عش واعمل في فلسطين

بقلم خالد جرار

بدأت الحكاية عندما عرفت من أصدقائي ناثان ولويز واليسون عن مدى سعادتهم في فلسطين، وأنهم حزينون لأنهم يوما ما سيضطرون للمغادرة، وذلك أن الإسرائيليين يضيّقون الخناق عليهم، حيث عليهم المغادرة كل ثلاثة أشهر عبر مطار «بن غوريون» كي يتمكنوا من تجديد تأشيرتهم التي يحصلون عليها من الإسرائيليين بصعوبة بالغة، وبعد تفنن في الكذب؛ خصوصاً موضوع إخفاء كونهم يعيشون في مدن فلسطينية، وذلك أن الاسرائيليين قد يعرقلون سفرهم وقد يعيدونهم أو يخضعونهم للتحقيق لساعات طوال قد تدوم إلى ٩ ساعات، كما حصل لأحد أصدقائي الفرنسيين، وكم كنت مستغرباً لهذه الأخبار، ولم أكن أتصوّر بأن الإسرائيليين قد يجرؤون على توقيف الأجانب لفترات طويلة، وليس هذا كله بل أنهم أصبحوا يضيّقون عليهم أكثر بإعطائهم تأشيرة دخول لمدة أسبوع، وخصوصاً إذا عرفوا بأنهم ذاهبون إلى مدن فلسطينية، وكم كان الأسوأ عندما سمعت بأن الأجانب مضطرون للكذب وقول أنهم لن يزوروا مدناً فلسطينية، وأنهم لا يعرفون أحداً هناك، كأننا أصبحنا في الـلاموجود، فهم يضغطون عليهم لينكروا وجودنا ليجعلوا حياة من يذكر اسم فلسطيني أو الفلسطينيين في جحيم، لذلك قررت أن أقول لهم بأننا موجودون هنا وأننا مبدعون.

قمت قبل ثلاث سنوات وفي ورشة عمل في «المحطة» بإنتاج عمل فني اسمه «كيف تحصل على الكرت الأخضر، عشْ واعملْ في فلسطين» وصممت وقتها ختماً لهذا العمل، وكان هنالك إجراءات شبه رسمية لتقديم الطلبات وختمها بختم دولة فلسطين، وإصدار كروت الإقامة المؤقتة لمن يريد كي يتمكن من العيش بحرّيّة في فلسطين.

قبل ثلاثة أشهر بدأت أفكر بالعمل على تطوير المشروع، والعمل عليه بشكل أكثر فاعلية فقمت بتصميم الطلبات والأوراق، وبينما كنت أصمم الختم الذي بدأت به بشكل تقليدي يحاكي ما هو موجود، اكتشفت مدى بشاعة أن نضع نسراً أو أفعى أو نسراً مجنحاً برأسين، وعمّقتُ البحث لأكتشف طائر الشمس الفلسطيني، حيث أحببت جمال هذا الطائر وقمت باستخدامه للختم، وعندما مررت بمراحل متطورة من تصميم الختم قلت في نفسي، أن هذا الختم يجب أن يوضع في مكانه المناسب أي على جوازات السفر وليس على ورق أنا أطبعه وأصممه! وبدأت الحكاية؛ ونجحت بختم ٣٠ جواز سفر من جنسيات مختلفة، وحصلت على رسائل ممن ختموا جوازاتهم وكيف تصرف معهم الإسرائيليون عندما عبروا الحدود، وأن بعضهم لم يتكلم الإسرائيليون معهم بكلمة وكانوا متوترين ولم يعرفوا كيف يتصرفوا، والبعض الآخر تم التحقيق معهم لأربع ساعات.. وقصصاً طويلة ومتعددة بإمكانكم متابعتها ودعم المشروع عبر صفحة الفيس بوك http://www.facebook.com/pages/Live-and-work-in-Palestine/159648430766352

I’m not so sure about the Palestinian Authority’s September bid for statehood. Not because I don’t want there to be a Palestinian state, but because I am deeply concerned about the current state of insanity that surrounds it. Many aid agencies and other international actors are rushing on the bandwagon, throwing support behind the statehood bid. 18 years ago, a similar situation happened as many of these same agencies and actors helped to facilitate and then celebrated the signing of the Oslo Accords. 18 years later, the Oslo Accords have presented us with a reality on the ground that makes statehood impossible.

