Hip-Hop in the Crossfire

In June 2024, the British rapper Mic Righteous embarked on a cross-country tour for his new album “Born Again.” The night he played at London’s O2 Academy Islington, a track called “Bullet” was on the set list. As the intro started, he took aim.

“I wanna see Rishi Sunak with a bullet in him,” he rapped. “I’m not saying I’m the one that’s gonna put it in him. All I’m saying if you did it, good riddance innit.” Mic Righteous, draped in a Palestinian keffiyeh, spat lyrics with his signature angst-ridden delivery as, moments later, performers wearing masks of Britain’s then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and the United States’ then-President Joe Biden circled him. As the audience cheered on with middle fingers in the air, Mic Righteous shot down the masked leaders with a toy gun, their falls punctuated by cries of “Free Palestine” and “Ceasefire now.”

This charged performance was more than just political theater — it represented the latest chapter in hip-hop’s long-running engagement with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the current Israel-Hamas war. Much like its American origins, hip-hop in both Israel and Palestine has been political since its beginnings in the 1990s and early 2000s. When the first Palestinian hip-hop group DAM — whose members were Palestinian citizens of Israel — was rapping about the Israeli state’s “rapes of the Arab soul,” Israeli emcee Subliminal was addressing sold-out audiences with chants of “Who is proud to be a Zionist in the state of Israel, put your hands in the air! Hell yeah!”

In the wake of the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, hip-hop artists on either side of the conflict have continued that legacy, on an amplified scale — fronting fundraiser concerts, becoming the soundtrack to protests or TikTok posts, and penning explicitly political bars. While some rappers call for peace and unity, others face censorship and social media bans as a result of their combative lyrics. Even after the recent ceasefire took effect in January, these wordsmiths continued reshaping the narrative of the conflict — grappling with art’s power to inspire action or bridge a divide resulting from decades of violence.

“I’m not a politician, man,” the Palestinian rapper and actor Sameh “Saz” Zakout told New Lines in an interview last year. “But when you live in Israel and Palestine, everything gets political. So you cannot run away from it.” 

Zakout forms one half of the rap duo Dugri, a name that comes from the Arabic for “speaking frankly.” It’s an unusual creative partnership between Zakout, a Palestinian-Arab artist, and his counterpart, Uriya Rosenman, an Israeli-Jewish educator and entrepreneur. The project is the brainchild of Rosenman, who drew inspiration from the U.S. rapper Joyner Lucas’ 2018 track “I’m Not Racist.” In the song’s music video, a Black man with dreadlocks and a white man in a MAGA cap lip-synch to Lucas’ track, hurling racial stereotypes and slurs at each other, ultimately reconciling their differences as they look to an uncertain yet hopeful future. 

Rosenman and Zakout continued the collaboration with more political tracks and similar one-on-one scenarios. Despite their years working together to speak frankly, after Hamas launched its Oct. 7 attack and Israel began its retaliation, the Dugri members didn’t speak to each other for three weeks. Looking back on 2023, Zakout says, “Uriya lost some people he knows. I have a big family in Gaza. So I lost some people, too. It didn’t really hurt our friendship, but it did lead to some tensions and disagreements.”

In the face of such personal losses, they contemplated whether performing songs on Arab-Jewish unity even made sense. “Some people were like, ‘Dugri, where the f— are you? This is your money time. Are you not gonna say f—ing something?’” Rosenman recounts. “But what can you say when there are so many people being killed in the name of something and then the retaliation is so bad? What can we say? Like ‘Yo, yo, stop the killing’? It’s ridiculous.”

While Rosenman and Zakout, who eventually reconciled, haven’t released any new tracks since the war began, outside Israel and Palestine, new political hip-hop releases have been constant during the 17 months of the Israel-Hamas war. In the United Kingdom, a prominent case in point is the aforementioned album “Born Again” by Mic Righteous. The pro-Palestinian politics in his album are evident from the very titles of the songs, be it the energetic chant “Ceasefire” or the introspective spoken-word piece “Letter to the IDF.”

But even before analyzing his lyrical content, performance venues like the O2 Academy Islington raised concerns with the display of Palestinian flags on stage, labeling them political. The British-Palestinian artist Isaac Speitan, aka Speit, recounted the episode to New Lines: “Mic Righteous told them that if they take the flags down, there will be no show.” When the tour moved to Ireland, a similar attempt was made to censor any Palestinian imagery. The performers and Speit were incredulous. “Bear in mind, we are in the Republic of Ireland, where we have had the same sort of oppression,” he said.

