During the short drive to gymnastics practice, our daughter Leila requests ‘Love Train’ from the movie Trolls Holiday. She claps along with glee to the kiddie version of the 1972 hit by R&B group The O’Jays. “Start a love train, a love train!”
Her father is driving, and from my passenger seat, I turn to smile at Leila’s unbridled joy and squeeze her bare leg. My phone buzzes. Shifting back in my seat, I swipe away the reminder to pick up my dry cleaning on the way home before opening Instagram reflexively. A post from dancer Moh Ghraiz stares back at me from my feed. Ghraiz started Camp Breakerz Crew in Palestine two decades ago, supporting children living under Israeli occupation through dance workshops and ciphers. Ghraiz’s latest post is a photo of a serious girl with soft brown eyes that mirror mine. She is around my daughter’s age — no more than six — her petite arms folded in a classic B-girl stance, defiant and powerful.
Her name is Rania Alghraiz. I recognize her as one of Camp Breakerz Crew’s students from an earlier video of a breakdancing class held in the Nusairat refugee camp. My eyes slide from the photo to its caption to discover that Rania and three more girls—her baby sister Rital, Maryam, and Dana—are all dead. They have been killed in an Israeli airstrike, murdered by one of the American-funded bombs raining hell on Gaza.
Since October 7, 2023, when Hamas Commander Mohammed Deif declared the bloody ambush known as Operation Al-Aqsa Flood an end to “the last occupation on Earth,” the State of Israel’s ongoing atrocities have broken me. But I have mourned for Palestine for decades. And like Camp Breakerz Crew, I have faithfully nursed that grief through the balm of hip-hop, a genre purpose-built for survival. With foundations in the Black community of 1970s New York, hip-hop was once a gift for oppressed and marginalized fans, a gift that kept on giving to become the worldwide phenomenon it is today.
I wasn’t much older than my daughter when hip-hop lit a revolutionary match inside me. During my brown family’s brief stint in white suburbia in the late 80s, I found myself an outcast among my peers, and rap became my lifeline. Through the bright orange headphones of my Walkman, Public Enemy alerted me to the centuries-old struggle of Black Americans with their hit protest anthem “Fight the Power,” and Eric B. and Rakim’s “Move the Crowd” taught me about personal pride. I was in awe of this knowledge of self, of this art form that spoke to its people and for its people, and felt empowered to celebrate my own Lebanese–Cypriot identity at a time of wall-to-wall ugly Middle Eastern stereotypes.
My introduction to Palestine also came at this time. I remember watching television coverage of children who looked like me defiantly throwing stones at adult soldiers. I was raised to understand that a child’s insubordination of an elder’s authority is taboo, so I recognized that there was a profound reason these kids with rocks had to fight “the powers that be,” as Chuck D and Flavor Flav were teaching me.
Today, Israel is wiping out Palestinian youths before they begin to challenge their dominance. We have lost an untold number of tender lives—teenagers, children, toddlers, infants, even those in utero — from unending attacks in Gaza and the West Bank. Many months ago, aid agency Save the Children estimated that over 20,000 minors in Gaza have disappeared, been detained or are buried beneath the rubble or in mass graves. The conflict has become the “most viewed” genocide in history. I have seen burning flesh drip from children’s bodies as parents cradle them; I have seen their limbs and heads blown off. These are the times when they weren’t assumed vaporized from existence. Amid this unimaginable bloodshed, young fans like the Camp Breakerz Crew use hip-hop as their refuge, as they have done for decades. But what happens when that refuge locks you out and turns you away?
The silence of hip-hop’s most successful acts is palpable. Our chosen heroes — those we’ve long admired, chart kings and queens, Grammy winners and Hollywood stars — are nowhere to be seen. “In the sixties, when we started rap, we were rapping for a cause, not applause,” Father Amde Hamilton of The Watts Prophets commented in a recent interview. Sixty years on, hip-hop’s once glorious capacity to effect societal change has waned within a well-heeled, middle-aged body. To borrow an oft-repeated concept from esteemed sociologist Tricia Rose, hip-hop has crystallized into a cultural arm of capitalism. In rap parlance, it’s become light on the Che Guevara and heavy on the bling.