“Picture taken from the art project (Live and Work in Palestine)”

To me, what makes logical sense would be these agencies and actors should first be demanding the one thing that would make statehood possible: an immediate end to the Israeli occupation. But this goal seems to have been lost along the way. Instead, there is a ton of donor money coming for state building plans. There are donors and international actors endorsing the ability and praising the readiness of the Palestinian Authority (PA) to run a state. There are also agencies and actors that already treat the PA as if it is a state, including demanding that we hold the PA accountable for administering to its citizens and for its role in developing key sectors and rolling out social services. In order to appear impartial and legitimate- buzz words for deflecting Zionist criticism- they also are quick to point to the PA’s failure to enter successful negotiations and their role in complicating the peace process. They make similar, if not worse, arguments about Hamas.

I fail to understand this logic. How can you have a government that you demand behaves like a government, that has contractual obligations with its people and with other governments and international actors without having a state? And how can you have a government that is physically capable of administering the contractual obligations of a state when you have an occupation?

Right now, the PA has only the right to rule over a tiny portion of people who would make up the population of its future state. The formal recognition of a state won’t change this. When statehood comes, do people in Gaza get to live in the state? People in East Jerusalem? How about the people who live in Area C? Are they part of the state? What about refugees? Where do they go? Do they have to live in the state, or do they get to choose if they want to go back to the homes they were forced from? Has anyone asked the people who make up the state what kind of a state they want, how it should be governed, and who should administer it?

Before South Sudan became a state there was a referendum, people had a voice in determining the physical boundaries of their state and the government. Sure, final status on borders and resources were negotiated with the help of the international community, but local people still had a say in what happened to them. In Palestine, however, this will most likely not be the case.

If I were a citizen of the United States, I would have certain rights and mechanisms to claim my rights in my country. I would get to help shape my government and laws through voting and electing representation. I may not always like who the candidates are, but I am not stuck with them forever and I would have opportunities to help change the system when it fails to deliver what I want and need. I would have the right to travel freely, not only in my own country, but to places all over the world. I would have the right to social services, like basic unemployment services, access to health care provision, and social security. They might not be organized in a perfect system, but they are there to provide me with some form of a safety net. I would have the right to legal representation, no one could come snatch me from my bed at night and keep me detained without any reason, or torture me or take away what belongs to me. If another state believes that I have committed a crime they would need to talk to my government and get an extradition order to come arrest me.

Not just in the United States, but in hundreds of other states around the world, these are the basic protections that citizens are granted. As a bid for Palestinian statehood approaches I cannot help but wonder what being a Palestinian citizen will mean? Will it mean that people can finally vote and that those elected can actually assume office? Will it mean that people can travel, not only out of Palestine but also to Gaza, East Jerusalem, and within their own state?Does it mean that Israel can no longer come across the border and kidnap Palestinian citizens off their own streets?

An occupied state is useless and while the world needs to recognize the state of Palestine as a state that has every right to exist, as long as the occupation continues we risk accepting a state no different from Oslo.

The Palestinian national liberation movement has reached its end. As the Palestinian leadership – if there is such a legitimate body today – prepares to bring the issue of statehood to the UN this September, the weeks and months ahead will witness the last desperate attempt to get the international community to assume their responsibilities and ensure that a Palestinian state becomes a reality in the occupied territories.

The reasons for the failure of the Palestinian national liberation movement are many. First and foremost, the shellshock that the creation of Israel caused among Palestinians in 1948 has never really gone away. Half of the Palestinian population at the time were displaced from their homes.

Those that refused to flee are today citizens of Israel – a citizenship that was not requested, but rather imposed upon them – and comprise more than 1.2 million people, Muslims and Christians.

