Beyond the Lyrics: Hip-Hop Practices and Palestinian Identity

Item Type text; Electronic Dissertation

Authors Karaman, Alexander Kamal

Publisher The University of Arizona.

Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction, presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author.

Download date 24/09/2021 17:32:27

Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/642061

BEYOND THE LYRICS: HIP-HOP PRACTICES AND PALESTINIAN IDENTITY

FORMATION

by

Alexander Karaman

______Copyright Ó Alexander Karaman 2020

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the

DEPARTMENT OF GENDER AND WOMEN’S STUDIES

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

For the Degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

In the Graduate College

THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

2020

2 Acknowledgements This dissertation is the product of eight years in graduate school and fieldwork spread over five years in Israel-Palestine. Such a project would be impossible without the help of so many colleagues, friends, and family members who invested their time in mentoring and supporting me. First, my dissertation committee members are a fantastic team of scholars who have demonstrated what true mentorship mean in a world where individualism and competition too often guide our work. Miranda Joseph was instrumental in recruiting me to the University of Arizona and, as the Director of Graduate Studies, being an early advocate for me and so many other graduate students. Her feedback and willingness to hold me accountable while encouraging me forward helped me to see the importance and strength of my work. Maha Nassar always reminded me that my work was important to Palestinians and Palestine Studies. In an era where Palestine becomes fodder for academics and journalists who are not concerned with issues near and dear to Palestinians, her encouragement was the most important. I cannot imagine what this work would have looked like without another Palestinian to converse with about my writing. Vincent Del Casino helped shape my understanding of geographic inquiry in many ways and across many classes. His strong understanding of methodology in class and as an advisor helped me develop and proceed through my own research with more confidence and direction while keeping me open to whatever might emerge in the field. Stefano Bloch was the most recent addition to the team and graciously filled in when I needed someone to help me with feedback while completing my writing. Stefano’s own work in urban and cultural geography and graffiti meshed perfectly with my project and our discussions proved refreshing and valuable as I finished. My community at the University of Arizona was wonderfully supportive throughout my tenure. I was blessed to be in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies and to be surrounded by a group of activists who advocated for each other and provided support to each other when the instituton did not. I saw faculty donate personal money to help graduate students pay medical bills. I saw out graduate students lead some of the largest demonstrations on campus for graduate student workers, undocumented students, and, even as I write this, for laid off staff and students in the midst of COVID. From the members of my cohort, Scottie, Rocket, Abe, and Kelly, to my writing partners, especially Mija, I found the most amazing and brilliant group of students. I am further lucky for a great crew of friends outside the university, who I cannot thank enough for never asking me how writing was going. Our crew is tight and caring, and I could not have done it without Tim, Jimmy, Traci, Steph, Buffalo, Antonio, Jonathan, and Aretha. Lastly, my amazing partner and co-conspirator, Megan, has been my ultimate support and encouragement throughout the last six years. She believed in me every step of the way, even when I doubted myself the most. She celebrated every accomplishment along the way, even if it was a chapter revision or just a day getting in a lot of writing. There is no one else I would have wanted to run this race with and I share this accomplishment with her. Also, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention our dogs Milli and Whiskey and our cat Stella.

3 Table of Contents Abstract …………………………………………………………...…………………………………………………….(5) 1. Introduction: Going Beyond the Lyrics: Hip-Hop Practices and Palestinian Identity Formation….……….(6) I. Themes for this Dissertation: Identity Formation and Space ………………………………………………(9) II. Notes on Terminology ………………………………………………………………………………………….(24) Geographic ………………………………………………………………………………………...…(24) Sexual …………………………………………………………………………………………...…….(28) Cultural ……………………….……………………….……………………………...….…………...(33) III. Notes on Methodology ……………………….……………………….………………………………………..(35) IV. Chapter Outline ……………………… ……………………… ……………………………………...………..(41) 2. Chapter One: Going Out, Not Coming Out: Queer Affects and (Secluded) Public Space in Haifa….…....(45) I. Glitter and Gunfire: Thoughts and Feelings on Palestinian Hip-Hop …………………………………..(45) II. Queer Theory, Decoloniality, and the Mixed City of Haifa ……………………………………………….(52) III. A Queer/Palestinian Geography of Public Space ………………………………………………………….(65) Mobility and Visibility Dynamics ……………………………………………………………...…..(67) Passing As: The Ocular Logic of Western Sexualities ………………………………………….(73) Passing Through: Mobility and Visibility in Public Spaces in Haifa …………………………(80) IV. Going Out, Coming Out………………………………………………………………………………………. (83) V. Secluded Publics …………………………………………………………………………………….………….(88) VI. Conclusion …………………………………………………………………………………………….………...(97) 3. Chapter Two: Hip-Hop Ramallah: Space-making Enterprises, Glocalization, and Feminism ….……….(101) I. Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………………………………(101) II. Space-Making Enterprises and Music Glocalization …………………………………………………….(107) The Need for (Hip-Hop) Space …………………………………………………………………...(107) The Political Landscape of Hip-Hop Spaces …………………………………………….……..(109) Space-Making and Glocalization: Enter the Void and the Boiler Room Show …………….(115) Rethinking Glocalization Across the Diaspora: The Berlin-Ramallah Connection. ……...(129) III. Gender, Feminism, and Hip-Hop Space-Making …………………………………………………………(133) Gender, Public Space, and Privacy in Palestine ……………………………………….………(135) Sexism in Hip-Hop in Ramallah ………………………………………………………………….(139) Feminist Space-making ……………………………………………………………………………(144) Rethinking Glocalization Beyond Nationalism: Feminist Space-Making Broadcast Globally……………………………………………………………………………………………... (154) IV. Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………………………………………..(156) 4. Chapter Three: The Forced Trade-Offs of Mixed Cities: Palestinian Masculinities and the Pursuit of Coexistence in Jerusalem ………………………………………………………………………………...... (162) I. Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………………………………(162) II. The Geopolitics of Mixed Cities …………………………………………………………………………….(168) Mixed Cities as Opportunities ……………………………………………………………………(169) Individual Opportunities: Identity and Everyday Choice …..……………………….(169) The Collective Opportunity of Coexistence …………………..…………………….....(173) Mixing/Mixed: Curtailed Opportunities and Perceptions of Coexistence ……………….....(176) Palestinian Masculinities and Hip-Hop in Jerusalem …………………………………………(178) Mixed Cities: A Hip-Hop Concern ……………………………………………………………….(186) III. Palestinian Artists Supporting Coexistence ……………………………………………………..….….....(194) The Hip-Hop Histories of Muzi Raps and Saz …………………………………………….……(195) The (a)Politics of Marketing in Coexistence ……………………………………………………(205) Mixed Events Centering Palestinians: Corner Prophets and Ha-Mazkeka ………………..(220) IV. Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………………………………………..(233) 5. Conclusion: From Practices to Arrangements: Affectivity and Identity in Palestinian Hip-Hop Spaces …………………………………………………………………………………………………...... (243) I. Shared Space: Public Space Versus Secluded Publics………………………………………………….. (245) II. Bodies in Motion: Affective Relationality ……………………………………………………………….....(250) III. Cruel Optimisms versus Intersectional Decoloniality ……………………………………………...... (255) IV. Transnational Hip-Hop Arrangements Beyond Shared Places ………………………………………....(260) 6. References...……………………………………………………………………………………………...... (265)

4

ABSTRACT Based on fieldwork spread over five years, this project explores the significance of hip-hop practices to Palestinian identity formation. In each of three cities, Haifa, Ramallah, and Jerusalem, I highlight how space-making practices employed by hip-hop fans and artists ultimately support intersectional, differential, feminist, queer, and affective modes of identity formation and belonging. In Haifa, queer Palestinians regularly go out to hip-hop shows in "secluded publics," built environments that accommodate queer eroticism while supporting modes of visibility and mobility discouraged and policed in Israeli public spaces. In Ramallah, processes of music glocalization, structured by transnational hip-hop circuits and the prominence of foreign NGOs in the West Bank, reflect in the selective co-optation of global hip-hop culture by feminist space-makers who assert local concerns over safe space and sexual harassment while elaborating globally an aspirational feminist politics of public space. In Jerusalem, male hip-hop artists seek success in the more financially lucrative Israeli music scene, but doing so requires them to make certain trade-offs that reinforce masculinized, colonial notions of the abhorrent, violent, angry Arab (terrorist) while positioning themselves as the sort of Arab required and desired in Israeli coexistence logics. In each city and chapter, this projects contributes to Palestinian cultural studies scholarship on intersectional identity formation and youth culture in ways that assert the salience of space, place, identity, and affect to the experience of Palestinian hip-hop.

5 INTRODUCTION:

Going Beyond the Lyrics: Hip-Hop Practices and Palestinian Identity Formation

Palestinian hip-hop was already global at the moment of its creation. It was born of U.S.- based music practices and circulated globally through digital media. Thus, it arrived in Israel-

Palestine, where it grew at the hands of artists and producers who put their own twists and riffs on the genre. Though young Palestinian kids were probably rapping along to tapes they came across since the early 1990s, many cite 1998 as the year when Palestinian hip-hop produced its first group, DAM. The trio was accompanied early on by some other notable groups and individuals, including Palestine Street, MWR, Palestinian Rapperz, and later R.F.M., Arapyat,

Ramallah Underground, and MC Gaza. These are but a few of the more popular early generation of rappers. What it overlooks is the large number of Palestinian rappers in the diaspora, The Iron

Sheik, Shadia Mandsour, Philistines, DJ Khaled, and Belly, among others, who have contributed extensively to Palestinian hip-hop and built bridges between Palestinians in the diaspora and in

Israel-Palestine. This first generation of artists was musically influenced by U.S. hip-hop, sampling from beats, melodies, and even lyrics to produce their music. They were politically influenced by events that changed the world in the late 1990s and early 2000s, increased Western military intervention in the Middle East, September 11th, and, importantly, the Second Intifada, influences that reflected in their lyrics. While the content of their music and the focus of their messages may have changed since then, many of these artists and groups continue to perform and to nurture new generation of artists.

Young artists today are making marked departures from the musical and lyrical practices that defined the first generation of hip-hop artists, defining what I see as a second generation in

Palestinian hip-hop. Though that generation has no clear temporal break from the first, after all,

6 many of the musical and lyrical practices from the early 2000s still influence new artists and many artists have successfully transitioned between the two, the years around and after 2010 witnessed big changes in the Palestinian hip-hop scene. In many ways, those changes have been influenced by an increased interest in the genre in Palestine. More artists, more fans, more venues hosting events, all meant that the genre had room to grow and change, instead of marketing consistency to a small audience. Music began to change as artists began citing different influences. Electronic dance music (EDM) has been one of those major influences as

Palestinians pay increasing attention to the EDM scene in Europe. Certainly, most shows I have been to have contained both EDM and hip-hop performers. Rappers, DJs, and producers are also brining Palestinian music traditions into their music in novel ways, creating a simultaneously

Palestinian and hip-hop sound. Those artists use Palestinian musical instruments, especially the oud and derbekkeh drums, alongside hip-hop base lines and rapping, which can take place in

Arabic, English, or both. The political influences have changed as well, with younger and older artists paying increased attention to internal critiques of Palestinian society and culture, alongside the extant focus on colonization.

The new generation is also notably diverse in its population, from artists to fans, hip-hop is attracting young Palestinians from many backgrounds. Female DJs, MCs, and rappers have been appealing to a growing female fanbase in cities like Acre, Nazareth, and Ramallah. In

Haifa, the hip-hop scene is a site where queer affinities are cultivated, with hip-hop shows becoming a major fixture of queer nightlife there. With production technology becoming increasingly available and affordable for new artists looking to set-up home studios, hip-hop remains and has even grown as a mechanism for young Palestinians to express themselves and continues to be discussed in scholarship as a youth music culture. What makes music

7 practices unique to the Palestinian case is their ability to travel through digital circuits that circumvent the barriers erected to stymie the movement of people. Those barriers, the West Bank wall, the enclosure of Gaza, the Israeli military control of the Jordan-Palestine border, and the other, countless, shifting barriers erected at a moment’s notice to restrict Palestinian movement, cannot stop someone from streaming a track on Soundcloud. What I find fascinating is that, despite the increased accessibility of digital music and video channels and sharing platforms,

Palestinian hip-hop practices continue to reflect the salience of local identities and experiences of artists and fans alike. One’s location, the various spaces and places one occupies, constructs, or co-opts, remain key factors in the hip-hop practices of this young and increasingly diverse community.

In this dissertation, I argue that hip-hop practices cultivate affinities between Palestinians, constituting practitioners in relation to each other and to spaces, both material and imagined, felt and thought. The spaces, effects, and affects of those affinities are myriad and addressed in the chapters that follow. Identity formation and space are central themes in this work as I attempt to be very specific in my analysis of hip-hop practices. What takes place, for example, in Haifa’s

(queer) hip-hop scene is not transferable to Ramallah’s, where different constrictions on public space affect a different relationship between (queer) individuals and the hip-hop scene. Those differences reiterate the role of space and place in gendered, classed, and sexual experiences of hip-hop cultures. Thus, this dissertation is primarily concerned with how spatially embedded and physically embodied hip-hop cultural practices contribute to identity formation among

Palestinians. While lyrical analysis is important to scholarship on Palestinian hip-hop, I draw from four years of participatory research in the Palestinian hip-hop scene to go beyond the lyrics,

8 to provide grounded theorizations of the material and imagined spaces of Palestinian hip-hop and the individuals who populate them.

I. Themes for this Dissertation: Identity Formation and Space

Identity formation and space are common themes in scholarship on Palestine across many disciplines, both of which continue to define scholarship on Palestinian national identity. The notion of Palestinian national identity is often derided by critics who argue that Palestine was never a “nation” in a traditional sense, instead an area traded by colonial powers for centuries before the establishment of Israel in 1948. Since then, the national paradigm has continued to dominate scholarship on Palestinian identity formation, positioned as both a real identity and an imagined or constructed one. Rashid Khalidi, one of the most prominent scholars on Palestinian identity formation, addresses how part of the Palestinian national identity has concretized around the marginalization Palestinians experienced leading up to and after 1948. Khalidi (1997) writes as an attempt, “to explain how a strong sense of Palestinian national identity developed in spite of, and in some cases because of, the obstacles it faced” (p. 36). Those obstacles are myriad, and different scholars have taken up their differential impact on Palestinian national identity formation. For some individuals, national identity has been impacted by experiences of

“marginalization and dislocation from a place” (Akesson, 2015, p. 35). Manuel Hassassian

(2002) similarly addresses how the diaspora has had considerable impacts on national identity, creating divisions between diaspora and non-diaspora Palestinians in terms of national identity. Hassassian discusses the Oslo agreements specifically, arguing that:

It was believed that this step would lead to the reconciliation between "interior" and

"exterior" political cultures. However, the post-Oslo period has witnessed competition

9 between various strains of Palestinian political culture, such as that between the

mainstream national movement and the Islamic fundamentalist movement. (p. 52)

Hassassian’s work resonates with a larger conversation about space and place, alternatively about location, as am impactful force on national identity. One’s location in the diaspora

(Hassassian, 2002), in Israel (Hammack, 2010; Basit, 2017), or in Palestine, can impact your national identity and aspirations. Beyond location, other identities intersect with national identity in ways that deny a unitary reading of Palestinian national identity. As Khalidi (1997) explains:

It is so difficult to perceive the specificity of Palestinian nationalism. This is so partly

because of the way in which identity for the Palestinians is and has always been

intermingled with a sense of identity on so many other levels, whether Islamic or

Christian, Ottoman or Arab, local or universal, or family and tribal. (36)

Experiences of dislocation, marginalization, or exclusion combine with other factors, including parenting (Brand, 1995), education (Basit, 2017; Abu Lughod, 2000; Hovsepian,

2008), and even official Islamist and secularist discourses (Amer, 2012). With a range of factors affecting Palestinian national identity formation, it is not surprising that most contemporary scholars describe Palestinian national identity as constructed, rather than an “old primordial phenomenon” (Hassassian, 2002, p. 51):

The concept of having a national identity is, therefore, constructed, as opposed to being a

given. In fact, the process of constructing national identity is shaped by real political and

intellectual forces which, in turn, grapple with the formation of new social classes, the

expansion of modern communications, the spread of education, and the introduction of

mass politics. (p. 51)

As Amer (2012) similarly contends:

10 The last two decades, however, had seen a proliferation of methodological

orientations which emphasized the socially constructed nature of national

phenomena. The conception of nation as an ‘imagined community’ highlights the

active role of discourse through which notions of national homogeneity, historic

continuity and shared present and destiny are constituted, re-constituted and

inculcated in and through discourse, often by a nationalist and engaged

intelligentsia. (p. 117)

Approaches to Palestinian national identity formation have been diffuse, representing at times intersectional paradigms that go beyond a singular notion of Palestinian national identity that ignores differences of gender, sex, sexuality, religion, or geopolitical location. I choose to utilize the language of intersectionality in connection with decoloniality throughout this work because of my own commitment to the term as a still relevant analytic for unpacking Palestinian identity formation at a time when scholarship on Palestinian (national) identity formation still sidelines considerations of sex, gender, and sexuality that should inform the horizons of Palestinian world- building. Within multiple fields of critical race and gender studies, scholars have recently placed intersectional theory in a critical light, alternatively suggesting that it is poorly defined and thus capable of being applied everywhere (Davis, 2008) or that it’s long history with Black feminist scholarship and organizing has reduced contemporary understandings of Black feminism to a narrow focus on intersectionality and identity (Nash, 2013). While Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term in 1989 within a critique of the U.S. legal system, her and other scholars remain hopeful that intersectionality can still prove useful in highlighting and excavating the means by which different systems of subject formation and oppression variously work together and come into conflict. As Crenshaw recently clarified:

11 Some people look to intersectionality as a grand theory of everything, but that’s not my

intention. If someone is trying to think about how to explain to the courts why they

should not dismiss a case made by black women, just because the employer did hire

blacks who were men and women who were white, well, that's what the tool was

designed to do. If it works, great. If it doesn’t work, it’s not like you have to use this

concept. (Crenshaw, 2017)

Jasbir Puar (2007; 2011) and Jennifer Nash (2013; 2019) have offered productive criticism and revisioning of intersectional theory, largely from the perspective of U.S. Black feminisms that have taken up the term extensively. I agree with both their conclusions that the specific deployments of intersectionality have reified the position of “woman of color” as the necessary

Other against which white women have their central subject position secured within academic and activist feminisms, meaning intersectionality is a term “simultaneously emptied of specific meaning on the one hand and overdetermined in its deployment on the other” (Puar, 2011, p. 52).