The scrutiny isn’t a new phenomenon for Palestinian artists, who have long been accused of inciting terrorism through their work. The rap group DAM’s 2001 track “Meen Erhabe” (“Who’s the Terrorist”) remains prophetic for its unflinching critique of the terrorist stereotype. Tamer Nafar, DAM’s frontman, challenged Israel’s democratic image with provocative lines like, “With your countless rapes of the Arab soul, it got pregnant and birthed a boy called the suicide bomber.”

If anything has changed from the early days of DAM to the era of Mic Righteous, it’s that pro-Palestinian artists now also claim to face the threat of “shadow banning” (limiting the reach of an account without informing the user) on social media. In January 2024, Mic Righteous took to Instagram to reveal that his track “Letter to the IDF” was banned from Spotify and Apple Music, with a note from his distribution service reading, “It has been detected that this release has a political connotation that is unfortunately not supported and cannot be accepted by digital music stores.”

In the caption to the Instagram post, Mic Righteous wrote, “Freedom of speech is an illusion. My song ‘Letter to the IDF’ is being blocked by music streaming platforms after 1 day, but they still took my submission fee. I don’t care about the money, it’s the fact I cannot speak my mind in my own music that is the biggest kick in the teeth.” He added that the Instagram-owning tech giant Meta had been taking down stories by anyone who shared the track.

While the track has now been restored on streaming platforms, the shadow banning of music on social media has affected the reach of less-known artists who are writing similar statements of Palestinian solidarity. One of those is the Canadian-Iranian rapper and producer Shalco, whose track “Never Again” addresses the actions of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with lyrics like, “Let’s free them hostages, Bibi won’t. He don’t give a f— about the people he constantly bombs.”

Shalco said he dismisses hate comments and Islamophobic backlash garnered by the track, but he is troubled by shadow banning on Instagram, which affects his visibility and reach. With over 32,000 followers, Shalco said that his account’s growth has stagnated and his uploads no longer appear in searches. “I got a bunch of posts taken down. So it’s hard for people to find me when they search for my name. My content can’t be recommended to the people on reels or Instagram search. I got this message saying ‘Your account can’t be recommended to nonfollowers,’” he told New Lines over Zoom, highlighting how political content often faces algorithmic suppression.

This concern is echoed by Kayncee, a rapper based in the English town of Crawley. “Content that questions power or popular narratives … is shadow banned by these algorithms, and that becomes a problem for artists like myself who rely on being heard and seen by an average person on social media.”

Speit has a similar experience of getting lost in the algorithm on YouTube whenever he uploads songs with supposedly political titles, ranging from “Gazan Blues” to “O, Jerusalem.”

“Before I was actually releasing music, I would be getting a thousand views on my Instagram stories,” he told New Lines. “Now I get a hundred. I go to Palestine every year because I am originally from the West Bank. And I have footage of bombs going off and people in cages. But when I put it up on the page, I don’t get any views. It’s like I’m not allowed to show the truth.”

In the face of such digital challenges, fundraisers and collective demonstrations remain a vital outlet. Kayncee, who is associated with several British hip-hop collectives, including People’s Army, recalled staging protests outside corporate offices like Barclays Bank in Crawley. His track “Oh No” critiques the capitalist motives behind global conflicts, with lines like, “Mass profit leads to genocide but we still pay the price. Can somebody tell me what’s the cost of a life? Is it the cobalt of Congo, oil in the Middle East or gas in Palestine?”

But some large charity shows or peace concerts have sown distrust among political performers. “Of course, I love the fact that everybody is standing up for Palestine and supporting us,” Speit said. “But sometimes, it feels like organizations are holding these events for clout. What’s happening in Palestine has been going on for 75 years. Where were they before?”

A week after Abdul made it to 16 last September, his biggest collaboration to date dropped, with a rapper who has become an unexpected booster of the Palestinian cause: Macklemore. The somewhat goofy, white, Seattle-born rapper of “Thrift Shop” fame might seem removed from the Israel-Hamas conflict, but he has undoubtedly gained the most airplay when it comes to pro-Palestinian music. The titles of his two recent releases, “Hind’s Hall” and “Hind’s Hall 2,” on which Abdul makes an appearance, allude to pro-Palestinian activists’ renaming of Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall to “Hind’s Hall” in honor of 5-year-old Hind Rajab, who was killed by Israeli forces in Gaza.

“Macklemore, I hope he has the best intentions,” said Shalco, the Canadian-Iranian rapper. “I wish it was someone else though because you have the biggest rap song for this movement that’s by someone who has had a history of antisemitic behavior.”