As if the forced dispossession from 78% of their homeland was not enough, the Israeli military occupied the remaining parts of Palestine in 1967. Israel had planned for that occupation long before the war. Military occupation is, by definition, regarded as a temporary state of affairs – and one would be stretching the definition to the point of fantasy to consider Israel’s presence in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem as still temporary after 44 years. Reality is much more accurately described as the crime of apartheid than that of military occupation.

Beginning in the early 1970s, the Palestinians became, as former Palestinian diplomat Afif Safieh put it, “unreasonably reasonable”. Year after year the Palestinian leadership offered concession after concession, trying to reach an equitable resolution to their dispossession and military occupation.

This seemingly never-ending chain of concessions culminated in what is known as the 1993 Oslo peace accords. These accords were a seriously lopsided bilateral agreement between the PLO and Israel, which attempted to bring the parties to a “final status agreement” within five years.

The Oslo accords kept the system of military occupation in place and simply codified the unsustainable imbalance between an occupying power (Israel) and an occupied people (the Palestinians). The accords failed, miserably and multiple times. Not only did a final agreement never happen, but today we are further from a two-state solution than ever before. No amount of 11th-hour wordsmithing by Barack Obama or Binyamin Netanyahu around reviving negotiations by setting a starting point for discussing borders is acceptable. Past procrastination has only created irreparable damage on the ground invoking a dire need for an end game, not yet another starting point.

After struggling to revive the peace process for two decades, the Palestinians have lost faith in the process as well as in those tasked with overseeing it, namely the Quartet – United States, Russia, the EU and the UN. For the entire period of the peace process, Israel ploughed forward with more land confiscations, more settlement building, more death and more destruction.

Any honest observer would reach a clear conclusion that Israel has no intention of allowing the Palestinians to create a new reality on the ground towards a feasible, workable resolution of the crisis. Nor are the powers that be, namely the US and EU, serious about ending the conflict on the basis of international law. Diplomacy has utterly failed the Palestinians, leaving them with less land and less water, more fragmented, poorer, in disunity, and with fading hopes.

The drama unfolding as we head towards September revolves around a simple equation. Those who claim to be the Palestinian leadership have no more tricks up their sleeves to justify remaining in negotiations with their occupier. Thus, they are taking what is being portrayed as a strategic move to apply for membership of the state of Palestine in the UN.

The underlying political fact they are trying to re-establish is that the resolution to this seemingly insoluble conflict is two states, Israel and Palestine, based on UN general assembly resolution 181, which in 1947 partitioned Palestine (illegally, I might add).

This move gets an “A” for effort but is doomed to fail even if Palestine is admitted into the UN this year, next year, in five years or not at all. The realities on the ground have changed drastically since 1947. Israel, with blind US support, has succeeded in removing a two-state solution from the feasible options.

The new Palestinian leaders, those whom the Israeli negotiators have not yet met, see the larger picture and refuse to believe that Israel desires to live in peace when every indication for 64 years has shown the opposite. The emerging Palestinian leaders see Israel for what it is: a settler, colonial, apartheid movement clinging to a racialist, exclusivist ideology that neither wishes nor intends to allow another state to emerge between the Mediterranean sea and the Jordan river, let alone allowing Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and be compensated for their hardships, as was stipulated as a condition when the UN accepted Israel as a member state on 11 May 1949.

Once this foredoomed move toward Palestinian membership in the UN runs its course, a new paradigm will take root, one that Israel dreads because it implicitly views Palestinians and Israelis as equals, as co-citizens, as partners. This new shift will see Palestinians dropping their desire for independent statehood in a fraction of their historic homeland and instead will find them, within a genuinely representative political structure, articulating their desire for self-determination within their historic homeland, even if that homeland today is called Israel.

The Palestinians are about to come full circle. They were correct, painfully so, to call for a secular democratic state at the outset of this conflict. Sadly, they wasted precious time and lost too many lives trying to accept unjust modalities of a resolution.

Now, the sooner Palestinians and Israelis realise that our destiny is to live together as equals, the sooner we can begin to rehabilitate our communities and build a single society whose citizens are all equal under law and equal as human beings.