When it comes to the atrocities in Palestine, hip-hop’s silence is — shamefully — loudest among its pre-eminent Arab and Muslim brothers. Multi-millionaire producer DJ Khaled, formerly known as Arab Attack, now has several new (unwanted) aliases: comedian D.L. Hughley dubbed him DJ Callous because of his inaction, while our community calls him DJ Khara (Arabic for “shit”). In 2016, when I worked as content director for The Source magazine, I interviewed Khaled for a long-awaited cover story. Before I hit record on the tape, I asked him about being Palestinian, and he professed pride in his heritage; in other interviews, he has referenced his ancestral village, Mazraa al-Sharqiya, in the West Bank. Yet somehow, like always, he side-stepped speaking about his people’s plight. Khaled is recognized as one of hip-hop’s most wealthy exports, with a worldwide audience of millions. Instead of using his platform or art to advocate for the besieged country of his kinfolk, he prefers sharing videos on Instagram of his obnoxious jewelry collection and his oversized freezer stocked with forty different ice cream brands. He gave his two beloved sons, Asahd and Aalam, Arabic names and celebrated them on his album covers. Still, he’s made not one public statement about the helpless children who look just like them. One month after October 7, I contacted Khaled’s publicist, whom I greatly respect, imploring them to get him to speak out. “I love you,” I wrote. “Love Khaled, too. I know this is a fraught time for him, but as an Arab woman, my heart breaks that he isn’t using his power and platform right now.” The response: “I love you back, Simone.” And that was it. There was nothing further to relay from the man who had told me during our interview that he had a “clean heart and soul.”
Swizz Beatz is another of hip-hop’s high-profile producers, and someone I have collaborated with, who has performative ties to the Middle East. Swizz recently completed his Hajj to Mecca, showing off the Islamic pilgrimage of spiritual cleansing all over his socials. Yet he has no issue with unethical business partnerships, including being paid handsome sums to be a cultural mouthpiece for Saudi Arabia, promoting the country as a hotspot destination when it is complicit in ongoing atrocities in countries like Yemen. Last Christmas, when he posted happy snaps with his family on Instagram, I commented on his and his famous wife’s reticence to speak about Palestine. He deleted what I wrote and sent me a message, warning me never to leave a comment like that again. I replied: “Palestinians on the ground have asked us time and again to publicly use our voices,” and asked him to give me one reason why he wouldn’t post in support. He told me he has “big respect” for me and asked for my number to chat — nearly one year and an estimated hundreds of thousands of dead bodies later, he still hasn’t called or posted. Moments after the Rafah massacre, where Palestinians were live-streamed being burned alive, Swizz — who is chronically online — had the nerve to share a video about what makes a good person. “A good heart brings love. Being a good person brings love.” Artists like this, to quote a song title from his pal Busta Rhymes, are effusive about “Arab Money” but voiceless about our pain.
I could keep naming hip-hop’s elite one by one, but what’s more crucial is exposing forces operating behind the scenes. Cardi B recently told Rolling Stone that artists of color risk being “blackballed” for expressing their support for Palestine. The unspoken part of Cardi’s sentiment is who would do said blackballing – and that is the industry’s political Zionists.
Modern political Zionism, according to Jewish activist Naomi Klein, has taken the biblical “idea of the promised land and turned it into a deed of sale for a militaristic ethnostate.” It functions like colonialism, and its proponents, both Jewish and Christian, wield great control in Western industry, especially in music and the arts. One look at Instagram account Zionists in Music and we can see how powerful these pro-Israel folk are. Many of them are employed by the Big 3 (Universal Music Group, Sony Music Group, and Warner Music Group), which still control roughly 80 percent of the global music market.