While I understand with and agree with their arguments, I also believe that they function within a particularly U.S., Western context in which the very histories and contentions they highlight circulate. In contrast, Crenshaw’s hope that intersectionality can be used beyond its specific attachment to Black feminisms finds expression in this dissertation. Nonetheless, this work reflects the concerns of Puar and Nash, among others, and considers their alternative approaches throughout its pages. Specifically, I engage in the application of intersectional theory outside of a U.S. context in which Palestinians are actively resisting the reification of Western identity categories. This aligns with Crenshaw’s (2017) hopefulness, but also Nash’s (2018, p.81) desire to see Black feminisms

“surrender” intersectionality to other fields of study. Further, as a work that highlights not only intersectional, but hybrid, differential, and notably affective approaches to identity and affinity, I align with Puar’s own suggestion that, “intersectionality as an intellectual rubric and a tool for

12 political intervention must be supplemented - if not complicated - by a notion of (queer) assemblage”

(2011). While I do not use the term “(queer) assemblage” specifically, my considerations of spatiality, mobility, and visibility, in part, help move beyond an approach to identity that reifies particular identity categories and towards notions of feeling, belonging, affinity, and arrangement that emerge through hip-hop cultural practices.

Identifying the role of cultural practices in (national) identity formation in Palestine helps to deny a static reading of ‘a Palestinian experience’ (and consequent national identity/aspiration) that denies Palestinians cultural agency. That static reading comes in two contradictory assumptions: that, on one hand, Palestinians face such harsh material conditions that cultural production is unimportant or nonexistent, and that, on the other,

Palestinians (and Middle-Easterners more broadly) are entirely culture, absent of modern cultural expertise, and ultimately caught in the past (Said, 1994). By shedding light on the role of cultural production in Israel-Palestine through a broad, grounded study of Palestinian hip-hop culture, this dissertation will demonstrate how the cultural is always in flux, always being practiced, in ways that similarly position identity formation as a process without an endpoint.

Within Palestine and among Palestinians, Helga Tawil-Souri (2011) argues that cultural production takes place under the current conditions of political and material dispossession, historical and contemporary erasure, and mainstream Western (mis)representations of

Palestinians, making cultural practices in Palestine often political and resistant. Ted Swedenburg and Rebecca Stein (2005) further argue that cultural production in Palestine functions as a

Gramscian “war of position,” one which scholars like Ali Abunimah (2014) contend Palestinians are slowly winning. Cultural production is performative, taking on discursive and affective dimensions within what have been termed cultural imaginaries, spaces in which notions of

13 identity, community, and futurity are contested. Thus, this project seeks to bring cultural practices to the center of political discussions of Israel-Palestine, ones that seek to understand the felt, identitarian motivations behind individual and group action. Understanding

Tawil-Souri’s argument as a call for cultural scholarship-as-resistance, I seek to understand the ways in which hip-hop practices links identity to politics on multiple scales, within Palestine specifically, and among Palestinians more generally, including through felt affinities that prefigure political mobilization. I chose this topic because although Palestinian cultural studies has focused at length on the connection between cultural production and Palestinian identity, it has done so without paying due attention to two key concerns that I argue are of great importance to cultural studies in Palestine and to Palestinian hip-hop specifically: “less- traditional” cultural forms and non-representational, non-linguistic aspects of culture.

Though “less-traditional” forms of Palestinian cultural production, including Palestinian hip-hop, do not always challenge traditional Palestinian identity formations, they often engage with mediums and topics left out of less recent, more-traditional Palestinian cultural forms. I contend that Palestinian hip-hop, a term I use to reference both a shifting set of cultural practices and specific products or texts, is an important site of intervention in and reformation of Palestinian identity politics. Scholars have linked hip-hop in Palestine to gender politics (McDonald, 2010; Greenberg, 2009), youth culture (Maira & Shihade, 20120), and transnational communication (Maira, 2008), demonstrating its usefulness for discussing “a

Palestine that is becoming globalized and a globe that is becoming Palestinized” (Collins, 2011, p. x). Further, while the study of (Palestinian) hip-hop music has overwhelmingly remained in the realm of representation (e.g. the lyrical genre as a semantic network) new research in sonic and affect theory indicates the need to consider how bodies are affected by hip-hop music and to

14 what ends (Goodman, 2009; Massumi, 2002; Gould, 2009). Thus, in addition to the linking of culture, identity, and politics, this work seeks to consider a number of deconstructive mediations, between Israel and Palestine, affect and language, orient and occident, and identity and politics.

The study of cultural production is rooted in the belief that cultural practices are implicated within political processes, related to power in both dominant and subversive ways.

For example, the study of subcultures as subversive to hegemonic politics contrasts with accounts of popular culture or a culture industry as producing docile subjects (Sardar, 2010;

Adorno and Horkheimer, 2001). For scholars of cultural studies like Raymond Williams and

Stuart Hall, “culture is not something to merely appreciate or study; it is also a critical site of social action and intervention, where power relations are both established and potentially unsettled” (Procter, 2004, p. 2). However, rather than being a utopic space, culture represents “a site of ongoing struggle that can never be guaranteed for one side” (ibid). Thus, a study of

Palestinian hip-hop necessitates a consideration of the political and economic contexts in which hip-hop is produced and consumed. Many aspects of Palestinian hip-hop make it amenable to the analytic traditions established within cultural studies. Its recognizance and framing as a transnational, global, or glocal cultural formation steeped in counter-hegemonic cultural traditions gestures towards extant scholarship on cultural production in the Global South reflecting criticisms of Western imperial hegemony (Appadurai, 1996). The disparate uses of

Palestinian hip-hop, ranging from its consumption as a political statement to Netanyahu’s use of it as background music in anti-Arab election propaganda, resonate with diverse approaches to meaning making in the reading or consumption of cultural texts.

Given the overt role identity plays in the structuring of Palestinian political landscapes, one key concern in this study is to understand the identitarian aspects of Palestinian

15 hip-hop music as they connect to the political. The intervention cultural production can offer in hegemonic power relations has directed many cultural theorists to investigate identity formation in relation to cultural practices. Feminist, Marxist, critical race, and queer studies have all influenced the interdisciplinary field of cultural studies. Subcultures, like Palestinian hip-hop, establish flexible and changing, yet nonetheless articulated sets of codes that define genre conventions within the contexts of production and consumption, political, economic, spatial, and imaginary. The imaginary has been a particularly useful lens of analysis in critical theory and cultural studies, referring to a “symbolic field in which people come to understand themselves and describe their social being,” indicating that “the repertory of symbolic representation and practices that constitute cultural life may exert material force in the everyday existence of a people” (Camacho, 2008, p. 5). The study of cultural imaginaries involves a contextual approach, as they represent “the means by which subjects work through their connections to a larger totality and communicate a sense of relatedness to a particular time, place, and condition” (ibid).

Thus, I contend that, by speaking to Palestinian “time[s], place[s], and condition[s],” Palestinian hip-hop provides opportunities for the differential (re)formation of Palestinian identity or community. This, I will argue, reflects a desire to simultaneously respond to and within the slippages of hegemonic materialities and discourses, as well as to engage in world-making practices directed towards Palestinian futurity.

The relationships involved in the construction of identity and affinity take on more than just semantic, representational dimensions, evidenced in lyrical analysis of Palestinian hip- hop, but involve an emotional, affective, and embodied sense of belonging. Drawing from

Deborah Gould (2009) and Brian Massumi (2002), I use affect to refer to the “nonconscious and unnamed, though nevertheless registered, experiences of bodily energy and intensity that arise in

16 response to stimuli impinging on the body” (Gould, 2009, p. 18). Similarly, I adapt Massumi's (2002) concept of emotion, “the expression of affect in gesture and language, its conventional or coded expression” (p. 232), to address how emotion (in)forms the horizon, or potential direction, of affect. Emotional markers often provide the rubrics through which affects are expressed or represented in language. As Gould (2009) states, “emotion, in other words, brings a vague bodily intensity or sensation into the realm of cultural meanings and normativity, systems of meaning that structure our very feelings” (p. 21). However, the expression of affect in language cannot resolve affect, leaving what scholars have termed an "affective residue”, a schema through which emotions redirect future affects (Gould, 2009, p. 38).

Although emotions might direct future affects, emotion still requires maintenance or elaboration through representational practices, ones that I view as intimately tied to identity and culture. To say that identities affect is not to make a deterministic argument about a Palestinian affect, but to gesture towards the representational and felt understandings of identity. Therefore,

I take up the term emotional habitus as something that emerges on interpersonal, intercultural, and glocal scales, appearing as the “socially constituted, prevailing ways of feeling and emoting, as well as the embodied, axiomatic understandings and norms about feelings and their expression” (Gould, 2009, p. 10). To say identity is an affective concern further offers insight into the ubiquity of identity as a binding phenomenon, as highlighted by conceptions of imagined nations or affinities (Anderson, 2016; Joseph, 2002). In his earlier work, DeLanda (2006) offered a path for this line of inquiry, alternatively conceptualizing affect as the ability to form or actualize assemblages from entities with different properties, including groups of people.

Individuals and collectivities have affective histories that influence which affects arise and/or how the body is affected. Similarly, Gould (2009) refers to the affective resonance

17 of group histories as the affective landscape of that group (p. 338-39). Raymond Williams has alternatively termed such histories as structures of feeling, “social experiences in solution, as distinct from other social semantic formations which have been precipitated and are more evidently and more immediately available" (qtd in Bachmann-Medick and Tygstrup, 2015, p. 133-34). Structures of feeling or affective landscapes are not absent semantic dimensions, but are often articulated in ways that are, in turn, felt, “not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought…a social experience still in process” (ibid, p. 132). Given that cultural production is a site of identity formation, we might ask what affective dimensions Palestinian hip-hop practices hold and how they intermingle with (Palestinian) structures of feeling and emotional habitus.

Recent scholarship on sonic theory gestures towards one of the affective dimensions of cultural production, the role of sound as a constant feature of political landscapes. Addressing with keen insight the affective dimensions of sound, partially in reference to the sonic warfare conducted on Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip, Steve Goodman (2009) utilizes the term affective tone as a way to address the “collective moods or affects” of sonic deployments, tones which can contribute, as is the case in Palestine, “to an immersive atmosphere or ambiance of fear and dread” (p. 15). Goodman explains that affective tones are capable of being “swept up in a regime of power, a regime that operates ambiently, modulating mood in the background and preempting the way in which the future unfolds” (Fuller, 2009). Therefore, while the sonic warfare conducted by the Israeli state and international contractors does have physical effects, it also shapes the landscape on and against which hip-hop music can deploy strategies of sonic, affective resistance.

18 If exercises of hegemonic power rely on the creation of immersive sonic atmosphere, they do so at the expense of categorizing various sonic deployments as just, necessary, and normal on one hand, while others become relegated to the margins and therefore become sites of resistant, sonic politics. Therefore, the association of hip-hop music with racialized counter- cultural communities in the U.S. typically involves both a criticism of the lyrical content and a dismissal of the sonic forms. In the case of Palestine, the association of (authentic, resistant) hip- hop with Palestine and its widespread criticism in Israeli cultural circles assigns Palestinian hip- hop counter-hegemonic power not only as a discursive formation, but also as a sonic deployment. Hip-hop beats shift the meaning of those objects they attend, be they words or images, and produce affective states that (in)form and are (in)formed by prevailing structures of feeling. Moreover, the lyrical content of hip-hop music actively depicts a particular emotional habitus, often intended to coalesce with the sonic dimensions of a song, or alternatively to capture through representation the affective landscape embodied and experienced by the audience.

Studying affect is a difficult process, and scholars continue to grapple with what it means to study affect in a material setting. In particular, I find useful the concept of “affective arrangement” as developed by Jan Slaby, Rainer Mühlhoff, & Philipp Wüschner (2019). Slaby et al. define their concept accordingly:

In our understanding, affective arrangements are heterogeneous ensembles of diverse

materials forming a local layout that operates as a dynamic formation, comprising

persons, things, artifacts, spaces, discourses, behaviors, and expressions in a

characteristic mode of composition and dynamic relatedness. (p. 4)

19 Slaby et al. (2019) suggest that scholars consider the empirical significance of their concept as a directive for those conducting research on affect and want to hold the elements in affective arrangements open to change or re-arrangement. They write that, “social scientists, ethnographers, or researchers of media who approach a social domain might use ‘affective arrangement’ as an explorative concept that guides their charting of the material layout and functional design of social spaces, domains, or media platforms, focusing on those elements and their structured interplay that are presumably instrumental to the reliable production and/or continued circulation of affect” (p. 10). I approached this study in line with their suggestions, maintaining openness to new materials, bodies, discourses, behaviors, and spaces that emerged during the research process. Thus, over the course of the proceeding chapters, you will encounter different foci, narrowing in on different elements that define different affective arrangements in each city.

Regarding space specifically, cultural production involves numerous spaces, the sites of production or consumption, the mediums, circuits, and landscapes of exchange, and the spatial imaginaries invoked. Drawing on research on spatial reorganization, gentrification, and resistance in Black and Chicano neighborhoods in Los Angeles, Gaye Theresa Johnson (2013) explained the quotidian struggle between mobility and containment that defined life in the city.

Her analysis has implications far beyond the scope of historic L.A., as the push and pull between mobility and containment defines the spaces of resistance in which battles are fought against what Johnson terms spatial immobilization, the seen-to-be neutral processes through which marginalized populations face “militarization of urban space, anti-immigration [and in the

Palestinian case, migration] policies, loss of assets, and disenfranchisement” (p. xxi). Spatial immobilization is not only effective in physically separating resistant or undesirable populations,

20 but is affective as well, physically and discursively cutting through and re-shaping the

Palestinian emotional habitus.

In the case of Palestinian political music, material spatial immobilization (in)forms modes of sonic spatial entitlement. Music moves through space in ways that other material, like human bodies, are often prevented from doing, or, as Alicia Camacho (2008) explains, cultural imaginaries “traverse geopolitical for national authority over territory” (p. 6). This traversal builds connections between Palestinians separated and immobilized by the physical, militaristic, and political machinations of settler-colonialism. Music production as a form of spatial entitlement is component of the (re)creation of community and identity through what Johnson terms a soundscape, “a shared sonic space that promoted mutual identification and prefigured…political affiliations and alliances grounded in intercultural communication and coalescence in places shaped by struggles for spatial entitlement” (p. 2). Thus soundscapes, including those created by Palestinian hip-hop artists, involve the elaboration of similarities and differences between those who populate the communities of production and listenership, with an eye towards political futurities. Palestinian hip-hop speaks to the diversity of Palestinians that exist and the differential spatial dimensions of military occupation, policing, and wall-building that Palestinians traverse, thereby crafting discursive and affective affinities. As a partial rumination on the relationship between space and hip-hop practices, this approach positions hip- hop space-making as not a priori to hip-hop practices, but a constitutive and ongoing hip-hop practice itself, one at times co-extensive with queer, feminist, and/or decolonial spatial politics and imaginaries.