منيتي

يقدم مركز الفن الشعبي الفنانة الفتية ناي البرغوثي في أمسية خاصة من مختارات الطرب العربي الأصيل بعنوان “مُنيَتي”، في قصر رام الله الثقافي، يوم السبت الموافق 13/8/2011، الساعة 8:30 مساءً بتوقيت رام الله.

في “مُنيَتي”، تؤدي ناي البرغوثي، بأسلوبها الخاص، بعض روائع الطرب العربي من ألحان سيد درويش، محمد القصبجي، رياض السنباطي، الأخوين رحباني، محمد عثمان، وغيرهم. أعد الموسيقى وأشرف على التدريب الموسيقار المخضرم خالد جبران.

(تباع التذاكر في مركز الفن الشعبي (2403891 أو 0598947907) وفي مطعم “زيت وزعتر” (2954455

Link to the facebook event: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=148974295181510

Tell us how do you feel about this event?

By a Palestinian Participant

We were the first to arrive, there were a large number of police around the embassy, probably anticipating the demo…the first thing that happened was that they jumped on me when I got the camera out of my pocket and they tried to grab it. I struggled with two police men for a little bit and eventually managed not to allow them to take it. More people arrived by then and they started threatening to use force and stared pushing us away from the embassy; they were talking threats to the males and could not be violent with the women. Then more enforcements came including three Preventative Security jeeps that drove very fast past the people in an obvious attempt to intimidate more. All PA security were armed and kept saying amongst themselves not to talk to the girls but push the guys. We were pushed some 300 meters away from the embassy. 40 people in total kep arguing with the police and the preventative security and then started chanting Mawtuni, “Long live Egypt” and other slogans. People dispersed after.

10 questions for Hillary:

1. Where is the plane and why is Hosni not on it?
2. Why were tourists getting visas to Tunisia while Tunisians couldn’t get permits to sell their fruit?
3. Why do you think that the new Lebanese democracy is not so democratic?
4. When are you actually leaving Iraq?
5. You couldn’t offer more than 3 billion dollars worth of military supplies to seal a three month settlement freeze deal?
6. Regarding the UN Security Council Resolution on settlements, are you planning on vetoing your own words?
7. You and Tzipi Levni are both lawyers. Do you also not believe in Law?
8. We’re hoping you can explain, what is your exact strategy of kicking in democracy? How do you decide when to urge a dictator to reform, call in your troops, or let the people have a voice?
9. What do you think of the new Middle East? And…
10. How’s Bill? Has he been home lately?

Photo from businessinsider.com

In October 2003, Marck Zuckerberg, a student at Harvard University, hacked into the University’s servers and downloaded student images to present them on a web application called Facemash where other students can vote for whether a photo is “Hot or Not”. In the first four hours, Facemash got 22,000 photo views. The movie “The Social Network” claims that Mark Zuckerberg wrote Facemash mostly just to impress his girlfriend!

It wasn’t too hard for the genius Sophomore to figure out later that students would spend endless time on the internet checking out profiles and photos of people in their communities. “Friending” people in the social network provided a revolutionary convenient method of ice-breaking for the real life social game. All of a sudden, everyone in Ivy League universities was tagged with a note specifying his/her relationship status!

Facebook added one million users in its first year and later became public. In 2010, Facebook reached 500 million active users. The amount of information Facebook has about every user is just unimaginable. It paved the way for companies to deliver targeted advertising and keep “fans” updated with their news through other features the social network provided. What it also provided through its “Wall” feature, and most likely unintentionally, was a cyber space for individuals to express themselves. I highly doubt that the Facebook creator ever expected or envisioned that content spread over his platform would fuel and facilitate in organizing uprisings and dismantling dictatorships!

Throughout history, people’s revolutions were lead by political parties and bound to their frameworks. Mobilizing people required lots of secret meetings, newspapers, speeches, magazines and thorough organizational efforts. In environments of despotism, where voices are suppressed and freedom is restrained, the political parties’ influence is suffocated. What history has witnessed in Tunisia was a spontaneous unplanned uprising of a non-politicized majority of civilians organized modestly through Facebook and other social networks.