In 2014, Macklemore rankled fans after he performed his hit single at Seattle’s EMP Museum (now the Museum of Pop Culture) while inexplicably wearing a black wig, fake beard and false, hooked nose — a getup that recalled a hoary old antisemitic Jewish caricature. It was a bizarre moment for a rapper so anodyne that his biggest hit included lyrics about wearing footie pajamas. Macklemore later apologized, adding that his idea of a fake beard and witches’ nose disguise didn’t seem like a stereotype to him at the time.

For Jewish-Israeli rappers, Macklemore’s antisemitic cosplaying isn’t what draws ire. The rapper Westside Gravy takes particular offense at Macklemore’s mentions of Zionism. In “Hind’s Hall,” Macklemore raps, “We see the lies in ’em. Claimin’ it’s antisemitic to be anti-Zionist” and “History been repeating for the last 75. The Nakba never ended; the colonizer lied.”

“Macklemore tried painting Israel and Zionism as a colonial or a white supremacist creation, which is divorced from the reality over here,” Gravy told New Lines over Zoom. “Zionism isn’t something that you can tie directly towards liberal or conservative, right-wing or left-wing ideology at large. It’s a right for us to live as free people and have autonomy in our homeland.”

Born Noah Shufutinsky to an African-American mother and a Russian father, both Jewish, Gravy hails from California but now lives in the Israeli coastal town of Bat Yam. Often rapping about the racism and antisemitism he faces along with themes of Israeli solidarity, Gravy laments that Zionism is unjustly used as a slur by pro-Palestine rappers.

The debate over what the term “Zionism” means has been ongoing ever since the idea emerged in the late 19th century among Central European Jewish intellectuals. Critics of Israel refer to it as a form of settler colonialism, while advocates of Zionism regard it as a liberation movement. Rosenman might advocate Jewish-Arab unity with Dugri, but he also doesn’t shy away from being referred to as a Zionist. The Israeli rapper feels that Zionism has turned into a pejorative term used to imply an underlying racial ideology.

“In Israel, we are Zionists because we believe we have a right to exist. That’s it,” he said. “We don’t perceive it like we’re more worthy than the Palestinians. Of course, you can find extreme right-wingers who would propagate that we are more worthy of the land. But that’s not how the majority of Israel is thinking, definitely not the secular liberal citizens of the country like us.”

Reclaiming such labels and ideas has become crucial in the current wave of politically conscious hip-hop, be it the principles of Zionism or protest cries like “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” a slogan chanted at rallies across the world during the Israel-Hamas war. Though many claim the slogan is peaceful and only about Palestinians’ right to a homeland — situated between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean — the slogan irks Gravy, so much so that he even released his own track called “From the River to the Sea.” The hook of the semisatirical song goes, “From the river to the sea, we ain’t gonna pretend that we don’t know what you mean. From the river to the sea. You want the land free of the people like me.”

Gravy might represent a new voice in Israeli hip-hop with his subversive takes on polarizing histories, but is it enough to spread his message? While he switches his flows between English and Hebrew, he feels that many new talents from Israel are limited in their reach because of the language barrier. Rosenman agrees. “Israeli hip-hop artists get less attention because Hebrew is not a popular language,” he said. “But the Arabs and the Palestinians, their narrative and language are used by millions of Muslims across the world. So their message can reach more widely.”

On the global stage, too, Gravy laments that Jewish hip-hop artists have said little to nothing in support of Israel, pointing his fingers at the Canadian hitmaker Drake, whose silence on the issue has been notable. The Palestinians, too, have had their own disappearing act in mainstream hip-hop. Speit felt frustrated that DJ Khaled, the American producer whose parents immigrated from Palestine, “doesn’t even mention Palestine on any of his platforms.”

Regardless of international support, rappers on both sides of the conflict continue to adhere to their ideals and fly the flags they represent, marching past the political and economic challenges that threaten their artistry. For someone like Mic Righteous, protesting for Palestine overseas is necessary, and he openly encourages his audiences to participate in public movements for the cause. He screams at the mic, “Those who do not have freedom, we’ll continue speaking up for them with our freedom.”

Back in Israel, Rosenman sums up his aspirations for the future. “I don’t care if this land is called Israel, or Palestine, or Isra-stine, or Pales-rael. These are all semantics. I don’t deal with semantics. I deal with humans not killing each other and living like neighbors.”

But such a future is far from certain, and seems further away than ever following the end of the ceasefire on March 18. As the Palestinian rapper Nafar puts it in his track “Tuzz Tuzzen” (“Whatever”): “A two-state solution? Whatever. All I’ve ever wished for in my life is … to see my brothers and sisters in my homeland. You deserve only the best, my homeland.”