Space-making practices, referring to the myriad means through which spaces are conceptualized, built, co-opted, destroyed, promoted, populated, and embodied, are a central part

21 of my study. From building studios and clubs, to taking over street corners and public parks, from event planning and promotion, to walking home from a concert, space-making practices come in many forms. In each chapter, hip-hop space-making practices are clearly linked to questions of identity formation. Whether for queer identity formation in Haifa, female identity formation in Ramallah, ethno-national identity formation Palestinian in Jerusalem, or transnational/glocal identity formation for Palestinians populating digital music platforms, hip- hop space-making practices connect people to each other in and through spaces, while producing affinities that can prefigure political mobilization, queer, feminist, and decolonial. Given the importance of space, and specifically space-making practices, to Palestinian decolonial politics and history, I tend to the multiple ways in which hip-hop space-making practices evidence some of the same concerns and contradictions of decolonial space-making practices.

Specifically, I return to two axes of spatial politics, mobility and visibility, throughout the dissertation. The question of who is allowed to move or be visible, how, and where is an intersectional one, and many scholars have consequently pursued those axes in studies of

Palestinian space. Wagner’s (2013) discussion of mobility and visibility helps to reveal how identities, sexual, gendered, and ethnic, render Palestinians differently (im)mobile and (in)visible within different spaces throughout Israel-Palestine. Different spaces provide different spatial options, including permissible modes of mobility and visibility, the intersection of which I can kin(a)esthetics. While Palestinians face restrictions on their mobility and visibility from mechanisms and institutions of Israeli colonization, those are variable in attention to the sex, gender, sexual, locational, and other identities those Palestinians carry. Thus, as I elaborate, spatial options reflect the intersections of systems of oppression. For example, concerns over privacy in public spaces expressed by women in Ramallah differ in both nature and degree from

22 both those expressed by men in Ramallah and those expressed by women in Haifa.

Foregrounding discussions of mobility and visibility helps to highlight the ways in which identity-based oppressions are experienced through space and how hip-hop space- makers respond.

The analysis of space and place in the proceeding chapters is further indebted to a number of developments within geography, specifically the development of geographies of affect and emotion coinciding with the affective turn in multiple fields of study. Beginning in the mid-

1990s, critical geographers sought to move beyond static consideration of physical space to understand how space constitutes people in relation to each other, or how space is affective.

Beginning with the development on non-representational theory, in particular by Nigel Thrift

(1996; 2008), geographers have grappled with how to maintain an approach to space that does not over-privilege human practices of meaning-making, signification, and representation. A productive exchange has emerged between geographers regarding the place of the human subject in studies of space and affect, or put differently, the relationship of representational and non- representational scholarship. I agree with Deborah Thien’s (2005) concern surrounding the affective turn in geography when she writes that, “This move to get after or past humanity also pushes us past the emotional landscapes of our daily life. It is my feeling that such a focus is insufficient for addressing the issues of relationality which are so profoundly embedded in our everyday emotional lives (p. 453).

Other scholars have responded that lending emotion and the human subject a central explanatory power can limit the potential of geography as a field intimately concerned with space and place (McCormack, 2006). Many, however, do not see a conflict between these two positions, but see the representational and non-representational, the emotional and affective, as

23 mutually important aspects of geographic inquiry (Tolia-Kelly, 2006; Lorimer, 2008). Rather than seeing non-representational theory as drawing a clear line between representation and non- representation, privileging the former, non-representational theorists have focused on human and non-human practices as a priori to the generation of meaning. Put differently, “representations are not understood as masks or veils that express some a priori system of transcendent categorization, but instead are encountered as constitutive elements in practices” (Gregory, et al.,

2009, p. 504). Such an approach, I believe, is useful to understanding the role of identity in

Palestinian hip-hop practices, in which an attention to representation can help foreground different bodies potential to affect and be affected. Thus, in my attention to space, I ruminate between representations of space extracted from participants in different hip-hop scenes and the embodied practices that take place in hip-hop venues, or following Lorimer (2005), “how life takes shape and gains expression in shared experiences, everyday routines, fleeting encounters, embodied movements, precognitive triggers, practical skills, affective intensities, enduring urges, unexceptional interactions and sensuous dispositions” (p. 84).

II. Notes on Terminology

Geographic: The geopolitical landscape of Israel-Palestine is complex, making language important when discussing or representing different aspects of the Palestinian hip-hop scene(s).

It is because of those intricacies that particular terms like “Palestinian hip-hop scene” (in the singular) start to fall apart upon closer inspection. The physical mechanisms of Israeli occupation, spatial separation and isolation, have contributed to local scenes developing in relative isolation, a trend I see as changing. Whereas it used to be rare for fans to know about artists in other cities, new means of connecting and collaborating across space have meant in increased connectivity of local hip-hop scenes. As I variously discuss the cities of Haifa,

24 Jerusalem, and Ramallah in the ensuing chapters, it becomes obvious that the differential restrictions on Palestinian mobility and visibility structure individuals’ experiences of hip-hop.

To entertain the notion of a “Palestinian hip-hop scene” is to rely on the experiences of the few

Palestinians, including myself as a Palestinian-American, who are able to travel across Israel and Palestine and thus experience the places and local practices of different hip-hop scenes. To study space and culture in Israel-Palestine necessitates an attention to these differences. Despite the increased interconnectivity of local scenes, larger-scale geopolitics still exert a strong influence. While the Boiler Room show hosted in Ramallah included the collective Jazar Crew from Haifa, Israel (chapter two), the artists who live in Ramallah could not as easily attend a show in Haifa. To do so would require them to receive artists permits from the Israeli government, permits that are notoriously hard to come by, often delayed, and that normally allow a very small timeframe for travel in and out of Israel. It is because of the geopolitical contours of the region, and their effect on Palestinian hip-hop practices, that I use the following geographic terms:

• Israel-Palestine: This term is used to refer to the entire area of Israel, the West Bank, and

Gaza, extending from Egypt to the south to Lebanon and Syria to the north, with Jordan to

the east and the Mediterranean Sea to the west. I utilize this term at times, though

infrequently, when discussing practices (whether hip-hop or otherwise) that extend across

that geography. Certain artists (like DAM) and institutions (like the Israeli Defense Forces or

Soundcloud) are relevant to an Israel-Palestine. In an effort to attend to the geopolitical

nuances between different locales, and to demonstrate the differences between local scenes, I

rely more on the specific terms delineated below.

25 • Palestine: I utilize this term to refer to the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, sometimes termed the Palestinian territories or ’67 Palestine to refer to the Six Day War in

1967 that resulted in Israel’s annexation and occupation of those territories. This term is used in contrast to the term ’48 or ’48 Palestine, referring either to Israel-Palestine or to Israel specifically. For Palestinians living in Palestine, movement is heavily controlled by Israel. To come or go, whether through Jordan, Israel, or Egypt, requires Israeli state permission. As mentioned above, and discussed in chapter two, artists in Palestine have difficulty travelling outside. Typically, it is easier for residents of Palestine to get permission to go to and from

Europe (via Jordan or Egypt), than it is to get permission to travel into Israel. As a grounded theory project, focused on participatory research methods, I do not discuss Gaza at length in this dissertation since I was not able to travel there for my research, though I do discuss aspects of Palestine that relate to both Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.

• Israel: This term refers to the other half of Israel-Palestine, the area that I do not include under Palestine above. Israel is entirely under governance by the State of Israel but contains a large number of Palestinians who either were not evicted from their homes previously, or who, in the case of my family, were evicted, but remained elsewhere in what became Israel in 1948. My research on and in Jerusalem and Haifa is, therefore, about Palestinian hip-hop practices in Israel. Thus, I see a difference between the adjective, Palestinian, and the locational designation, in Palestine. Hip-hop practices can be Palestinian without being in

Palestine, whether they are taking place in Israel or in the diaspora (see below).

• West Bank: The West Bank, referring to the West Bank of the Jordan River, which divides Palestine and Jordan, is the largest Palestinian territory, containing some of the most prominent hip-hop cities, including Ramallah, Hebron, and Nablus. The West Bank is home

26 to the Palestinian Authority, the main governing entity for Palestine. However, within the

West Bank, the varying presence of the Israeli government complicates notions of the West

Bank as a consistent geopolitical landscape. The official terms of Area A, Area B, and Area

C refer to areas that are under the (A) “sole” administration of the Palestinian Authority, (B) shared administration of Palestine and Israel, and (C) under sole Israeli control (namely settlements). As discussed in chapter two, being in Area A does not mean you are outside of

Israeli administration. Between economic controls (e.g. taxes from Area A go to the Israeli government to be remitted to the Palestinian Authority), frequent military exercises, and surrounding Israeli barriers, checkpoints, and walls, Area A is hardly outside Israeli jurisdiction. However, the differences between these areas are important and gain attention in the chapters that follow.

• East Jerusalem: While certainly part of Palestine, East Jerusalem merits attention as a unique locale. While I attend in detail to East Jerusalem in conversation with West Jerusalem in chapter three, Jerusalem has two parts. West Jerusalem, which is within Israel, is under administration, of course, by Israel. East Jerusalem, however, is under the occupation of

Israel, like all of the West Bank, However, a wall cutting down Jerusalem separates West from East, with East Jerusalem administered by a combination of Israeli and international

(mostly through the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, UNRWA) entities. Residents of East Jerusalem exist in political limbo, neither recognized as citizens of Israel, despite being residents of (East) Jerusalem, and face restrictions on movement that differentially allow them into Israel and Palestine.

• The Diaspora: Though the focus of this dissertation is on specific places and spaces in

Israel-Palestine, the diaspora, referring to the entire world outside of Israel-Palestine where

27 over 6 million Palestinians live. While Jordan is home to over three million of those

Palestinians, across the world Palestinians are contributing to hip-hop. Certainly, some of the

biggest names in Palestinian hip-hop are artists in the diaspora. In chapter two, focused on

Ramallah, I attend to a connection between Ramallah and the large diaspora city of Berlin,

Germany.

Sexual: In this dissertation, I utilize and reflect on diverse academic works broadly termed queer theory, paying particular attention to sexuality and sexual identity in chapter one. The relationship of queer theory to non-Western contexts, including Palestine, is justifiably fraught with questions of power and representation. Criticisms of queer theory, beginning in the 1990s, have argued against it as a colonial project, one which adapts and enforces Western constructions of sexual identity and gender across the globe. Given the absence of an authentic and natural

Western gay identity, one isolated from or tantamount to, identities of race, ethnicity, class, or location, that history has obscured both the origins of queer theory and the realities of queer identities. First, queer theory has its roots in academic and activist feminisms developed by women of color in the 1970s and 80s, a history often ignored by queer theorists who choose, instead, to cite Euro-American scholars of Continental postmodernism, poststructuralism, and psychoanalysis (Garber, 2003, p. 126). Second, queer theorists have often discussed sexuality and sexual identity without attention to its intersection, both structural and experiential, to other identities of race, ethnicity, nationality, and class. As a result of these two historical and contemporary lacunae, Linda Garber (2003) concludes that, “Queer cannot be discussed in terms of sexuality or gender alone, because it is not through sex and gender alone that we live our complex lives” (p. 128).

28 The critique of queer in its inconsistent relationship to (de)coloniality extends through another historical lacuna, that of the application of a Western history of sexuality to non-Western locations. Often drawing on Michel Foucault’s genealogy of sexuality that places the emergence of modern homosexuality in the late 1800s, queer theorists often miss the long history of non- hetero identities and practices that extend centuries before then. That oversight reproduces

Western homosexuality as the preferred and original form of same-sex desire and identity.

Debates over the relationship of queer theory to notions of the “Global gay” continue (Altman &

Symons, 2017), asking who is being represented in increasingly mainstream, global depictions of non-heterosexual identities. What sexualities become normalized? What sexualities become erased? How might those mainstream constructions of sexual identity fail to reflect different historical and contemporary sexual norms or practices? Can queer (theory) retain a sort of conceptual flexibility that might reframe its usefulness to (de)colonial contexts, including in

Israel-Palestine?

Answers to these questions lie in the many resuscitations of queer theory among academics and activists concerned with intersectional and decolonial approaches to sexuality, including in Israel-Palestine. Three themes emerge in those attempts that inform my particular use of queer theory and the term queer in this dissertation. First, queer theory promotes a deconstruction of binary logic that proves useful for Palestinians who are often depicted through narrowly binary frames of reference. Early pioneers of queer theory, including Eve Sedgwick

(2008) and Judith Butler (1999) have detailed how heteronormativity relies on and reproduces a binary approach to sex-gender-sexuality systems. These early queer theorists have highlighted the related binarisms of male/female, masculine/feminine, and heterosexual/homosexual, and attempted to deconstruct those binaries, exposing their social historicity, and offering up

29 alternative modes of belonging and identification. As I will demonstrate, these binarisms, along with those of East/West, local/global, and Israel/Palestine often work in service of a heteronormative, settler colonial politics that renders Palestinian sexuality as always already deviant, perverse, and threatening. If queer theory, and queerness, have a tradition of deconstructing binarisms, demonstrating the implication of each within the other, then I assert its decolonial potential in Israel/Palestine. In particular, I attend to how queer, hip-hop practices deconstruct the global/local binary that informs notions of a one-way movement of queerness from West to East, demonstrating how Palestinians exert local agency over their own uses and performances of queer.

Second, queer critique resonates with contemporary criticisms of Israeli sexual politics that continue to marginalize Palestinians. Sedgwick’s (2008) early elaboration of queer critique, which demonstrated the centrality of a homosexual/heterosexual binary to modern Western societies, focused on notions of “coming out” and of “the closet” as key to the subject-forming processes of state-based power. Coming out offers up the self as an object of state subject- formation, which, for many Western gays, has been experienced as a mode of liberation and a means of accessing rights. This process of hailing by the state and declarative response by its

(soon-to-be) queer citizen-subjects, which might be described as a Western, queer visibility politics, is insensitive to Palestinian sexual traditions and contemporary experiences of non- heterosexual Palestinians. As I elaborate in chapter one, there are two main dimensions to this gap between Western homonormative/homonational visibility politics and Palestinian sexual politics and cultural practices. On one hand, the rights and freedoms commonly assumed to exist for LGBTQ individuals in modern Israel are not experienced by queer Palestinians, who routinely face marginalization in Israeli gay spaces and erasure by an Israeli state that refuses to

30 see individuals as both Palestinian and gay (Ritchie, 2010; Wagner, 2013). On the other hand, the desire for a Western queer visibility politics is not expressed in Palestine or among

Palestinians in ways similar to Israel and the West. The ways in which sexuality and sexual identity become (in)visible vary by location, not only because of homophobia, but also because of local sexual practices. The practices through which queer Palestinians perform their identities, construct queer spaces, and engage in erotic acts do not, and should not need to, fit a normalizing

Western model of the hyper-visible, gay, citizen. Thus, queer theory, queer identities, and queering as a deconstructive practice all hold decolonial potential for supporting a Palestinian sexual politics that does not bend to an Israeli, homonational, colonizing project.

Third, queer scholarship has a tradition of focusing on world-building that parallels Palestinian hip-hop practices. José Muñoz’s conceptualizations of ‘utopia’ and ‘queer futurity’ provide particularly useful in their elaboration of a connection between queer cultural practices and queer aspirations and desire. As Muñoz (2009) writes:

Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer,

but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We

have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from

the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness's domain… The here and

now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and

now’s totalising rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there. Some will say that

all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal

transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the

world, and ultimately new worlds. (p. 1)

31 I choose to quote from Muñoz at such length because of the way in which his words resonate, however unknowingly, in the discussions I have had with queer Palestinians in the hip- hop scene and my own understanding of the myriad cultural practices queer Palestinians engage, including hip-hop space-making practices. His understanding of queer temporality, in which the past is not lost, but used in the service of building a new future, similarly reflect young, queer,

Palestinians’ political and cultural aspirations. Hip-hop practitioners do not seek merely the

“pleasures of the moment”, choosing to focus, instead, on how their hip-hop practices can simultaneously critique historic and extant conditions of settler colonialism, sexism, and homophobia, while proactively constructing visions of the future that depart from

“the now’s totalising rendering of reality”. As such, many scholars have used Muñoz to discuss or frame Palestinian queer cultural and political pratices (Hochberg, 2010; Schotten,

2018; Alqaisiya, 2018; Naber et al., 2018). As young Palestinians use hip-hop practices as a means of aspirational world-building, queer theory allows us to identify how those practices hold decolonial, antihomophobic, and feminist potential.

The above justifications of queer theory as an appropriate tool to use and develop in discussions of Palestine apply to my project specifically. Many other reasons could be provided for other studies in and on Palestine. However, above these three justifications, I use the term because it is used extensively and at an increasing rate, by young Palestinians in and adjacent to

Palestinian hip-hop scenes. While Gil Hochberg justified the use of the term back in 2010, arguing that while, “at the moment, there seems to be no comparable ‘local’ term in circulation”, nonetheless, “among Palestinians, queer is not commonly used…” (p. 498). Hochberg added, optimistically, that, “Palestinian political activists have more recently begun to mobilize it, in the absence of an Arabic term that emphasizes the political and performative aspects of gendered

32 and sexualized identities” (p. 498). Organizations like Al-Qaws for Gender and Sexual Diversity and Palestinian Society, Aswat Palestinian Gay Women, and Palestinian Queers for Boycott,

Divestment, and Sanctions, have all utilized the term queer for over a decade in their decolonial, intersectional work (Jankovic and Awad, 2012), and a decade later, the term is much more common than when Hochberg argued for its usage in scholarship on Palestine. Thus, while I utilize queer theory in this project, I also deploy the adjective queer as a term indicating sexualized and gendered identities that do not subscribe to binary, Western/Israeli, colonial, gay visibility projects and concomitant modes of (citizen-) subject formation.

