democracy in the
Philippines, such as BAYAN-USA, that have long resisted U.S. imperialism
given the American occupation of the Philippines. African American youth
in the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement have drawn on the language of the
right of return to link refugees from Katrina-stricken New Orleans to the
plight of Palestinians, opposing American as well as Zionist ethnic cleansing
and mass incarceration. Th ere are also growing alliances with Latino youth;
for example, events linking the militarized “security fence” on the U.S.-Mexico
border with the apartheid wall in Palestine. Th ese alliances do meet with
opposition sometimes; for example, the portrayal of the Intifada in a mural
made by Latino youth belonging to HOMEY, an organization in the Mission
District of San Francisco, met with attempts at censorship, predictably, but
the mural was also an inspiring example of the mutual understanding among
Arab American, Native American, and other youth on issues of indigenous-
ness, colonialism, and sovereignty. As a Chicano ex-convict commented:
“the Palestinians had their homeland stolen and were oppressed in much
the same way as Mexicans” (in Aidi 2007).
Th e movement for Palestinian rights or Palestinian liberation is not
one movement but many. But in some form or another and at one point
or another, all face tactics of intimidation, repression, or harassment given
the well-organized structure of silencing that exists in the United States,
from generously funded pro-Israel and right-wing groups, think tanks, and
watch dog organizations. Palestinian and Arab American youth, too, have
to confront this in their political mobilization on college campuses; for ex-
ample, David Horowitz’ Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week brought pro-Israel
speakers focusing on “Islamic terrorism” to campuses around the country in
fall 2007.16 Yet this campaign united Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, and progres-
sive students who formed coalitions to counter its racist discourse. Hip hop
“ We A i n ’ t M i s s i n g ”188 ●
played an unanticipated role in organizing a series of events at my campus,
the University of California–Davis, which ended up pre-empting the right-
wing show. An outdoor event, “Walls and Wars,” organized by a multiethnic
student coalition, focused on the apartheid wall, immigrant rights, impe-
rialism, and occupation and featured Latino/a spoken word artists as well
as Middle Eastern student speakers. Th e lyrics of a powerful poem about
Palestine by a Bay Area rap artist, Amir Sulaiman, countering the discourse
of Arab and “Muslim terrorism” (“I am not dangerous / I am danger”) could
be heard all over the quad. Th e Anti-Defamation League, predictably, struck
again and objected to the rap song, in particular, as “anti-Semitic.” Yet their
attempt at silencing implicitly acknowledged the power of this medium to
be heard, to unite, and to harness the language and beats of resistance for
the liberation of Palestine. Th e word is out.
{
n o t e s
I would like to thank the artists who generously shared their time and thoughts with me, and
Magid Shihade for his valuable suggestions and insights.
1. Arab Summit, Fear of an Arab Planet. Th e title is a riff on Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black
Planet.
2. Th roughout the essay I use “Palestinian” to refer to youth in (occupied or historic) Pal-
estine and Palestinian American or Arab American to refer to youth of Palestinian or
Arab origin in the United States (acknowledging that not all these youth would choose
to identify with this label).
3. Th e diffi culty of naming the form of U.S. “empire,” until recently, is tied to the fact that
U.S. imperialism has historically been characterized by nebulous, nonterritorial forms
of domination that do not resemble traditional forms of territorial “colonalism” (Mag-
doff 2003; Smith 2005). Scholarship on U.S. empire has analyzed the direct or overt as
well as the often covert or secret military and political interventions that are enabled
by the collective denial of U.S. empire (Harvey 2003; Williams 1980).
4. It is worth noting that there are hip hop and spoken word artists who are not Arab or
Palestinian American and who address the issue of Palestine and support the Palestine
movement as well; for example, Talib Kweli, Method Man (“PLO Style”), Immortal Tech-
nique, and poet Mark Gonzalez from Los Angeles. Th ere are also African American hip
hop artists who resonate with Arab issues via Islam; for example, Mos Def, Eric B. and
S u n a i n a M a i r a ● 189
Rakim (“Know the Ledge”), and Black rappers who are Five Percenters (the Nation of
Gods and Earths)—a splinter group of the Nation Of Islam founded in 1964—such as Wu
Tang Clan, Busta Rhymes, and Poor Righteous Teachers. See Aidi (2007), Alim (2005),
and Knight (2006).
5. See Rodinson (1973) and Shafir (2005).
6. Less well-known is the 1968 case of three Yemenis falsely accused of plotting to as-
sassinate President Nixon and the FBI’s targeted surveillance of Arab Americans in
Operation Boulder beginning in 1972 (Orfalea 2006, 216).
7. See DAM website: http://profi le.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofi le&
friendid=25392149.
8. See the articles in Adalahs’ Review (2002).
9. Th e label is drawn from Samih al-Qasem’s poem, “Standing Tall (Muntasib al Qama)”:
“Standing tall I march / My head held high / An olive branch held in my palm / A coffin
on my shoulder / On I walk” (Rabonowitz and Abu-Baker 2005, 2).
10. See Sayed Kashua’s 2002 novel, Dancing Arabs, for a poigant portrait of growing up
Palestinian in Israel.
11. For example, Massad notes Tawfiq Zayyad’s song “Unadikum” (I Call upon You) which
“implores the diaspora and West Bank and Gaza Palestinians not to forget their com-
patriots” (2005, 189).
12. Th is refers to the famous poem about being a Palestinian citizen of Israel, “Record, I am
an Arab” (DAM 2007).
13. Ragtop insightfully suggests that this is because ’48 Palestinian rappers identify strongly
with the oppositional relationship to the state and the racism of majority culture ex-
pressed by hip hop artists in the United States, have access to technology (however
limited), and can use rap to speak to the Israeli public as well as to Palestinian and Arab
youth (email communication with Ragtop, February 7, 2008).
14. Iron Sheik has also published an article about Arab American hip hop (Youmans 2007),
so he is clearly a scholar, political analyst, and cultural producer.
15. Th e song’s title might be more literally, and evocatively, translated as “Freedom and
Woman are One.”
16. See: http://www.terrorismawareness.org/islamo-fascism-awareness-week/.
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