Not only did social networks provide a platform for people to express themselves, but also, with the help of sophisticated telecommunication technologies, they allowed for a fast “real time” spread of content describing current events. Tunisians didn’t have to wait for a newspaper the next day to view the photo of the man who set himself on fire. Bouazizi’s act did not go unnoticeable; it was instantly spread to the frustrated millions to sparkle the angry demonstrations and the Jasmine Revolution.

Opinion by Abdaljawad O.A. Hamayel

A shadow of despair befalls those that tirelessly rationalize their acquiescence to the mighty forces of tyranny, forces that eagerly showcase that the price of freedom is death and the price of silence is an undignified life, but a life nevertheless. Not in Tunis, Bouazizi broke the barrier of fear by engulfing himself with gasoline, igniting a fire and choosing to end his life in a painful and terrifying manner rather than suffer the reality of daily humiliation. Only to his joy, the Tunisians rose from the ashes of despair to the splendor of hope.

His act has the potential to transfigure Arab polity, by taking his own life and only his own life, Bouazizi freed himself and with him the mass of Tunisians that followed. Bouazizi epitomizes freedom, responsibility and a rejection of static unchanging social, economic and political realities. He moved away from a captive mind-set that plagues the Arab world, away from the nihilistic menace and away from the long internalized notion that Arabs are spectators rather than makers of their own destiny.

Until Bouazizi act, the only constant reality in the Arab world was that of despair. From the residue of despair differing charlatans, partisans and charismatic leaders light the rod of the day, sweeping away the nihilistic peril by electrifying the region. Each one of them had a battle to win and each one of them won the first battle, the young Egyptian officer, Gamal Abdal-Nassir, captivated the entire Arab world after he faced off ‘the most-hated trio’, France, Britain and Israel, keeping his country intact and his canal nationalized. The small and humored Palestinian fighter, Yassir Arafat, fought his battle in Jordan after the great defeat or ‘Naksa’ as Arabs remember the fateful October week, a small, yet a thrilling fight, enchanting what remained of Arab nationalist fervor and ensuring that sprinkles of hope persisted. Then came the “sword of the Arabs”, Saddam Hussein, defending the Arabs, not from the enemy to the west but from the rising tide of their Muslim brothers to the east, the Persians. Nasser died and with him the dream of pan-Arab unity, Arafat died and with him his secular-nationalist party Fattah, while Saddam was executed by the forces of Uncle Sam, as they entered to liberate Mesopotamia and erect a democracy, a ‘city on the hill’, a beacon of hope, offering freedom-loving Arabs a glimpse to a world they can only dream of, they glimpsed and thus far have turned their backs away.

Bouazizi was not a military commander that could reign through a military coup like Nasser did, nor was he a nationalist leader like Arafat was; nor was he the ruthless political calculator that Saddam typified. He was a simple, humiliated Arab that refused to remain humiliated. And in doing so, he electrified the Tunisians and aroused their fury, and reminded them that freedom is attainable, that the grip of ruthless Arab leaders is as frail as a spider web.

Tunisia might prove to be the first Arab democracy, the first people’s revolution, the first Arab country to rise from the trauma of colonialism and it’s after effects. This is an earth-shattering moment and with it comes great responsibility and Tunisians are more than equipped to handle it. Some of the challenges include filling the vacuum of political leadership due to years of oppression, Tunisians do not have effective or popular opposition groups, therefore it is integral that such political leadership emerges from the masses and calms the streets by initiating a smooth transmission to democracy. Second challenge is more of a warning of any outside influence or meddling in Tunisian affairs meant to deter it from blossoming into a full-fledged democracy. Arab regimes want nothing more than a Tunisian failure so their regular excuses for the lack of democracy and good governance would still hold some currency. Any kidnapping of the revolution will reverse democratic tendency not only in Tunisia but in the rest of the Arab world for years if not decades. In that sense, Tunisians must enable an effective, efficient and smooth transition into democracy for their own sakes and for the fate of millions of other Arabs.