Cultural: As this dissertation overlaps with academic traditions including (Palestinian) cultural studies and transnational feminist cultural studies, I am very particular and cautious of the term culture, especially in the specific form of “Palestinian hip-hop culture.” As the geographic terminology above indicates, defining such a culture requires a sort of view from nowhere enabled by a mobility not afforded most Palestinians. While I do deploy the term “Palestinian hip-hop culture” in daily conversations and interactions with others, in a work such as this, focused on the differential manifestations and effects of Palestinian hip-hop, I prefer to specify my language in two ways. First, though less often, I use the plural form “Palestinian hip-hop cultures” to gesture towards the broad role of geopolitical difference in structuring hip-hop, the ways in which location informs hip-hop experiences. As I expand on in the following chapters, the purposes, forms, and effects of hip-hop in Ramallah, Haifa, and Jerusalem can vary. Thus, I maintain a use of the plural form “cultures”, or the specific singular “Haifa’s hip-hop culture” or

“Ramallah’s hip-hop culture.” Further, I argue, that specificity performs the critique advanced above, namely that contemporary media and academic attention on Palestinian hip-hop aligns with narrow, nationalist understandings of Palestinian identity and experience. Specifying the

33 different (sub-)cultures of Palestinian hip-hop can foreground how identities, including that of location, but also gender, sexuality, class, and religion, affect and are affected by, hip-hop.

The second, and more frequent term I use is “cultural practice(s).” This term positions

(Palestinian hip-hop) culture not as a monolithic entity with clearly defined norms, boundaries, and participants, but as a set of shifting practices, engaged in different spaces, and by shifting groups of participants. I see the notion of cultural practices, in contrast with culture, useful in a few ways for a project of this type. First, notions of cultural practices, in the plural form, align with popular understandings of hip-hop as involving multiple sub-cultures, or, more accurately, different practices. Hip-hop is commonly described as involving multiple pillars, outlined early on by Afrika Bambaataa of the Zulu Nation collective, including: MCing/rapping

(vocal/linguistic), DJing/turntabling (musical), breakdancing (kinesthetic), and graffiti (visual).

Other pillars have been included in such depictions, including knowledge of hip-hop culture/history, fashion, beatboxing, entrepreneurship/hustle, and VJing or video production.

Certainly, the earlier pillars merited modification as the technologies and products of hip-hop changed over the years. While some of these pillars gain more attention in scholarship, including, I would argue, lyrical analysis of rap, all of them are important aspects of the affectivity of hip-hop. These different practices all emerge in different ways in Palestinian hip- hop cultures. One practice not listed above, but clearly present in the history of hip-hop in the

United States and elsewhere, is space-making. Hip-hop has always involved the construction or co-optation of spaces. From rap battles on street corners to the experiences of spatial immobilization and eviction that have influences artists, hip-hop involves the production of space and place. Space-making is one hip-hop practice that I pay particular attention to, demonstrating its inter-affectivity with other cultural practices listed here.

34 III. Notes on Methodology

This dissertation is a grounded theorization Palestinian hip-hop practices, drawing primarily on field-based, site-specific research utilizing a mix of qualitative research methods. I specifically utilized constructivist grounded theory as the core methodological approach to analyzing my research, first drawing out theoretical insights relevant to and then engaging with multiple extant fields of study. While I drew from a large breadth of materials, namely interviews with scene members and participatory research in concerts and recording sessions, I still prioritized in-depth analysis of particular spaces and places. This dynamic informed my approach to the field, as I drew from multiple sites of research in Israel and Palestine. While single-site research can offer a particular depth of insight needed for the nuanced understanding sought by a dissertation, I do not think a multi-sited project precluded the possibility of in-depth analysis of, in this case, Palestinian hip-hop cultures. In fact, an awareness of the aforementioned geopolitical landscape in Israel-Palestine calls attention to the nuanced differences, inequalities, and contradictions extant between different consumers and producers within the purview of Palestinian hip-hop practices. Such a multi-sited project thus lent itself to the questions being answered within this project, as Palestinian hip-hop practices (in)form

Palestinian identity through their management of the dynamic between difference and solidarity.

Given that this research seeks to understand both the role of political inequalities in cultural practices and the role of Palestinian hip-hop practices in combatting those same inequalities, I believe a multi-site, grounded theory project is justified.

Attempting to reflect on Palestinian hip-hop as a specific sub-culture while allowing the voices of artists and participants to come through in the research and analysis necessitates field- based work and a personal, involved, and reflexive hermeneutic applied to conducting research

35 as both a participant and observer. To accomplish this goal, I utilized a mixed-methods approach in the field, drawing from semi-structured and unstructured interviews, participant observation, open-ended surveys, and audio and video data collection. Building a base of research from this mixed-methods approach provided the material from which I began to draw out themes and commonalities between diverse aspects of Palestinian hip-hop culture. Of importance to me is the usefulness grounded theory holds for approaching representational and material- affective concerns simultaneously, a way of making connections not just through language, but through an attention to embodiment and embededness. A mixed-method approach further lends itself to reflexivity in both fieldwork and analysis. Focusing on questions of positionality, context, and embededness, and striving to accomplish alternative methodological practices, scholars of reflexivity in methodologies call for a non-linear, non-deterministic application of method (Billo & Hiemstra, 2013 ). Rather than viewing methods as a politically inert tool for uncovering essential truths, my methodology links theory and method, positioning both as practical and political issues. This approach then shifts the conception of methods from inert tools to alive and politically potent terms needing constant (re)negotiation and input by those represented by one’s research. Therefore, I understand my use of mixed-methods within the history of reflexive methodologies that preclude a reliance on a static set of methods. Grounded theory, specifically in its recent constructivist iteration, is one methodology that fits in that history and the one that I utilized in this project.

When deciding on my own approach to planning, research, and analysis as temporally or analytically (in)distinct stages of a project, grounded theory scholars offered productive debates for thinking through the relationship of those terms. Across those debates, or schools of grounded theory, most scholars support the abandonment of research hypotheses and over-

36 structuring literature reviews. The classical grounded theory approach to a general research topic, rather than a theoretically informed research hypothesis, is believed to offer a more efficacious theorization of the field and the core object of study (Glaser and Strauss, 1967). Further, grounded theory, broadly speaking, defines data collection and analysis as coextensive, with preliminary data collection leading to initial analytic themes or avenues of inquiry that, in turn, indicate the next subjects of data collection. In an effort not to avoid, but to speak productively to theoretical discourses within Palestinian cultural studies, I utilized grounded theory as my core methodology. Over the course of five years of fieldwork, earlier preliminary research trips helped to establish key themes of analysis that emerged from my data, helping me

(re)formulate research questions and decide on the appropriate methods to employ. While those preliminary trips included visits to multiple cities across Israel-Palestine, they also helped me decide on the three cities here as the key spaces that would allow me to discuss the differences and similarities across multiple Palestinian hip-hop scenes. Later trips helped to expand on and redirect the project further, revising and specifying interview questions, emerging themes and theories, and research subjects.

While all grounded theory is intended to offer a robust, analytic approach to inductive or abductive theorization, I intend to use grounded theory in alignment with the more recent, constructivist revision of classical grounded theory. First, I align myself with recent modifications and critiques of grounded theory that dismiss with the appeal to a value- or theory- free research project, critiques wherein a scholar’s theoretical history is already implicated within their interest in and experience of a particular site (Charmaz, 2006). This does not, however, negate the other aspects of grounded theory or its complementarity with a reflexive, mixed-methods approach. Therefore, the theoretical “backgrounds” offered in this introduction

37 and the proceeding chapters are intended as both justifications of continuing to study Palestinian culture and identity formation and suggestions of new research questions or topics that have emerged from my own research in Israel-Palestine. While I consider how different theoretical paradigms developed in extant scholarship are useful in interpreting Palestinian hip-hop, including within queer theory, transnational feminist cultural studies, spatial theory, and affect theory, I do so in conversation with my own grounded theories, allowing my work to speak back to those fields. Each chapter returns to these conversations, elaborating the intervention offered by those grounded theories and suggesting further avenues for study.

This framing of the relationship between methodology, method, and theory benefits a project of this topic and scope. My shifting utilization of different paradigms, including queer and feminist, is distinct from the sort of over-structuring theoretical framework that grounded theory avoids, yet allows for a productive analysis of the different topics, terms, people, places, spaces, feelings, affects, and affinities, that are taken up in hip-hop practices. While grounded theory has been used for analyzing language in and on Palestine, including in literary and discourse analyses (Khoury et al., 2013; O’Connor-Delosrios, 2016), I am interested in how grounded theory can contribute to analyses of emotion and affect in relation to space, place, and identity. Specifically, I believe that grounded theory is an appropriate methodological approach for the study of affective arrangements as discussed by Slaby et al. (2019). They explain that their empirical suggestions do not require a complete mapping of all elements in an affective arrangement. Rather, they suggest that:

[A researcher] might highlight selected dimensions, or focus on different elements of an

arrangement sequentially during the research process. Accordingly, reckoning with an

affective arrangement within empirical research can take the form of an orientating

38 blueprint which might be coarse-grained and selective initially, with details being filled

in as new data emerge. The research process can go back and forth between provisional

arrangement sketches and their correction and elaboration in the light of new material. (p.

10)

This dissertation is intended, in that vein, as an initial blueprint of vital elements in the different affective arrangements that emerge through hip-hop practices, a blueprint that evolved over time to capture emerging elements in Palestinian hip-hop.

The application of grounded theory methodologies to Israel-Palestine is not without precedent. Many studies in and on Palestine have utilized grounded theory to great success, but overwhelmingly reflect grounded theory’s historical and contemporary applications within predominantly health and education focused scholarship (Gallagher et al., 2015; Yemini

& Brohnstein, 2016; Kanan, 2005; Qato & Nagra, 2013; Dababnah, 2018). Another popular use of grounded theory is in analyses of economic activity in Palestine (Halimi, D’Souza, &

Sullivan-Mort, 2017; Alattar, Kouhy, & Innes, 2009). My project falls within recent utilizations of grounded theory to do first-person, mixed-methods research on issues that pertain, broadly, to emotion, affect, identity, and embodiment, with an attention to the specific spatial contexts in which those issues come into relation. Salam Alkhatib’s (2012) work on domestic honor killing utilized grounded theory to explore both the individual and collective motivations and the

“emotional and social effects and consequences” of the practice, while focusing on the gendered norms attached to particular (domestic) spaces. Tom Tlalim’s (2017) use of grounded theory also informs my work as he focuses on the relationship between sound and state power, through what he develops as a “theory of aural politics” focused on interrogating “how the aural sense is deployed in both the assertion and critique of political power in Palestine-Israel” (p. 2). These

39 recent works collectively gesture to a scholarly investment in grounded theory as a methodology rigorous enough to tackle the geographic, emotional, and affective nuances of Palestinian cultural practices.

Second, the constructivist turn in grounded theory methodology has proven useful for me when interrogating my own positionality relative to this project and to the specific spaces I lived, played, danced, and researched in throughout my visits. My positionality comes from multiple aspects of my life. As a Palestinian-American, born to a Palestinian father and U.S. mother in Los Angeles, but whose family is primarily in Israel-Palestine, I have a complex position as an insider-outsider. My United States citizenship meant it was relatively easy for me to travel in Israel and Palestine, compared to Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza who virtually cannot travel into Israel, and thus allowed me to conduct a multi-sited study. As a

Western academic with a history in U.S.-based gender and women’s studies, another aspect of my positionality manifested in my desire to privilege particular questions or academic paradigms in my research. With time, my relationship to the cities, scenes, and people changed in noticeable ways. From 2013 through 2017, my role as an outsider/researcher shifted to reflecting more aspects of being an insider/participant. Many things might have contributed to this change, including my increased comfort with speaking Arabic, my repeat visits, and the shift of research relationships into regular friendships. Nonetheless, no amount of recognizance or credibility in the scene meant I was not a researcher. I was constantly reminded of it when asked by friends if my attendance at a particular event was for fun or for work. The honest answer, I always said, was that it was always both.

The ways in which constructivist grounded theory allowed me to think through my own positionality relative to Palestinian hip-hop practices are especially useful at a time when

40 Western-academic fascination with Palestine and Palestinians is often under-interrogated in its potential to reassert colonial intellectual paradigms. It is an awareness of that tendency that haunts this project even as I attempt to grapple with terms and theories that emerged in Western academic contexts and have inconsistent relationships with decolonial movements, academic and activist. It is my aim to use grounded theory, in its constructivist form, attentive to questions of positionality, reflexivity, and decoloniality, to study Palestinian hip-hop as a set of practices that exert agency, rather than an inert object of research. In so doing, I believe I offer productive conversations with, and even resuscitations of, multiple theories that can capture the nuance and importance of hip-hop practices to Palestinian identity formations, formations we too often fail to see as queer, differential, affective, and open to new futurities.

IV. Chapter Outline

This dissertation proceeds through three main chapters, each focused on different places and spaces of Palestinian hip-hop. The first chapter, based in Haifa, Israel, speaks to scholarship on spatial immobilization in Israel and queer geography through its focus on queer hip-hop practices in the city. Considering scholarship on queer theory and decoloniality and departing from traditional sexual geographies that map the presence and growth of explicitly LGB spaces, like the gay bar, this chapter examines how queer Palestinians engage with public spaces en route to secluded hip-hop spaces and reads those engagements as distinct from Western and

Israeli coming out paradigms and sexual geographies that hail queer (citizen-)subjects. Focusing on descriptions of some interactions in public space from queer Palestinians in Haifa, I examine the relationship between passing as and passing through as complimentary undertakings closely linked within Palestinian public spaces. From there, the chapter turns to two specific grounded theories I develop: “going out”, referring to queer Palestinian spatial practices that find

41 expression in hip-hop spaces and promote queer identifications and affinities distinct from

“coming out” practices, and “secluded publics”, built, mixed-use environments that facilitate and protect queer eroticism, and in particular, dance.

While the chapter on Haifa does not engage in detail with the process used to acquire, design, construct, promote, support, and sustain hip-hop spaces, the second chapter, based in

Ramallah, is primarily focused around what scholars have called space-making enterprises or practices. While space is often seen as a pre-condition for hip-hop practices, this chapter positions space-making enterprises as a co-constitutive hip-hop practice. Specifically, I argue that space-making is a hip-hop practice that co-constitutes producers and consumers of hip-hop in relation to each other while elaborating an aspirational geography of hip-hop. Moreover, this chapter highlights how pragmatic and aspirational approaches to space-making can coexist in ways that highlight continued salience of localized cultural politics alongside the globalization of hip-hop practices, what we might describe as the glocalization of Ramallah hip-hop. I begin with an overview of the expressed need for more hip-hop spaces, while contrasting that need with the multifarious and shifting constraints on the creation and use of public spaces in Ramallah. The remainder of the chapter turns to the translocal or glocal dimensions of hip-hop space-making practices in the city. First, I explore a relationship or transnational cultural circuit developed between Ramallah and Europe, specifically Berlin, Germany, through the work of the cultural non-profit Enter the Void and through the hosting of a Boiler Room show in Ramallah. Second, I highlight the extensive feminist hip-hop practices that engage in space-making as a method to combat sexism within hip-hop cultures and sexism within public spaces in Ramallah. Their collective approaches, I argue, reflect the continued glocalization of Ramallah hip-hop.

42 The final site of my research was in Jerusalem, where chapter three finds its focus. With competing demands to the city and different, at times overlapping jurisdiction between West

Jerusalem, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank, the political geography of Jerusalem is complex and Palestinians consequently have their movement and expression regularly policed. Despite the well-documented inequalities faced by Palestinians in the city, Jerusalem and other mixed cities are highly touted as places of coexistence that might spell out a future for Israeli-Palestinian relations and society. This chapter begins by examining the contradictions between the praise of mixed cities and the documented inequalities that persist therein, paying particular attention to the relationship of mixed city politics to literature on Palestinian masculinity and colonization.

To help understand those contradictions, I turn to the careers of two Palestinian rappers who market in a politics of coexistence: Muzi and Saz. Specifically, I detail how both artists face a set of forced trade-offs that are required of them to promote their music to the more lucrative Israeli market. With large, Israeli music festivals bringing in more revenue than smaller, Palestinian- organized events, artists like Muzi and Saz might seek that revenue in order to establish independent, financially secure careers. However, the trade-offs that Muzi and Saz face help highlight how mixed cities are imagined as extensions of a settler colonial project in which angry, anachronistic, Arab masculinities are decried and pragmatic, independent, and enlightened

Arabs are required. The chapter explores how Muzi and Saz have specifically marketed in coexistence, including through a narrative of individual mindset change and a bootstraps approach to success coupled with the promotion of a humanistic approach to identity focused on collectivity, commonality, and a shared love of music. Further, it highlights two events in

Jerusalem that gesture towards a potentially decolonial coexistence. I conclude the chapter by

43 revisiting the question of coexistence in mixed cities and asking whether coexistence can be salvaged as a framework for promoting decolonization.