For years, calling out certain figures in the industry was swiftly branded as antisemitic, but that fear no longer holds — especially for someone like me, a Semite myself. Entertainment executives like Universal’s Lucian Grainge and film and music titan Haim Saban are some of Israel’s most ardent financial supporters, but to truly understand why hip-hop stays silent, it boils down to two words: Lyor Cohen. Yasiin Bey didn’t mince words when he called him “the tall Israeli running this rap shit.” Cohen’s power is unmatched, with a career spanning from his early days at Rush Management — when Russell Simmons handed him the keys to the kingdom — to his reign at Def Jam, Warner, 300 Entertainment and now as YouTube’s Global Head of Music. He’s been instrumental in shaping rap’s colossal stars, forging tight relationships with them, all while maintaining an untouchable aura. After four decades at the helm, Cohen holds the industry’s deepest secrets, and in a space where only a handful wield true power, he is the ultimate gatekeeper — deciding whose sins are overlooked and whose careers get crushed. A staunch Zionist with deep-rooted ties to Israel, where he spent his formative years (his mother, as he once revealed, worked for the Israeli government), Cohen’s allegiances are clear. Photos from his lavish wedding to Xin Li — a close confidant of Wendi Deng, ex-wife of Rupert Murdoch, whose media empire acts as a mouthpiece for Israeli propaganda — were splashed across the pages of VOGUE, with the flags of Israel, the U.S., and China flying high. Anyone indebted to Cohen for their career knows the leverage he holds, and they follow his lead. For Cohen, support for Israel isn’t just business — it’s personal.
Groomed by Cohen into one of hip-hop’s most beloved businessmen, Jay-Z is not only hush-hush on Palestine, but one of his partners in the REFORM Alliance — purportedly devoted to criminal justice reform for Black and brown Americans — is a Zionist named Daniel Loeb. Loeb was part of a billionaire boys club WhatsApp chat encouraging American university presidents and government officials to stamp out college remonstration against the genocide. The group not only urged beleaguered New York City Mayor Eric Adams to arrest peacefully protesting Columbia University students, but they also offered him a private staff to help his police department do so. (Here in Australia, we saw Zionism’s influence highlighted when the transcript of another private WhatsApp chat was leaked in February and listed over 600 Jewish creatives and academics — including local record executives. The chat revealed that many of these people had organized to intimidate and silence Arab, Muslim, and pro-Palestinian peers through petitions to have them sacked.)
Kehlani, one of the first major artists to speak out against Israel since October 7, indirectly addressed the impact of Zionist pressure during an interview with radio show The Breakfast Club. She admitted to experiencing a lot of pushback and lost financial opportunities in the wake of making her pro-Palestine stance public, describing how the threat of such losses silences many of her peers. “So many of us have come from nothing . . . we have this scarcity mindset of, ‘I have to protect what I have going on so hard that I will do anything’. . . It’s sad because that does get dangled in our faces when it comes to really important political matters that people don’t align with.”
Beyond the influence of Zionist investments, it must be reiterated that when people of color do take a stand for others, the safety of their personhood is in the line of fire. ‘Stakes is High,’ as De La Soul warned. My heart twisted when I saw a viral video of a white man making monkey noises in front of a Black woman standing with pro-Palestinian protesters at the University of Mississippi earlier this year. I have seen many Black Americans online telling each other to focus on the trials of their community alone, asking why they should care about Palestine—especially when Arabs do not care about them. In many ways, they are right. I stand with Palestinian women like Linda Sarsour and Rashida Tlaib, who vehemently advocate to stamp out anti-Black racism and recognize that the struggle for civil rights starts and ends with Black people. From the Arab–Muslim slave trade in Africa to Sudan’s turmoil today and the kafala system, there is no shortage of examples of Black brothers and sisters living through hell at brown hands. Because, as the saying goes, none of us is free until we all are.
Compared to the rest of the Middle East, there is a long history of solidarity between Palestinians and Black Americans: a recognition of shared struggle, despite being over 9,600 kilometers away from each other, within the Black revolutionary tradition of opposition to Zionism and all forms of Western racism, colonialism, and imperialism.
Rap’s favorite revolutionary, Malcolm X, was deeply impacted by a visit to a refugee camp in Gaza in 1964. Witnessing firsthand the displacement and suffering caused by the 1948 Nakba, he declared, “Our problem in America is a problem that is worldwide,” drawing parallels between the Palestinian struggle and the Black American fight for equality. Civil rights and pan-African activist Stokely Carmichael, regarded as the originator of the phrase “Black Power”, was also vocally pro-Palestinian. The Black Panther Party supported Palestinian liberation “one hundred percent”, releasing the first of several official statements on the issue in 1970: “We would like for all of the progressive people of the world to join in our ranks in order to make a world in which all people can live.” One year earlier, at the first Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers, party members and another Panther leader, Eldridge Cleaver, were famously photographed with delegates from the Palestinian Liberation Organization. During the festival, Cleaver was quoted by the New York Times as saying, “We recognize the Jewish people have suffered, but this suffering should not be used to justify suffering by Arabs now.” Yet another Panther leader, Huey P. Newton, visited Lebanon in 1980, spending significant time with Palestinian refugees.