The lesson should not be lost, Tunisians are true pioneers, it was not American military might that brought and ushered the first democracy, nor was it the autocratic and corrupt regimes that once in a while promise gradual liberalization as in the case of Egypt or Saudi Arabia, it was in most democratic fashion, a people’s revolt that a democracy will likely emerge. Old theories seem like old orthodoxies, theories that proclaimed Arabs antithetical to democracy and so-called western values are crumbling one by one on the shores of Tunis.

The ancient Greeks had a word for those that choose to concern themselves with private affairs rather than the affairs of whole. They named such individuals idiots or in the more infamous English form ‘idiot’. While, Tunisia struggles to cleanse itself from the once seemingly incurable disease of dead Arab activism and the remnants of the old regime, all that can be hoped is that the rest of the Arab world would follow suit and rinse itself from the despotism of their leaders and from their own sense of powerlessness that feeds to a manufactured apathy. After all, no one wants to be called idiots. Bouazizi died but not in vain, for he is not dead, he lives in the millions of Tunisians and the millions of their Arab brethren, for in each and every one of us hidden beneath the heavy rubble of security-apparatuses and the ax of repressive and tortures measure is a Bouazizi.

I started listening to Arabic hip hop when I was only 12 years old; it was really interesting for a young teenager who was always affected and obsessed with American hip hop, and fascinated by artists like Eminem, Jay-Z and a list of others who are really great. So, being obsessed with that kind of music, then suddenly finding the Arabic version of it, –especially Palestinian- this was a really new and exciting experience. I like Hip hop because it’s used to express people’s own grievances with the social and political climate in which they live and work. Hip hop aims to send a message about patriarchy, drugs, violence, and other social problems that you can find in any society in any part of the world. Most of these messages in American Hip Hop directly relate to Palestinian Hip Hop, and that is why liking one makes it easy to like the other.

One of my favorite bands is Ramallah Underground, which is based–as the name clearly shows- in Ramallah, the West Bank. Three young Palestinian artists called Stormrap, Boikutt, and Aswatt founded the band. I wanted to know more about how they started in hip hop and what influenced them as Palestinians, so I went and interviewed Basel Abbas (also known as Aswatt), a full time musician and exhibiting artist. I was really surprised when Basel told me that Ramallah Underground was actually divided one year ago, because every one of them was working on different projects, and also because they felt Ramallah Underground was limiting them to a certain type of work. So I asked Basel how these splits in Ramallah Underground happened and what he was doing now, and he replied:

“I was composing music in Ramallah Underground with stormtrap and boikutt, but they also mc’d. I don’t mc, I just compose music. Ramallah Underground was becoming more established as a hip hop group. But we all had interests with other things too, and every one of us was in a different country at the time, so it was hard to continue working together. In the last period of Ramallah Underground, we started working with Ruanne, an artist who worked with us doing live videos in performances. So Boikutt, Ruanne and I decided to create a new set-up that is more of an audio-visual group and thats how tashweesh came about. However, Tashweesh also has the hip hop influence in its music,maybe not so much mc’ing. For example, in a one hour performance, Boikutt may go up and rap for 5 or 6 minutes only, and the rest is mixing between audio and visuals that I can’t tag with a certain genre. We all listen to a lot of music genres, so an influence from all these genres comes up when you produce your work. And that’s how things work right now.”

Photo from http://beyondborders2010.com/events/tashweesh/

Then I asked him why, since Ramallah Underground was so popular, he chose to take such a different approach to the new band, Tashweesh. He said that he and Boikutt both work in composing music and that he works in different exhibitions with Rawan. They feel that the live performance takes you to spaces that you can’t reach when you record a song and upload it online or put it on a CD. He told me that when you make a performance there will be people who never heard your song online or never went to the exhibition to see your work. Thus, performances opens up other spaces that let you make contact with the audience. And so, Basel concluded that the whole identity of Tashweesh is actually a live performance. The idea is that they gather solos and other work that one does alone (not performances, such as composition and videos and other stuff), then they bring these elements and present them as a live performance, which requires a lot of improvising rather than just playing the same songs when you play live.