44 CHAPTER 1:

Going Out, Not Coming Out: Queer Affects and (Secluded) Public Space in Haifa

I. Glitter and Gunfire: Thoughts and Feelings on Palestinian Hip-Hop

Haifa, Israel. Summer 2016. I arrived in the late afternoon to Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv on one leg of the research for this dissertation. In a matter of hours, I was descending with some of my cousins and their friends into a literally and figuratively underground club in Haifa for a set on U.S. hip-hop spun by an Israeli DJ. The event had been organized and promoted by a local artivist group with a queer rapport, one that had been producing a series of themed music shows that summer. The club was located on the edge of Haifa’s downtown district, a mixed-use area adjacent to the once-thriving port, formerly dominated by half-empty warehouses, but at that time undergoing a series of public revitalization projects that ushered in new restaurants, cocktail bars, and clubs catering to the mixed Palestinian and Israeli population. Going out that evening was initially difficult for me, as upon leaving the plane at Ben Gurion Airport, I was met with the news of the shooting that had taken place at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando while I was traveling. I felt out-of-body, as though I was watching myself move and think from a distance, without a place that could resolve the dissonance of disembodiment I was experiencing. I was overcome with a sense of constantly exhausted desire whose object kept shifting: to hold and be held, to be alone, to move, to be still, to know more. At that point, I had been made aware of the details of the shooting, the brave people who fought to save lives in the club, and the fear the club’s guests had experienced. I was nowhere near the queer friends I had in the U.S., those whom I wanted to comfort and be comforted by, and my budding desire to do something, anything, was building, without a clear object for its release.

45 In part because my cousins took note of my state that evening, they urged that I might find both solace and enjoyment in the event that night, that there would be a lot of queer folk present, and that the music, of course, would be legit. They were friends with the organizers of the event and told me I could plan on doing some filming there. Introduced to them outside the club, I double-checked with one of the organizers about the filming, my plans for the footage, and my work in general, with an eye towards maintaining safety for the many young, queer guests for whom this club offered a place of escape and simultaneous visibility, a secluded publicity. I gave my ID to security in front of the club, two tall, Russian men who spoke more

English than Hebrew. The security guards stood chatting in their native Russian and smoking cigarettes when there was no line outside. Any public event in Israel attracting crowds of people requires security clearance, as well as security outside the event, a fact I learned upon inquiring about two security guards, seemingly out-of-place, outside a wedding I attended. I later learned that security companies were considerably marketed to and operated by Russian immigrants, one of many industries structured around specific immigrant groups in Israel (Borschel-Dan, 2016).

Inside the club I was greeted with a darkly painted space, half-bar, half-warehouse, with an elevated DJ booth on one end, a bar counter running the length of one wall, and another platform perfect for dancing. Groups of friends filled up the space, many dancing in unison to the calls of the music and the DJ, the increasing tempos that signal the approach of a change in music or an ever-enjoyable bass drop. Partygoers sung to many of the songs’ lyrics, sometimes coming together in unison to shout key lyrics at the DJ’s volume-dropping encouragement. Some guests attended in seemingly coordinated outfits, matching their acid washed, ripped jeans or the colors in the glitter they applied to their faces and hair. The music transitioned between U.S. hip- hop and pop hits ranging from the 90s to today, marketing both to the theme of the event and to

46 contemporary popular music tastes. The set meandered through an eclectic collection of U.S. hip-hop and pop songs, largely from the early 2000s. When I entered, 50 Cent and J Lo’s “I’m

Gonne Be Alright” (2001) was resolving into Flo Rida’s “Whistle” (2012). J-Kwon’s “Tipsy”

(2004), Fergie’s “London Bridge” (2007), Jay-Z and Alicia Keys “Empire State of Mind”

(2009), J-Lo, Jadakiss, and Styles P’s “Jenny From the Block” (2002), Beyonce’s “Naughty

Girl” (2003), and Eve’s “Who’s That Girl?” (2001) were some of the songs played at that night’s show.

This might outwardly seem like an unusual and potentially problematic set of songs to play at an event that is intended to create space for gender non-conforming, gay and lesbian, and queer people. Certainly, many of the lyrics in these songs fall under the well-established criticism of U.S. hip-hop music as a misogynist genre (Rebollo-Gil and Moras, 2012; Adams and

Fuller, 2006; Weitzer and Kubrin, 2009). However, an attention to differential consumption practices, particularly dance, is important here to elucidate the capacities of listeners to reformulate and embody the meaning of songs in progressive, counter cultural, or anti-normative ways. In the context of Haifa, the mixed makeup of the city and the influence of Western

LGBTQ liberation movements from outside Israel-Palestine contrasts with a very real, felt concern over violence directed towards queer folk from people and in places of “tradition.”

Given the breadth of literature on the effects on colonization on gender and sexual politics globally, it is worth mentioning here that separating homophobia among Palestinians from the

Israeli occupation is difficult, as colonization can (in)form socio-cultural relations in ways that militate against pro-LGBTQ politics. Palestinian queer activist and scholar Haneen Maikey (2010) describes how “the unique social, historical, and political situation of Palestinians—the Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza and decades

47 of discrimination against Palestinians in Israel—has created real obstacles for advancing respect for sexual and gender diversity in Palestinian society, which has not had the same opportunities to grow and evolve as many other societies have” (p. 600-601). Queer Palestinians consequently struggle with the competing notions that either homophobia or the occupation must be settled first, instead seeing the two issues as intertwined and their solutions as co-extensive.

Nonetheless, in the face of that false dichotomy, Palestinians are actively creating and

(re)establishing spaces for queer folk within which decolonial affinities and non-traditional sexualities form and flourish.

Similar arguments could be made about misogyny, colonization, and the de- agentification (particularly sexual) of young women in some segments of Palestinian society. On a lyrical level, these songs have very different meanings when consumed in a non-U.S. context where heteronormative ideologies and sexual and gender-based cultural norms are different. One can easily understand Beyonce’s “Naughty Girl” as a sex-positive anthem for (Palestinian) women’s agency over the portrayal and use of their bodies, as well as their ability to engage in pre-marital relations with men. In a space populated, in part, by lesbians and queer women, this song gains further meaning, as the relationships imagined by its listeners are not presumed to be hetero. Even for heterosexual men in the space, the lyrics to many of the songs might represent a sexual politics that is increasingly desired among some Palestinians, one that notably challenges a timeline of traditional relationships that discourage sexual relations before marriage while encouraging family involvement in all stages of a relationship, a system that Alana Banourrah

(2016) terms “implied marriage”. Each of these re-imaginings of hip-hop lyrics were embodied in the club that evening, affective as much as they were representational. The rhythmic patterns of the hip-hop music coalesced with dance forms that brought bodies into close contact,

48 compositions of bumps and grinds, kisses and touches between dancers that are not permitted, or at least not found frequently, in Palestinian spaces with classical Arab music.

At one point in the night, two men in coordinated outfits were dancing on the raised platform, very aware that their performance was on full display, yet seemingly caught up in and insulated by the pleasure of movement. I found myself drawn later to one guest, a young man wearing a black v-neck shirt, his cheeks adorned with glitter and his ear with a gold hoop earring. Later in the evening I was filming and caught a shot of him many concert videographers would gush over, as I did. As I panned past him and his cohort dancing, he pulled a cardboard tube from his pocket and blew into it, releasing a large cloud of gold glitter over the heads of the other dancers, to which they responded enthusiastically. I felt in those moments a sense of affinity with that young man. In many ways, he helped to resolve much of what I had been feeling that day. I saw in him a glimpse of emotion that felt, to me, very real, as though we were both participating in the emotional landscapes of the bars in Long Beach, California that had been quintessential to my early years as a queer man, but that had been exported here to Haifa through hip-hop practices. I felt in him a sense of hopeful excitement, a desire that unfolded within and through his body, exuding queer and Palestinian potential, embedded in this public and private space, finding expression in lyrics imported through the transnational circuits of hip- hop, and (partially) resolved, in that unbound moment, in the communion between him and the other people in the club’s soundscape.

I begin this chapter with this refrain intending to engage the development of scholarship concerned with embodiment and affect, and to suggest that the study of hip-hop practices must be concerned with said scholarship, a theoretical relationship that has been scantly developed

(Roberts, 2013). This suggestion is not without scholarly precedent, as the fields of cultural

49 studies and sound studies have become a formidable site of work on affect (Goodman, 2012;

Gregg & Seigworth, 2010; Thompson & Biddle, 2013; Voegelin, 2014), but is also meant to reflect a grounded theorization of Palestinian hip-hop as experienced by myself and those with whom I had the fortune to spend time, hopefully elucidating how hip-hop practices (in)form embodied, Palestinian identities. In Palestine studies, scholarship on Palestinian identity formation tends to focus, through a range of methods, methodologies, and foundational concepts, on the representational aspects of ethno-religious and nationalist identities. I assert that the focus on ethno-religious and nationalist Palestinian identities, and related elision of gender and sexuality, ignores the ways through which Palestinians differentially embody and feel, rather than just think and describe, their identities. Regarding Palestinian cultural studies, a scholarly preoccupation with older cultural forms contributes further to this elision at a time when new and notably transnational cultural practices, such as hip-hop production and consumption, help generate prefigurative, queer affinities with the potential to challenge patriarchal and homophobic norms within Israeli/Palestinian society. Taking these themes in Palestinian hip-hop as a provocation to investigate the ways Palestinian identities form through participation in hip- hop practices and spaces, this chapter continues the move away from strictly representational, ethno-religious, and nationalist conceptions of Palestinian identity to more intersectional, hybrid, affective, and queer conceptions, ones that help elucidate the differential processes involved in

Palestinian identity formation.

This chapter specifically prioritizes a spatial approach to Palestinian identity formation that foregrounds where hip-hop practices take place and their relationship to sexuality and affect. I argue that most discussions of Palestinian identity are implicitly geographic and spatial, involving both ideas about space and place as well as practices that (re)produce, materialize, and

50 embody those ideas. In countries with uncontested, open, or non-existent internal borders, discourses about national identity are less focused on internal spatial boundaries than in Israel-

Palestine, where notions of Palestinian identity, experience, and authenticity are intimately tied to contests over space, place, and one’s geopolitical location, so much so that disputes over a matter of yards in East Jerusalem or Hebron take on considerable significance. In my attempt to capture a differential, anti-essentialist, and affective construction of queer Palestinian identities, I focus this chapter’s concern on the role of space and place in the formation of said identities through hip-hop practices in Haifa, Israel. The opening section of this chapter expands upon my definition of the term queer in the introduction chapter, exploring in more depth the relationship between queer theory and (de)colonization. Here, I further justify my use of queer and queer theory as a decolonial undertaking that responds to dynamics unique to Haifa as a mixed city.

Using a recent queer film festival in Haifa as an example, I highlight how media framings of mixed cities often co-opt grassroots, queer, Palestinian work, erasing Palestinian identity and disconnecting the progress Palestinian queers achieve in mixed cities from their explicitly decolonial politics. The next section focuses more explicitly on space, producing a conversation between the fields of Palestinian cultural studies and queer geography to identify the important role of public space in practices of queer identity formation and (decolonial) Palestinian resistance. In the process, I discuss the relationship of mobility and visibility to scholarship on passing, stressing the complimentary of passing as and passing through public space. The focus then shifts to the theories grounded in my fieldwork in Haifa, including mapping projects, interviews with artists and activists, and participatory research at hip-hop shows. Two themes emerge from this research that merit attention: “going out” as a resistant, queer, and Palestinian practice intimately tied to identity, space, and place, and the role that the built environments of

51 hip-hop spaces, which I term “secluded publics,” play in facilitating queer eroticism and dance.

Collectively, this chapter further evidences the centrality of space and space-making to

Palestinian identity formation, including the development queer and decolonial affinities and sensibilities.

II. Queer Theory, Decoloniality, and the Mixed City of Haifa

Queer theory as a body of scholarship and a method of inquiry, along with the term queer in both adjective and verb forms, have not been consistently received by scholars invested in decoloniality. As I argued in my introductory chapter and expand on here, queer theory and its tools are relevant and important to studies of contemporary Palestinian sexual politics, despite the history and contemporary status of queer theory as a Western, and predominantly U.S-based field of study (Mikdashi & Puar, 2016). Nonetheless, the critiques of queer theory and its resulting development in different activist and scholarly contexts help explain my and other

Palestinians’ growing commitment to the term queer and the use of queer politics in Israel-

Palestine. Héctor Ruvalcaba (2007) summarizes the focus of his 2016 book on queer theory in

Latin America, Translating the Queer, with a number of questions:

What does it mean to queer a concept? If queerness is a notion that implies a

destabilization of the normativity of the body, then all cultural systems contain zones of

discomfort relevant to queer studies. What then might we make of such zones when the

use of the term queer itself has transcended the fields of sex and gender, becoming a

metaphor for addressing such cultural phenomena as hybridization, resignification, and

subversion? Further still, what should we make of it when so many people are reluctant to

use the term queer, because they view it as theoretical colonialism, or a concept that loses

its specificity when applied to a culture that signifies and uses the body differently?

52 I find Ruvalcaba’s inquiries informative and reflective of the questions I pose of queer theory’s applicability to Palestinians in my introduction. This chapter focuses intently on the body and bodies in “zones of discomfort”, including public spaces and hip-hop spaces, doing so in ways that reflect a “destabilization of the normativity of the body”, its attendant meanings and affects.

In particular, I do so in relation to Western homonormative and homonationalist logics embedded in relations of settler colonialism, global logics which render queer Palestinians invisible in an effort to justify Israeli claims to governance vis-à-vis claims to Western modernity. But to use queer theory in a non-U.S. context requires me to expand upon my justification of the term from my introductory chapter and to engage with both criticisms of queer theory and the changes to queer theory that emerged from those critiques.

Queer theory’s history as a Western and predominantly U.S.-based pursuit had been well documented in its tendency to reproduce the white, gay, male as the unmarked center of both sexuality studies and global sexual politics. Beginning in the 1990s, Western scholars of critical race theory critiqued queer theory as a non-intersectional project that did not consider the role of race and racism in sexual identity and thus reproduced racist logics and practices in their pursuit of a radical politics of sexuality. Roderick Ferguson, a pioneer in the development of queer of color critique, highlighted the racism inherent in contemporary queer theory in his 2004 book Aberrations in Black: Towards a Queer of Color Critique. Ferguson notably critiques the disconnect of queer theory from race, its focus on sexuality and sexual identity as identities that form separately from race. He concludes thus that, “queer of color analysis needs to debunk the idea that race, class, gender, and sexuality are discrete formations, apparently insulated from another. As queer of color critique challenges ideologies of discreteness, it attempts to disturb the idea that racial and national formation are obviously disconnected” (p. 4). Ferguson’s argument

53 that racial categories in the West are sexed, gendered, and sexualized, and that categories of sexual identity are racialized, reflects an intersectional critique that defines much contemporary scholarship on queer theory both within and outside the U.S.

Indigenous queer critique has been another productive site for intersectional approaches to queer theory, built partially on the insight of queer of color critique. Andrea Smith, a prominent scholar of indigeneity and queer theory, argues that “even queer of color critique does not necessarily mark how identities are shaped by settler colonialism” (2010, p. 64). Smith therefore explores how, “Native studies can build on queer of color critique's engagement with subjectless critique. In the move to go ‘postidentity,’ queer theory often reinstantiates a white supremacist, settler colonialism by disappearing the indigenous peoples colonized in this land who become the foils for the emergence of postcolonial, postmodern, diasporic, and queer subjects” (p. 63). Scott Lauria Morgensen (2011) similarly critiques the development of queer theory, arguing that, “in the United States, modern queer cultures and politics have taken form as normatively white, multiracial, and non-Native projects compatible with a white settler society”

(p. ix). Nonetheless, Morgenson endorses queer theory broadly as not applicable to Native societies, but as already cultivated within Native societies yet masked or ignored by queer hegemonies. As Morgensen contends:

Native queer and Two-Spirit activists directly denaturalize settler colonialism and disrupt

its conditioning of queer projects by asserting queer modernities. By repudiating

heteropatriarchy as a colonial project, recalling subjugated Native knowledges, and

forming alliances that trouble settler sovereignty and pursue decolonization, Native queer

and Two-Spirit activists have created critical theories and movements to which all people

can respond. (p. ix)

54 Morgensen and Smith’s approaches to queer indigeneity reject the notion that subjugated peoples do not have a voice or agency within academic institutions, suggesting instead that subjugated peoples exert agency when co-opting and revising hegemonic, global, scholarly discourses to their benefit. Morgensen and Smith’s work is primarily grounded within indigenous activisms that overtly deploy queer identity and queer theory in their work. As stated in my introduction, the widespread use of the term queer in Palestinian activist networks and by individual queer

Palestinians reflects the salience of queer theory, queer identities, and acts of queering within a

Palestinian context. However, within academia, growing attention has been paid to how

Palestinian studies might benefit from a selective engagement with queer theory. Morgensen, though focused on indigeneity and decolonization in Canada, noted in a comparative analysis of

Canada and Israel-Palestine, how “after years of organizing among Palestinian LGBTQ people in

Palestine, Israel, and the diaspora, a broad array of queer critiques of gender and sexuality in

Israel/Palestine recently has appeared in social movements and in queer studies” (2012, p. 174).