More recently, during the 2014 Ferguson Uprising that followed the murder of unarmed Black teenager Michael Brown by Missouri police officer Darren Wilson, Palestinians sent advice to protesters via Twitter about how to resist tear gas and other military tactics taught to and acquired by U.S. law enforcement from Israel. Palestinian flags and the following chant then gained prominence in the protests: “From Ferguson to Palestine, occupation is a crime!” Two years later, in 2016, the Movement for Black Lives published its policy platform where it described Israel as an apartheid state committing genocide. (In response, they experienced backlash from funders, canceled events, and accusations of antisemitism.)
Harlem-born poet June Jordan once said our greatest moral litmus test is what we are “prepared to do on behalf of the Palestinian people.” Hip-hop’s world-class wordsmiths should recognize through Jordan’s message that rap’s power is explosive when it taps into its inherently provocative roots. When Kendrick Lamar made ‘Alright’, it became the soundtrack to Black Lives Matter. When Eminem performed a surprise freestyle as part of the 2017 BET Hip Hop Awards’ annual cipher, it was a four-minute acapella tirade against President Donald Trump. We need more of these dynamic examples, not less. Instead of fearing the impact on themselves and their careers, what if top artists recognized their collective power and forced the decision-makers to feel the pressure?
In the decades before the current Gazan genocide, there was a trickling of hip-hop solidarity from stalwarts like Palestinian-American artists Shadia Mansour and Fred Wreck, plus Lupe Fiasco, Lowkey, Immortal Technique and Saul Williams. Throughout this past year, they have been joined by Arab artists like Anees, Belly, and Dizaster, plus Redveil, Kid Cudi, Rapsody, and international acts like Chilean-French Ana Tijoux, Irish group Kneecap, and Australian record label Elefant Trax. These warriors — as admirable as they are — don’t hold the power or weight of rap’s leading acts. Of course, we have multiple Grammy-award winner Macklemore, who has become an unfailing advocate for Palestine, creating stirring tributes in ‘Hind’s Hall’ and its sequel. Before performing the track for the first time in New Zealand earlier this year, he told the adoring crowd: “I stand here today and every day forward for the rest of my life in solidarity with the people of Palestine.” To my earlier point, while Macklemore should be lauded for being the highest-profile rapper to condemn Israel, as a cisgender, Christian-raised white man, we also know he has much less to lose.
Speaking of privilege, sitting here while Palestinians continue to be killed in catastrophic numbers, plus a growing number of Lebanese, makes me ill. I have the privilege of being a settler myself on unceded Aboriginal lands. I had the privilege of growing up when hip-hop changed the narrative — when it talked up and talked back. I had the privilege of being welcomed into hip-hop in the first place. I don’t believe that most of rap’s top artists have no objections to human genocide, but their selfishness supersedes their sentience. At some point in their careers, they made that decision. But in the tradition of the best hip-hop journalists, I demand more from them. The soul of this art form that changed our lives is dying, and we must save it. In his 2021 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame acceptance speech, Jay-Z reflected on wanting to be like the culture’s pioneers who rocked “the red, black, green medallions” and how “the audacity of hip-hop” kept him reaching new heights. This is my clarion call to DJ Khaled, Swizz Beatz, Jay-Z and their ilk. Remember why we fell in love with this gift in the first place. Your silences will not protect you, as Audre Lorde said. Being silent on oppression isn’t hip-hop. Shit, basic actions like signing a statement and wearing a pin ain’t hip-hop, either. We must divest, make rebel music, and take to the streets like I’ve been doing with millions of others, looking deeper within to find that fight.
I wonder what hip-hop songs the brave college students around the world are listening to as they set up encampments protesting Israel’s genocidal campaign. What is playing in their ears to encourage them to fight the power? It isn’t our biggest stars. Maybe it’s Belly’s “Patience vs Patients”: “Drones, helicopters, killing our doctors/Turned the hospital to a hospice/While you watched it.” Hip-hop fans are doing everything we can to ensure we don’t just stand by and allow more children like Rania Alghraiz to end up dancing in heaven. Our artists should too.
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