From what I learned about Tashweesh, it was clear to me that a new form of Palestinian hip hop was developing. Normally, when you think of Palestinian Hip Hop you immediately think of bands like DAM, who have a real popular following and a style very similar to American Hip Hop, even though they focus on Palestinian issues. To find out more about what sets Basel’s style apart, I asked him what made Ramallah Underground, and now Tashweesh different from Palestinian Hip Hop bands like DAM. He replied:

“I think Palestinian Hip Hop groups opened a lot of opportunities to express one’s situation and paved the way for other groups to also take that on. .Each group has its own influence, and its own way to present ideas. So you find similarities and differences. For example, we as Ramallah Underground, when we didn’t continue and started a new band, we were always trying to find new things, original ideas. I wouldn’t say that tashweesh is creating a new form of palestinian hip-hop, as i said before Tashweesh has influences form all over including hip-hop. When we make music we also try not to play by the rules, and that’s how we are continuing with Tashweesh.”

Then I asked him about what kind of funding Tashweesh has and the importance of playing performances both in and out of Palestine, he said:

“As for performances, we have been working on different sets for about 9 or 10 months. Our first performance was in The Palestinian literature festival in Nablus, We did another one in Ramallah. In addition, shows for poetry nights were held in ramallah once a month, we would perform for 10 or 15 minutes to try our different sets during these shows. We also performed outside Palestine and did some workshops; for example, during the summer we did a workshop with kids in Denmark, taught them how to produce music from field recordings/sounds they hear around them. So we are working both in and out. And as for funding, we fund ourselves really, we get paid for our performances. For example, we have two performances in Belgium next march, so we put aside some money, so we can buy new equipment or fix old ones.”

Even though Basel has a lot of passion, we all know it is hard to build a band and make a living, especially in Palestine, where there are many obstacles. I asked Basel what were the main obstacles they faced. Basel said:

“It is really hard for performing artists in palestine, Performances don’t provide much money, and there is no continuity or sustainability in work. We wish we could perform more here, but we lack the institution or the industry that can always provide that. In addition, it’s a small country, so for example, if you perform 2 or 3 times in Ramallah, you won’t have any audience next time because people would have seen your work. And then you might wait 6 months or so to make another show so you could provide new content to present, which is also quite good as it pushes you to always create new work. While in other countries, there are cities which would reach a population of 20 million, so even if you perform every night, you will still find people that haven’t heard you before.”

But Basel said one thing was working in their favor. According to Basel, the Internet and new social media has played a big role in getting his bands and his music well known. He also said its played an important role in the spread of his music outside Palestine, and in communicating with show organizers around the world. Basel stated that

“We started a long time ago, maybe in 1999 or 2000, I was only 17 years old then, and now I’m 28, and Internet played a big role in communication. You perform in London for instance, you meet with someone, then you keep in touch with him on email, and in the following year, this person introduces you to another, etc. So, without the internet this would be difficult and slow.”

Kronos performs Ramallah Underground’s “Tashweesh” live at Barbican Hall’s Ramadan Nights Festival in London on September 26, 2008.

For me, arts, and especially music, which motivates young people, plays a big role in the social and political situation of the state, and this could be especially the case in Palestine. I really believe that this kind of new music can attribute to the development and rising of a great culture, one that might have more crucial effects than fighting and violence.
Dave Randall, a musician who collaborated with Ramallah Underground wrote an article ‘Hip-hop is part of Palestine’s cultural intifada,’ which states that Palestinian Hip Hop has become “a musical collective born from the desire to give voice to a generation of Palestinians and Arabs, in a situation of great economic, artistic, and political difficulty.”

Rachel Shabi, a journalist specializing in the Middle East conflict who has wrote for a variety of national and international newspapers such as the Guardian, has also focused on how Palestinian Hip Hop, especially in Ramallah, gives resistance new meaning. Regarding Palestinian Hip Hop artists she says, “It would be simple for these Palestinians to step into a world of violence right outside their door. Instead, they attempt to spread their politically conscious messages to the world.”