Thus, we can also look to the specific engagements with and justifications of queer theory within

Palestinian studies scholarship to more specifically highlight its decolonial relevance and potential.

In their introduction to a 2018 special issue of The Journal of Palestine Studies focused on queer theory, Leila Farsakh, Rhoda Kanaaneh, and Sherene Seikaly expand on the productive relationship between the two fields:

Both Palestine studies and queer theory are interested in exposing certain dynamics of

domination and liberation. Palestinian studies tend to be dominated by historical and

geopolitical analyses of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Scholarship has not attended

enough to the processes of colonization and decolonization, and to the disciplining of

55 gender and sexuality inherent to colonialism and nationalism. Queer studies have not

always been attuned to how sexuality can take shape as a colonial category co-constituted

through multilayered structures of oppression. Scholars in both fields grapple with the

phenomenon of nationalism and the role of the state in the politics of liberation. (p. 7-8)

These lacunae are being directly addressed by queer Palestinian activists and scholars, bringing considerations of gender and sexuality into Palestine studies and bringing discussions of colonialism into queer studies, similar to Morgensen and Smith. Opposition to Western domination, cultural, economic, and political, defines much queer organizing and scholarship in

Palestine. As Farsakh, Kanaaneh, and Seikaly argue, “Just as central to Palestinian queers’ political engagement is their opposition to Western-dominated definitions of sexual liberation and widespread practices of exclusionary LGBTQ politics. Palestinian queers, for example, reject the universalization of “coming out” and insistence on public displays of sexual diversity as intrinsic to queer activism because this Western model denies Palestinians their context and tools” (p. 10). This rejection among Palestinian queers fits within a larger critique of the connections between colonization and sexual politics. Scholars working at the intersections of queer and Palestine studies engage queering as an act that renders visible the gendered, sexed, and sexualized foundations of colonialism.

In the same vein, Walaa Alqaisiya’s (2018) participation in and research on the queer activist and service organization, alQaws, informed her notion of “decolonial queering”, a practice which “reveals how these discourses of sexual progress reproduce Zionist colonialism and thereby demonstrates how deeply politicized LGBT Israeli organizations are, regardless of their self-definition as apolitical” (p. 32). Comparing alQaws’ focus on decoloniality with single- issue LGBTQ campaigns in Israel, Alqaisiya concludes that “The significance of decolonial

56 queering lies in its ability to trace the heteronormative structures of Israeli colonialism and their reproduction within dominant Palestinian imaginings of liberation. Decolonial queering assesses critically the premise of state building that tethers the outcome of liberation to the very gendered and geopolitical structures that enable Palestinian subjugation and ongoing fragmentation” (p.

39). Alqaisiya further uses alQaws’ work to unveil the sexist and homophobic dimensions of mainstream Palestinian nationalist ideologies. Drawing from Andrea Smith (2010), Alqaisiya argues that, “Struggles for sovereignty and liberation often dictate a hierarchy that marks indigenous queer and/or feminist organizing as a divergence from the main issue—meaning, national liberation must come first. Such calls for ‘purity’ function as forms of ‘political silencing’ of queer and native feminists that leave the indigenous neocolonial elite unchallenged”

(p. 38-39). Farsakh, Kanaaneh, and Seikaly (2018) draw similar conclusions about queer theory, suggesting that, “This queer perspective expands Palestinian feminist critiques of patriarchy, and helps explain why, for example, Palestinian women’s demands for gender equality in the 1970s and 1980s were pushed aside in favor of the Palestinian national liberation struggle. Time and again, the Palestinian leadership’s nationalist discourse argued that the nation-state has to precede gender equality and was thus a more urgent task” (p. 9). What these accounts collectively tell us is that the use of the term queer, the use of queer theory, and specifically acts of (decolonial) queering help to render visible the sexual logics that undergird settler colonialism and that also emerge in (national/decolonial) liberation movements.

What do these critiques and revisions/adaptations of queer theory tell us about its potential for Palestine? If, as Alqaisiya (2018) highlights, organizations like alQaws combat

“reductive approaches that relegate queer to a Western colonial epistemological construct” (p.

39), why do critiques of queer theory as inapplicable to Palestine persist and how do we interpret

57 them? I find the continuing characterization of queer theory as inapplicable to Palestine to be problematic given that it also emerges primarily from Western academics and ignores the preponderance of evidence that Palestinians utilize queer theory in unique, local, and decolonial ways. It should be enough to say that, in my opinion, to suggest that critiques of queer theory’s applicability to Palestinians should emerge from and be grounded in Palestinian experiences.

Otherwise, we risk assuming the problematic and colonial notion that marginalized people lack the knowledge and agency to make sense of and combat their own oppression. This assumption is the equivalent of asking, from a Western positionality, whether queer theory can be useful to people in the East/Global South. I believe a more radical academic and epistemological praxis would allow Palestinians to determine if and how queer theory might be applicable to interrogating and framing their own lives, as queer of color critique and indigenous queer critique have done, and to using those interrogations to build radical coalition beyond Israel-

Palestine. While I appreciate the critical reflexivity involved in “decolonial” critiques and dismissals of queer theory, when it emerges primarily from Western academics, I become concerned over the reproduction of a colonial savior mentality within a field of study that claims to be radical. I prefer to listen to and center the voices of Palestinians who are increasingly deploying queer terminology and queer theory in decolonial ways. I find myself compelled by

Jason Ritchie’s (2010) work in Israel-Palestine, focused on Palestinian queer life, mobility, and visibility in predominantly mixed cities in Israel. Rejecting the totalizing depiction of homonationalism produced by some Western queer theorists (Puar and Mikdashi, 2012),

Ritchie (2015) urges for scholars to locate queer critique within the contexts and particularities of the specific queer people such critiques seek to represent. As Ritchie concludes:

58 But if queers who live in other places have some value beyond serving as grist for North

American and European queers to consolidate a properly radical subjectivity and mitigate

their privilege, homonationalism's activist critics—and its theorists—might consider

resisting the impulse to homogenize this or that queer as the victim or the victor and work

instead to develop a nuanced framework for building coalitions to fight—rather than

platforms on which to fight about—the complex and unpredictable ways space is

organized, difference is enforced, and some bodies in some places are allowed to move

more freely than others. (p. 632)

Recent queer events in the city of Haifa help demonstrate how sexual identity and rights get co- opted under settler colonial logics and how Palestinians in mixed cities reiterate their commitment to queer decolonial movement building. At the end of 2015, Haifa played host to a queer film festival, Kooz Queer, featuring films relating to LGBTQ topics within the Arab world. The film screenings were hosted in Palestinian social spots in Haifa, namely Kabareet, owned by Ayed Fadel, a major figure in the Palestinian EDM and hip-hop scenes. Media coverage of the event within the United States was considerable, with multiple major news outlets, including The New York Times and Variety, picking up the story and having correspondents conduct interviews with festival organizers and participants. Certainly, the festival specifically and Haifa’s Palestinian youth social scenes in general appeal to Western audiences. Debra Kamin (2015) of Variety compared the film festival to similar ones that had already taken place in San Francisco, California in the U.S. Diaa Hadid (2016) of the New York

Times described Elika Bar, another Palestinian social spot in the Hadar neighborhood of Haifa, in both aesthetic and political terms:

59 They [the patrons] were among the many coiffed, pierced, and tattooed women and men

who populate a slice of Haifa’s social scene that resembles that of the well-heeled

hipsters of Tel-Aviv. But here, the cool kids are Palestinians, and they have unfurled a

self-consciously Arab milieu that is secular, feminist, and gay-friendly (Hadid).

Besides the similar use of Western frames of reference to describe non-Western cultural practices, the two articles in Variety and The New York Times had very little in common.

Kamin’s (2015) article, titled “Palestinian Gay Film Festival Breaks Down Barriers,” described the festival in detail, including the many films, both Palestinian and international, screened at the event. In the article, Kamin described the festival in overtly decolonial terms:

The tiny three-day fest, established by grassroots org Aswat-Palestinian Gay Women, and

held across a handful of Haifa coffee shops and art venues, opened up a dialogue about

the overlaps of occupation and sexuality; and of the borders of individual identity in the

context of an uncertain international existence... a response to so-called Israeli

“pinkwashing,” the term, often used by Palestinian advocates, to describe a deliberate

Israeli strategy of promoting the Jewish state’s gay-friendly policies in a bid to turn

attention away from the occupation.

In this depiction, the intersectional nature of the film festival, a simultaneously queer, feminist, and decolonial event, is not lost. Diaa Hadid’s (2016) article, focused more broadly on

Palestinian social life in Haifa and titled “In Israeli City of Haifa, a Liberal Arab Culture

Blossoms,” took a pronouncedly different approach, despite citing Kamin’s (2015) article from a month prior and conducting interviews with many Palestinians in the city who help organize and promote all the cultural practices the article cites. In the article, Hadid quoted from Ayed Fadel when he described his aspirations with Kabareet bar in relation to his queer patrons. As Hadid

60 quoted, “’We want a gay couple to go to the dance floor and kiss each other and nobody to even look at them,’ he said. ‘This is the new Palestinian society we are aiming for.’” Hadid then immediately continued her article by likening the changes in Haifa to a time in Haifa’s history as an Arab-port city:

For some, the blossoming Palestinian scene in Haifa is reminiscent of the city during

British rule, when a lively Arab cultural life flourished. Much of that ended in 1948 with

the war in which Israel was established, when Arabs fled, or were forced to leave, their

homes in many cities, including in Haifa, said Mustafa Kabha, a lecturer in Palestinian

history at the Open University of Israel.

The differing narratives of Kamin and Hadid in these two articles reflect two approaches to framing mixed cities and the Palestinian cultural practices within them. For Kamin (2015), the relationship between the queer film festival and the occupation was not lost or intentionally covered up. Kamin positioned the film festival using the same narrative as the event organizers, a decidedly queer and anti-occupation event. Hadid (2016), in contrast, divorces all Western- appealing aesthetic and cultural descriptions of Haifa’s Palestinian community from the anti- occupation politics that have consistently accompanied or co-opted them. In an article a week later by Ben Norton (2016), published in Salon, Ayed Fadel and three other interviewees attested to their disappointment and anger that Hadid edited out anything they mentioned pertaining to the occupation. Fadel discussed the Western-centric framing of Haifa in the article, describing how, "It portrays the modern Palestinian in a 'Western' image that comforts white readers and make them say, 'Oh, they're just like us!'" Norton then turned to the topic of pinkwashing as

Fadel continued to reflect specifically on his quote about a gay couple kissing and the subsequent discussion of the Kooz Queer film festival in the New York Times article:

61 Pinkwashing refers to a propaganda strategy in which countries, corporations or

institutions portray themselves as LGBTQ-friendly, in order to distract from human rights

abuses, crimes or misconduct in which they engage.

As an example, Fadel pointed out that the Times mentioned the Palestinian “Kooz queer

film festival that we hosted without mentioning that one of the most important topics in it

was the Israeli pinkwashing.” He emphasized that this “is misleading, especially when

I've been totally used as a pinkwasher with the quote above!” (Norton)

Hadid (2016) described her perception that, “Haifa’s relative liberalism is a product of its unique, cosmopolitan tradition,” but what that cosmopolitan tradition is, where it comes from, and whether Palestinians are responsible for it are somewhat unclear. Less unclear, however, is the historical erasure that goes hand in hand with the contemporary (re-)framing of Palestinian queer life that Hadid attempts. In one paragraph, Hadid simultaneously describes the oppressive

British colonial rule of Palestine as a time when “Arab cultural life flourished,” and describes the

Nakba as involving Palestinians that fled their homes, without recognizing either why they fled or the fact that many who attempted to return home after were forcibly turned away, their houses now seized by Israeli soldiers and civilians.

Perhaps the most pervasive tactic used to isolate the individual opportunities mixed-cities might afford queer or female Palestinians from larger discussions of occupation and colonialism is in the pervasive need to distinguish Palestinians in Israel and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza as culturally distinct groups (often through the differential use of Arab-Israeli vs

Palestinian). Continuing to use queer Palestinians and the film festival in Haifa as an example,

Hadid (2016) chooses to describe the blossoming liberal culture in Haifa in contrast to “many of

Israel’s Arab communities, where sex before marriage is taboo, and single men and women

62 rarely date and tend to marry at relatively young ages, in matches often arranged by their mothers.” This narrative, that Palestinian society in the West Bank maintains practices that are oppressive to queer Palestinians is not a complete or true depiction and, when presented as a blanket statement, contributes to the Orientalist and pinkwashing-friendly notion that queer

Palestinians are desiring and attempting to escape from the West Bank and Gaza to come to participate in Israeli queer life. In contrast, at the end of her article, Kamin (2015) quoted from event organizer and Aswat’s educational project organizer, Hanan Wakeem, who mentioned that,

“A lot of Palestinian queers live in the West Bank, and they want to stay there. They don’t want to move to Haifa or Tel Aviv.”

Wakeem’s sentiments address an important trend within Palestinian decolonial queer politics in Israel, namely the desire to identify, connect with, and support the active queer social and political life in Palestine, not only in Israel. After the film festival in 2015 and similar events in the following years, a collective of queer Palestinian artists and activists in Haifa issued a call to boycott the city’s 2018 pride events, tired of those events being depoliticized and used to support the occupation:

Palestinians and opponents of colonization in Haifa and beyond,

We call on you to boycott the pride events in our city, Haifa, for there is no pride in

occupation. Our pride is in our liberation.

For many years, our city faces many projects of “coexistence” that aim to change its

features. The municipality with the help of Israeli capital brutalizes our city and its

neighborhoods...The municipality strangles and suffocates what is left of Wadi al-

Nisnas and al-Halisa neighborhoods and it is working to impoverish the population by

cutting off vital services in those neighborhoods turning them into slums. Many other

63 neighborhoods face the same fate resulting from policies of impoverishment and

demolition.

Despite these atrocities, Haifa municipality is trying to promote the city as a city for

coexistence, love, peace, pluralism and acceptance. This is not but a lie that aims to wash

the blatant colonial essence of the Haifa municipality, for there is no “love” in the

continuing attempts to erase and eliminate us, there is no “peace” in our impoverishment

and displacement, there is no “pluralism” in our separation and restriction in our stricken

neighborhoods and there is no “acceptance” in its response to our latest stand with our

people in Gaza...

We refuse these policies, and we encourage you to not participate in the upcoming pride

events, to not promote it, and to actively boycott it as a rejection of the manipulation of

our destiny. (Palestinian Queer activists in Haifa)

The statement addresses the history and contemporary status of Haifa, the marginalization of

Palestinians within the city, and the connections between the struggles inside Haifa and across

Israel-Palestine. At the end of the statement, the activists and artists included a single image of queer graffiti in Ramallah. The image, which had two men kissing with the words “Queers were here,” was a gesture and reminder that Israel does not have a monopoly on queer rights or social and cultural life and that Palestinians across the Israel-Palestine are actively engaging in intersectional queer liberation movements. Mixed cities certainly offer Palestinians a range of individual opportunities or choices, many of which are curtailed in Palestinian majority cities.

You can choose to go to a pride parade or a queer bar, experiences which can certainly be enjoyable. However, those choices, those events, those spaces, are often divorced of decolonial potential, instead re-centering Israel as the solution to, and not the cause of, Palestinian

64 oppression. Against that reality, queer Palestinian organizers and artists in Haifa seek to assert a sense of queer belonging and movement building that is intimately tied to decolonization and

Palestinian identity. To deny this reality and to position Palestinian queers and queer activists as unwitting recipients of a Western-imposed hegemonic queer theory is tantamount to the erasure of Palestinian queer, decolonial activism in Hadid’s article. It denies the agency the Palestinians exert in critiquing, co-opting, and revising queer theory, regardless of its Western origins and global hegemony, into a viable, decolonial force.

III. A Queer/Palestinian Geography of Public Space

The modern history of Palestinian public space takes shifts in the migration of Jews and the ensuing political and spatial colonial settlement of Palestine as major turning points in the make-up and distribution of Palestinians across space and in place. The growth of political

Zionism in Palestine was a geopolitical enterprise, involving the forced movement of

Palestinians to rural areas (Shafir, 1996, p. 41-44), the establishment of (new) urban centers for

Jews (Rotbard, 2014, p. 122-23), and the narration of settlement and development of a “land without a people” (Masalha, 2012, p. 61-62). The expansion of Zionism necessitated a form of historic revisionism materialized through a new geography and toponymy that

Nur Masalha describes as historicizing the natural place of Jews in Palestine, physically and discursively. For example, the destruction of Palestinian towns and villages was just one material dimension of this transition, mirrored in a discursive attempt to rename cities and streets with

Hebrew names, many of which glorified early leaders of the Zionist movement in Palestine

(Azaryahu & Cook, 2001, p. 185-86).

In Haifa, this is perhaps best represented by Ben Gurion Street, named after Israel’s first prime minister, founder of the IDF, and former leader of the World Zionist Organization, who

65 was also noted for promoting the “Judaization of Haifa” (Goren, 2004, p. 135). The sloping Ben

Gurion Street, a major nightlife center, is testament to Haifa’s unique geography. Home to roughly three-hundred thousand residents (closer to one million in the metropolitan area), the city is bordered by the southern side of the Bay of Haifa to the north and by Mount Carmel to the south. With very little flat land along the coast, most of which is either industrial port or beach areas, the city is mostly on a mountainside. To make use of the limited land, itself difficult to build on, Haifa has expanded upwards as well as outwards. As will be discussed below, the large density of people, ranging from 4,000/square kilometer in the city’s core to 1,100 across the whole metropolitan area, impacts how queer Palestinians navigate public space.

The geographic dimensions of the establishment of Israel and the subsequent occupation of lands retained for Palestinians have had important effects on the construction of Palestinian identity and consciousness across space. One’s physical location in Israel (e.g. Palestinians in

Haifa) versus in the Palestinian territories, in refugee camps in bordering countries, or in the larger diaspora to the U.S., Europe, and South America, factor into how one is perceived as, and perceives themselves as, Palestinian. Rashid Khalidi’s (1997) expansive study of Palestinian identity and consciousness indicated that identifying with a national Palestine was one of many overlapping, and sometimes conflicting identities that Palestinians took on, including tribal, religious, geographic, and familial. For Khalidi, extracting an authentic, ahistorical, or non- relational Palestinian identity would be (geographically) impossible, despite persistent attempts by both Palestinian and Israeli academics and politicians to do so. These geopolitical differences between Palestinians, however, do not necessarily diminish or bolster one’s association with an assumed, essential Palestinian identity, but rather offer one dimension of the differential processes through which Palestinian identities are formed. Nonetheless, geopolitical location

66 does play a role in the contestation of Palestinian authenticity and legitimacy, contests that overlap with notions of hip-hop authenticity, often prioritizing those who live in Gaza and the

West Bank as more authentically hip-hop or Palestinian. My concern in this chapter is not to unpack the role of geographic location vis-à-vis a metric of “Palestinian-ness”, but to foreground the importance of space and place in any study of Palestinian identity formation. In particular, this chapter draws out practical connections between queer and hip-hop practices that are built within particular spaces, both public and secluded.

Mobility and Visibility Dynamics

Regarding public space specifically, Palestinian identity formation is tied to myriad practices that utilize public space. Two themes are prominent in Palestine studies regarding the significance of utilizing public space: mobility and visibility (Wagner, 2013, p. 1-2). The various geopolitical machinations and practices of the Israeli state have considerably constricted the mobility of many Palestinians. Tenant vacancy laws mandated the seizure of any Palestinian homes left empty for more than 48 hours, forcing many Palestinians to remain in or near the home indefinitely. The restriction of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza from moving to or visiting Israel has severed families and other groups and bound many Palestinians to the towns they reside in. Security checkpoints and other means of restricting travel to Palestinians in

Palestine and Israel are commonplace. Thus, the theme of (im)mobility in scholarship on

Palestinian identity and space highlights the role of settler colonialism in the geo-cultural imaginaries and daily lives of Palestinians and, consequently, the relational nature of Palestinian identity formation to different practices that engage with, or move through, public space. More specifically, it indicates that mobile utilizations of public space can be resistant

67 and identitarian endeavors, performing and materializing what has been termed a “right to the city” (Mitchell, 2003, p. 17-21).

The theme of visibility further addresses the varying cultural norms of Palestinians pertaining to public space. Regarding Palestinian cultural practices that engage public spaces, visibility is a largely ocular matter. The questions of who is permissibly visible, how, and where provide insight into Palestinian cultural norms pertaining to gender, sexuality, and class.

Through Israel-Palestine, different spaces invoke different ways of seeing, different in that they permit different forms of visibility or performance. For women who wear hijab, the private space of the home might permit them to remove their hijab and to be visible without it, whereas the public space of, for example, a marketplace, has different codes of visibility, wherein a woman without a hijab might be subject to different, intensified scrutiny than one wearing a hijab.

For Mokarram Abbas and Bas Van Heur (2014), three factors play into the experience of women in spaces ranging from private to public, space audience (who is seeing), spatial opportunities

(what is permissible in those spaces), and space organization (p. 1225-26). Similarly, other scholars have identified the role of privacy or seclusion for women as integral to their level of comfort engaging with public spaces (Al-Bishawi, Ghadban, & Jorgensen, 2007, p. 1561-

63). These same understandings of visibility and gender map well onto the intersectional experiences of queer Palestinians for whom different spaces offer different levels of comfort related to different ways of seeing and being seen. Thus, visibility in Palestine is an intersubjective concern, involving visual displays and ways of seeing, which help differentiate between Palestinian experiences of public space informed by gender and sexuality. In materializing and performing a right to the city, “a place in which groups and individuals can make themselves visible, is crucial” (Mitchell, 2003, p. 33). The themes of mobility and

68 visibility offer a way of considering the importance of using public space as a form of resistance against settler colonial practices, sexism, and homophobia that render Palestinians differentially

(im)mobile and (in)visible.

This visibility-mobility dynamic in scholarship on Palestinian public space has been well developed in regard to Palestinian ethno-religious and national identity, as well as to gender norms internal to Palestinian society, yet has not been taken up to extensively study sexuality and public space in Israel-Palestine (See Wagner, 2013; Ritchie, 2010). Sexual identity among

Palestinians also involves questions of visibility and mobility, what displays or movements are permissible, and who can safely see you performing a non-normative sexual identity. Ben Gurion street provides an excellent example of this in Haifa. If you are a new Palestinian couple in

Haifa, Ben Gurion Street is a public space in which visibly performing your relationship takes on special meaning. When a couple receives the blessing from their parents to be together, many choose to go out to Ben Gurion Street. If you are seen there with a potential partner, it indicates that you are officially together, publicly, and also in line with the dictates of heteronormative “implied marriage” (Banourrah, 2016). This going out, perhaps the first public performance of one’s relationship, highlights the dual role of mobility and visibility in the construction of geographically and spatially embedded Palestinian (sexual) identities. However,

Ben Gurion Street does not offer the same sort of protections to sexual minorities, queer

Palestinians whose relationship to public spaces and practices of mobility and visibility are affected by Palestinian heteronormativity. This is not to say that queer Palestinians do not go out, but that their experiences of mobility and visibility in public space are not solely (in)formed by their ethnic, religious, or national identities. Rather, queer Palestinians embody a differential subjectivity that must simultaneously navigate relations of ethno-

69 religious discrimination and Palestinian heteronormativity. Roy Wagner (2012) helps highlight this in his discussion of the 2006 attempt at an LGBT pride event in Jerusalem, when the police decided to remove protection from the event due to the focus at the time on conflicts in Gaza:

“LGBTs did move through the streets of Jerusalem on November 10, 2006; but those recognizable as manifesting pride, seeking LGBT visibility, were denied mobility…LGBTs had to choose between mobility and visibility” (p. 4). This tactical trade-off between mobility and visibility is not ubiquitous, as Wagner explains, but certainly commonplace for individuals manifesting queer/Palestinian-ness.

An examination of the literature on public space and sexuality from queer geography offers a complement to the literature on Palestine, indicating that different, prevailing narratives about sexuality, visibility, and performance influence queer engagements with public space (See

Duncan, 1996; Hemmings; Johnston & Longhurst, 2010; Gorman-Murray, Pini, & Bryant,

2013). While queer geography has a strong tradition of focusing on the coding of queer spaces, as within the bar scene, that tradition has involved a reliance on the explicit signification of gay and lesbian spaces and consequently produced a delineation between queer geographies and geographies of sexuality. The geography of sexualities approach, intended to highlight the places in which gay, lesbian, and other queer folk come together, reflects the confessional or declarative mode embraced by Western norms around coming out. The “coding” of bar spaces as gay or as lesbian (often to the exclusion of other groups) involves a form of declaration that becomes immediately public, searchable online from google to the abundant gay travel guides, and that can blur the lines between coming out and going out. While this scholarly tendency has reflected the changing normative status of coming out over time within the West, it does not serve the same purpose for queer people whose engagements with public spaces might prefer those

70 spaces to not be explicitly coded as gay, lesbian, or otherwise queer. To find out about a queer- friendly and Palestinian-friendly space in Israel-Palestine might require you to know someone who can direct you there, and it certainly will not be as easily searchable online. Given that queer histories are often narrated as histories of space and place, it is important to avoid the culturally imperialistic potential of this scholarly trend by focusing on the uncoded, flexible, and mixed use spaces of Palestinian queer, public life.

While Tel-Aviv offers a number of explicitly coded gay places, a fact often touted in pinkwashing literature on the regional exceptionalism of Israeli LGBTQ politics (Papantonopoulou, 2014, p. 278-79), those spaces are often policed along ethno- religious lines. Jason Ritchie’s work on the politics of visibility in queer Palestinian and Israeli social life highlights well the policing of ethno-religious identity and state belonging within gay bars in Israel. Discussing an event where he and an Arab friend were turned away from a Tel

Aviv gay bar, Ritchie (2010) describes how “that moment cast into sharp relief the discursive framework that governs sexuality and race in Israel-Palestine: the entrance to the bar was a sort of checkpoint, like so many others queer Palestinians regularly face, in bars, saunas, parks, Web sites, and other “egalitarian” gay spaces; it was manned by a queer agent of Israeli nationalism, whose job it was to determine who belongs in this gay/Israeli space and who does not” (p. 557).

Ritchie continues to build on criticisms of gay visibility, extending a metaphor of the checkpoint as an alternative to the closet. “I read the checkpoint, then, not just as a literal site on the border where agents of the state ‘inspect . . . what goes in and out’ of the nation but as a ubiquitous subjective process wherein citizens and noncitizens alike check themselves —and others — against ‘the field of signs and practices’ in which the nation-state is represented” (p. 557). Thus,

Ritchie concludes, “While the dream of ‘coming out of the closet’ into full citizenship and

71 national belonging drives the activism of many queer Israelis, the violence of the checkpoint — and countless other reminders of the impossibility of belonging (not to mention “citizenship”) — shapes the strategies of queer Palestinian activists.” (p. 558).

In contrast to the explicitly coded gay bars of Tel Aviv, Palestinian queer spaces are constantly shifting, affected by the who and what of the event for the day. One night could play host to a jazz band visiting from Europe, while the next could usher in a hip-hop night marketed in queer Palestinian circles. This flexibility could be read as a tactical approach to

(re)constructing queer space, avoiding the scrutiny that might attend the label of being a “gay bar”. While this tactic could similarly be read as a navigation of Palestinian homophobia, its motivations and functions are for more complicated. The Palestinian hip-hop scene and the

Palestinian queer bar scene are small yet growing in Israel-Palestine. Despite that growth, it is not yet possible for counter-cultural spaces to market themselves as just one or the other while staying afloat financially. The practice of maintaining an uncoded space, open for a range of events and communities, reflects a number of desires, including the desire for cross-cultural collaborative praxis, be it in the mixing of classical Arabic music with hip-hop beats and lyrics, or the mixing of queer and hetero populations. This mode of operation also helps militate against a number of the traps that explicitly coded gay spaces fall into, namely the policing of who can be there and how, modes of policing that often recreate sexism, racism, and ableism in an attempt to secure a safe space. Moreover, given the criticism leveled by many queer Palestinians against Western notions of coming out (see below), it stands to reason that the line between coming out as gay or lesbian and going out to an explicitly coded gay or lesbian space is blurry, as coded spaces hail the subjects that populate them into particular social relations.

72 Despite the fact that queer geographies have included attention to flexible, uncoded spaces, scholarship still largely focuses on the specific places in which queer people come together and not on the means by which they come to those places. This reproduces the assumption that queer mobility and visibility en route to the venue is permissible, or largely unrestricted, an assumption that might not mirror in queer Palestinian experiences of public space, let alone in the experiences of all Western queer people. Put differently, the scholarly mapping of queer places, rather than a more nuanced mapping that includes routes to those places trafficked by queer people, raises questions regarding for whom and for what those mappings might be useful. Analyses of queer places (e.g. specific gay bars) often ignore the practices by which people arrive at those places, a lacuna that suggests a gap between geographies of sexuality on one hand, and literature on passing on the other. The sometimes- tactical movements through streets and alleyways en route to venues and the role of visibility in those movements are important aspects of the experience of going out.

Passing As: The Ocular Logic of Western Sexualities

Thinking through the related body of literature on passing (See Bronski, 2001; Lingel,

2009; Fuller, Chang, & Rubin, 2009; and McCune, 2014), this might be described variously as the result of an elision of literature on passing in geographies of sexuality or the result of a focus on passing as, rather than passing through. This difference between passing as and passing through, developed in the proceeding sections, is more than just a linguistic and geographic reconfiguration of queer theorizations of passing, but one that calls attention to the consistent, yet underdeveloped place of spatiality in literature on passing and its importance to any Palestinian geography of sexuality. Scholarship on passing began within work on race and racism, examining the role of racial passing, or passing as a race other than that

73 which you identified as or which legal and cultural institutions designated you. More recently, scholars developed notions of gendered and sexual passing, two closely related fields, in part because a failure to perform normative gender can often lead to one being read as non-hetero.

Passing often is discussed as a strategic negotiation of the self that responds in flexible ways to myriad systems of policing identity, though it more recently has been deployed as an identity- signifier, such as in the identifiers “straight-passing” or “white passing”. The difficulty of this formulation is the assumption that one is something, that there is another identity category that one is not, and that both of those categories are stable, cohesive, and distinctly readable. Put differently, if people are constantly looking for and interpreting gendered and sexual cues, then passing requires that we can be read and interpreted as something other than our own identities.

Passing in public space should be taken broadly as a question of mobility and visibility as suggested by the scholarship detailed in the preceding section. The literature on passing presented here, however, prioritizes the role of visibility in displaying, reading, and interpreting gendered and sexual cues, and the resulting strategies employed by gender and sexual minorities to pass as, or appear as, something else. For Palestinians, however, it is not safe to assume that the categories of straight and gay are well established, coherent, and distinct in the same ways as in the West, indicating that a Western ocular logic, or the framing of passing largely as a matter of visibility, is insufficient. First, the practices around sexuality and confession that are reflected through the normalization of Western coming out narratives, both in and outside the West, is not the same across Palestinian cultures, either for straight or queer people. Specific sexual practices are not as closely tied to public discussions of sex and identifications of oneself as “straight” or

“gay” as they are in the West. Many men who have sex with other men and women who have sex with other women do not actively employ the terms gay and lesbian, either personally or

74 publicly. This difference is not only a matter of Palestinian cultural practices around non-hetero sexual identities, but around sexuality proper, with public discussions of sex and sexuality considerably muted when compared to places where coming out is a normative practice.

Second, the assumption of a distinction between straight and queer people, one that can also be read (often visually) in public space, does not resonate in Palestinian society. Looking specifically at dress styles, for example, both queer and straight Palestinian men are donning styles that emerge in Europe and the U.S., with companies often adapting those styles in small ways that accommodate a Middle Eastern and Mediterranean aesthetic, whether through color, print, or fabric changes. While this could be because of restrictions on public displays of queerness that Palestinians face, it could also be connected to the incomplete advancement or colonization of Western homonormativity for queer people within the Middle East and the aesthetic norms that develop accordingly. While many queer Palestinians sometimes have to choose forms of visibility over other forms of mobility, the modes of resistance queer

Palestinians employ emerge within, and not prior to, the prevailing constrictions of mobility and visibility. In other words, modes of queer dress, comportment, speaking, and other performances of identity do not have an authentic, essential form that is constricted by Palestinian heteronormativity. Rather, those performances emerge in response to those already present constrictions, in ways that simultaneously navigate constraints on mobility and visibility, while challenging them, what Wagner (2013) describes as “realigning, rather than strictly suppressing forms of visibility.” This is to say that the discussion of constrictions on mobility or visibility that queer, Palestinian men face, often implies an original authentic form of gayness that is naturally desired by gay men everywhere. The colonial implication of this, that places where queer people do not mirror (Western) gay and lesbian identities and practices must be so due to

75 systemic homophobia, is under-examined in literature dealing with sexual identity, queerness, and the Middle East.

Part of the queer intervention in literature on sexual passing, that moved it away from a strict focus on strategic passing as straight and/or cisgender, has been in the focus on acts of disruption, performances of the self that challenge binary and other normative ideologies of gender and sexuality, rather than negotiate around and through them. Leanne Dawson (2015) concisely explains that “it is those who either cannot or choose not to pass, and therefore present a disruptive surface text, who have been most celebrated in queer theory, despite the fact that failing to pass can have serious socio-political consequences” (p. 206). Rachel Devitt’s (2013) work on gender performances at drag and burlesque shows weaves together staged femme performances directed at both passing and what she terms ambivalence. Drawing from José

Muñoz’ (2009) work on disidentification and strategic misrecognition, Devitt writes of “a kind of passing that is not necessarily focused on a believable performance, but rather on a ‘tactical misrecognition of self’ that both invokes a racialised, classed and/or gendered archetype and challenges its limit(ation)s” (p. 438). Devitt’s definition does work to foreground a critique of the supposed stability and naturalness of gender and sexual identity categories, while recognizing their important roles in structuring social life.

While Devitt’s (2013) work is focused on staged performances in queer coded spaces, it resonates well with queer Palestinian practices of passing through public space. In the very act of passing through, a passing that addresses the implicit place of movement in notions of passing as, queer Palestinians challenge the very limitations of gendered and sexual mores. In one interview with a queer Haifa resident who frequents hip-hop shows, they described how their attention to grooming their beard and donning clean and fashionable clothing often gains them

76 the praise of a heteronormative public gaze. People they know who they pass in public praise them for being so well put together and attractive. These practices of grooming and dressing well are commonplace for straight Palestinian men, thus, in the moment of passing through and as, many queer Palestinian men challenge the limitations of Palestinian heteronormative mobility and visibility dynamics. More specifically, they take a binary understanding of straight and queer aesthetics and kinesthetics and, in their successful passing through public space, and as per

Devitt, challenge its limitations.

Returning to Wagner’s (2013) framing of the visibility-mobility dynamic, work on passing focuses heavily on visibility, on the ocular, defining passing as something akin to

“appearing to be something you are not” (Devitt, 2013, p. 430, emphasis added). While the ocular is a primary means through which information or cues about gender and sexuality are gathered, this approach reduces passing to a mere negotiation of prevailing modes of seeing and policing gender and sexuality, instead of an agentive (re)negotiation of society and space. In addition, it leaves aside the very motivations for entering and moving through public, potentially threatening spaces. In foregrounding the prevailing modes of policing and seeing gender and sexuality, and the respondent modes of survival queer Palestinians employ, scholars stand to miss the implication of that for queer and other marginalized peoples, engaging public space is more than just a tactical way of surviving harassment, but a way of constructing one’s identity.

More specifically, not only are people motivated to move through public space to access places of queer socialization and community building, but those movements themselves are one of many means through which queer Palestinians construct their identities as both queer and

Palestinian, identities simultaneously embodied and embedded in, and moving through, space and place.

77 These differences between Palestinian cultural and sexual life and the Western cultural milieu in which literature on queer geography and passing developed are critically important to understanding how queer Palestinians differently engage with public space. The act of passing is not only concerned with ‘appearing straight’. First, queer and straight Palestinians face restrictions on movement as Palestinians, meaning that queer Palestinians are attentive to multiple systems of policing, ethno-religious and sexual. Therefore, the need to pass is not one that separates queer and non-queer Palestinians per se, but passing (through) is a constant feature of Palestinian negotiations of public space, one that both queer and non-queer Palestinians navigate, though at times in different ways. Moreover, the mechanisms of policing ethno-religion and sexuality are not always distinct, as Ritchie explains with his metaphor of the checkpoint-as- closet. For example, Wagner (2013) describes a “double-passing” that occurs for some visibly queer Palestinians who receive the protection of the military or individual Israelis, for example by crossing the West Bank barrier to go to an Israeli pride parade without military interference.

Wagner cites a documentary on the Jerusalem Pride Parade, wherein one young Palestinian gave a testimony to that end:

In this testimony, a person, who acknowledges that as a Palestinian he is not allowed

mobility, manages to gain mobility by making visible another supposedly immobilizing

feature: being gay. The Occupation's awkward logic turns this cumulative negation into a

sort of affirmation. The checkpoint personnel cannot see a person as both gay and

Palestinian; indeed, gay lifestyle is typically associated in Israel with an image of the

liberal-democratic West (even by those who oppose gays and/or Western liberal

democracy), whereas Palestinians are stereotyped as backward and homophobic. Budi's

78 gay identification thus erases the threatening aspect of Palestinian identity. Budi's

blinding gay visibility takes over his Palestinian visibility. (p. 12)

Thus, Wagner’s notion of double-passing helps demonstrate the linked ideologies behind pinkwashing (I the “regional exceptionalism” of Israel’s LGBTQ policies) and Ritchie’s subject-hailing checkpoint, ideologies that recirculate Orientalist depictions of anachronistic

Palestinian sexual mores.

Second, public spaces are also important parts of Palestinian public life, and thus present a different set of difficulties for those queer people moving through them. Those spaces then present a different landscape for identity formation to people for whom the streets they navigate are largely irrelevant while en route to the queer-friendly spaces of the well-mapped, geographically significant gay bars. An easy example of this would be in the experience of running into someone you know. A large swatch of literature within queer geography has been premised on research done in larger, more metropolitan cities. While this could be due, in part, to the tendency of larger cities to have more queer-friendly spaces and institutions, the ramifications it has had in scholarship through the construction of a narrative of “going to the city” to lead a more open, authentic queer lifestyle are well-documented. Besides the implication that there is an “authentic” queer lifestyle that can be realized in the city, this reproduces a particular understanding of public space that does not reflect other places, notably rural environments and small towns. In many Palestinian cities and towns, even the 300,000- person large city of Haifa, moving through public space often involves running into people you know, friends, family members, or co-workers. With each person you interact with, you have to adapt a particular performance of the self, a performance that might be very different when talking to a friend who goes to hip-hop shows with you versus talking with your father’s boss.

79 Passing Through: Mobility and Visibility in Public Spaces in Haifa

Growing up with an American mother and Palestinian father in Los Angeles, I was struck early by their different associations with time. My mother would always be waiting outside our elementary school when my sister and I walked out, despite the hour or so commute she had to and from work each day. My father, who worked nearby our school, was much more frequently late, to my chagrin. When he finally explained this to me, he described it as a cultural difference.

In the village he grew up in, just a few miles outside Haifa, it was rude to be on time. The logic, he said, was that when you walked through town you would inevitably run into people you knew.

If you arrived on time somewhere, it indicated that you were rude to those people, brushing them off instead of engaging in friendly conversation. Today in Haifa, little is different. Despite the dense population, walking down city streets will likely mean you run into someone you know.

Avoiding people that you know intentionally would require a complex navigation of back streets or that you avoid the city’s main hubs, where dense crowds jostle consistently from midday shopping to the later nightlife. Even in the interspersed trips I took to Haifa over five years, I would rarely leave my apartment without meeting someone I knew or who knew my family. Once I found out a man that I had known for months who was doing construction on my street was actually an uncle of mine. This combination of density and familiarity means that

Haifa does not fit easily into literature on either metropolitan or rural geographies. The regularity of meeting friends, co-workers, or family, especially en route to queer spaces or events, serves as the basis for my thinking through modes of passing through as complimentary to modes of passing as.

The literature on passing approaches public space largely as a gauntlet of potentially unknown modes of harassment that must be tactically navigated and survived. Thus, one

80 can pass as something else through multiple interactions, and if the performance is repeatedly successful, it signals the hegemony of gender and sexual norms that one must tactically uphold in order to successfully pass. However, the Palestinian experience of passing through is, perhaps, more complicated, involving multiple, shifting performances, including multiple attempts to differentially pass as, not with the unknown, but with the well-known. To pass quickly and tactically through public spaces, ignoring people who might pose difficulty to you, has a particularly metropolitan feel to it, evoking stereotypes of a New York sidewalk, filled with the hustle and bustle of commuters trying to make it quickly to work. Depending on what neighborhood you are moving through, many queer Palestinians might need to be prepared to run into multiple people, and to perform and pass a version of themselves that will impress or appease the person they are talking to and not impede their movement, their passing through.

The approach is less tuned to avoiding any potentially harassing interaction, then to being open to and prepared for a range of interactions that you will have to engage to avoid criticism of yourself avoiding the interactions that constitute “politeness” in Palestinian public spaces. This complex process of passing through could involve everything from a friendly hello across the street to engaged conversations and depends not only on your aesthetic and other gender or sexual visual cues, but equally, if not more so, on your ability to converse on the appropriate topics and to display social traits valued by those you are talking to. These topics relate to widely held values and ideas about young Palestinians, which might include discussing educational or work-related aspirations or how your parents and other family members are doing. Thus, passing through is an intersectional endeavor that intimately involves a successful performance of Palestinian classed, gendered, and sexualized identities.

81 These tendencies to run into people you know also help clarify one aspect of the queer,

Palestinian apprehension of Western coming out practice. In an interview with an organizer with

Al-Qaws (The Rainbow), a Palestinian LGBTQ organization, they described a useful metaphor comparing the different social landscapes of the U.S. versus Palestine, and their consequent effect on modes of queer identity formation. They likened being “in the closet” to being in a physically and socially constrictive space, described as being surrounded by a circular wall.

When you come out in the U.S., they said, you ultimately smash that wall and stare out at a now open world of possibility. In Israel-Palestine, by contrast, the smashing of the wall, the act of coming out, reveals yet another wall waiting behind the first. They described that wall as a new network of gossip, micro-aggressions, and other forms of policing that affect not only you, but also those who associate with you. They described the example of one of your mother’s co- workers interrogating her about you, her newly found-out-to-be-gay son.

While the first part of the example, of an open world of possibility acquired through coming out in the U.S., is by no means an apt capture of the realities of U.S. queers who navigate extant homophobia, the second sheds light on how imbricated identity formation is with public space in Palestine. Combined with Ritchie’s (2010) metaphor of the checkpoint, it is no surprise that, as opposed to the Western logic of coming out narratives and practices, “queer Palestinians articulate a politics of social change that offers a potentially subversive alternative to the normalizing project of queer visibility” (Ritchie, 2010, p. 558). The study of queer Palestinian practices of going out is a study of identity formation absent the declarative practice of coming out and the form of state and citizen-based interpellation that attends it, but attentive to the ongoing modes of socialization that take place among queer Palestinians. Thus, coming out offers a framework for understanding, but not a monopoly on affecting, queer socialization and

82 affinity. The proceeding sections begin to lay out an alternative framework, that of going out, as attendant to Palestinian practices of queer socialization in public spaces that offer critically important modes of seclusion.

IV. Going Out, Coming Out

Going out can be the highlight of the week for young, queer Palestinians who attend hip- hop and other contemporary music shows in Haifa. While hip-hop by no means is the sole site of queer socialization in Haifa, which includes electronic dance music shows and bar spaces without musical performances taking place, the rapidly growing hip-hop scene in Haifa means that you can find a hip-hop show almost every week. Combined with the fact that hip-hop venues have a queer appeal due to their association with counter-cultural and underground socialization, hip-hop shows are regularly organized by and attractive to considerable numbers of queer

Palestinians. Going out becomes a language in and of itself, a way of communicating one’s location and authenticity in the social life of Haifa. Asking if you made it or plan to make it to a particular show is commonplace and does not necessarily mean you have a strongly held love of hip-hop, perhaps conveying a commitment to a general, venue-based “scene,” rather than to the specific artists who fill those venues. Two of the most popular venues, Kabareet and Scene Bar, along with a set of cafes on the hip, cosmopolitan Massada Street, host the majority of hip-hop shows. Thus, “Are you going to the show at Kabareet tomorrow?” is a commonly heard refrain and does not always center the performer or type of music as critical to one’s desire to go there.

This is not to dismiss of the importance of hip-hop music and performers as constitutive elements in Haifa’s queer social life, but to render visible the role of the bar environment and its attendant meanings and affects. As argued in the preceding section, the acts of passing as and passing through are important parts of the experience of going out, partnered with the

83 socialization that takes place in hip-hop shows themselves. This section therefore approaches going out as involving two contrasting moments of visibility mobility, visibility and movement to the venue and within the venue. However, these spaces are not always distinct, and popular bar venues often function as the very border between the geographic center and periphery of social life in Haifa. The forms of aesthetic cultivation for and comportment through both of these spaces, the public space of the street and the secluded public of the venue, highlight the different pressures queer Palestinians face when going out and their varying kin(a)esthetic responses.

Given the high likelihood of interacting with family, colleagues, or other acquaintances when walking to the music venues, queer Palestinians might engage in flexible forms of aesthetic cultivation to prepare for going out. Taking time to do one’s hair and makeup is commonplace for young Palestinians in Haifa. Grooming one’s beard, applying hair products and styling your hair, and picking out a clean, classy, and well-matched outfit are typical for queer and heterosexual Palestinians alike. The various aesthetics associated with hip-hop cultural practices in the U.S. are rarely seen in Palestine, normally reserved for the artists and die-hard adherents, rather than the mass of attendees at a show. The outfits you see at a hip-hop show could just as easily be seen at an EDM show or at a fancy restaurant, and it is common for young people to attend multiple shows and go to dinner with friends in a single night. This mode of aesthetic cultivation can cross physical and cultural boundaries, making it a supportive mechanism for queer Palestinians who want to go out to utilize with comfort. One interviewee remarked that his straight friends take more time to groom themselves for going out and often wore nicer and more feminine dress. Another interviewee and friend said that they get compliments from family friends who often remark that he should “meet their daughter” or ask how he is not yet married,

84 and he enjoyed remarking on the irony of the situation. His interactions with the parents of young women render visible the instability of hetero aesthetics as he passes as and passes through Haifa’s streets.

Modes of movement compliment the role of visibility in acts of going out, as being seen takes place while moving to and through certain neighborhoods en route to the hip-hop venue. Queer Palestinians employ a number of tactics to pass quickly through public spaces, without ignoring the interpellative acts of hailing that might take place from friends’ parents, co- workers, or other acquaintances that might be sitting in the large and oft-filled outdoor patios of restaurants or walking on the sidewalks in popular shopping areas. One respondent described a group approach, wherein a small group of friends will meet at one house and walk together to a show. One benefit of this is to avoid parental scrutiny before leaving the home, as her parents feel better knowing she is with a group of friends and not alone. She further described how this helps avoid two unwanted interactions in public. In the case that someone who she does not know, or who knows that she is queer, should want to harass them, being in a group helps quell that potentiality. That harassment, she remarked, might also include unwanted sexual advances from men that are less common if she is in a larger group. Similarly, knowing that she will likely run into someone she knows, being in a group gives her an excuse to say a quick hello and goodbye without being expected to stop and make small talk. As an added bonus, being in a group, she explained, helps her get excited for the upcoming show and for the sense of freedom she will feel when walking from the street into the more secluded venue. Another interviewee, the one who remarked on the propositions he receives from parents on behalf of their daughters, aptly described the connection between passing as and passing through. When in comfortable spaces, including hip-hop venues, he likes to strut and intentionally draw the attention of

85 partygoers. In the case of the outdoor public streets, he knows to walk in a typical fashion, with a quick gait and while avoiding crossing his thighs over each other as he moves. In both cases, how one (does not) pass as is affected by how one passes through.

Upon arriving to the space of the hip-hop venue, the shift in social norms immediately translates into varying practices of aesthetic cultivation and comportment. The pressure to appear as hetero while moving through heteronormative public space dissipates considerably, allowing some queer Palestinians the freedom to complete the aesthetic transformation central to going out, a transformation that helps instantiate moments of queer socialization, moments of doing sexuality through displays and readings of queer sensibilities. Bathrooms in these venues become temporary dressing rooms, places where clothing and makeup receive additional modifications. The glitter-clad men of this chapter’s opening refrain might have used the bathroom in that venue to apply their final touches, and a couple of my interviewees discussed bringing makeup with them to venues, knowing that it could bring additional scrutiny on the street, and that they might have to remove it before they left the venue. At some shows, going into the gender-neutral bathrooms meant encountering small groups of men and women who were removing articles of clothing, unbuttoning the tops of their shirts, replacing previously removed piercings, and applying glitter, eyeliner, and other makeup. In the mass of people who don similar styles of clothing, these final touches allow some Palestinians to communicate queer aesthetics to other partygoers while simultaneously evidencing the shift in gender and sexuality-based regimes of visibility.

The movements within hip-hop venues similarly evidence a shift in regimes of mobility affected by changing spatial relations. While the next section takes up specific questions of dance and sexuality in the built environment of these secluded publics, some initial

86 observations on movements as a performative embodiment of sexuality are worth mentioning.

Modalities of visibility and movement perform sexuality in ways that co-construct the spaces up hip-hop venues between partygoers. In packed venues with sometimes upwards of one hundred attendees, the more you move, the more visible you become. Attendees have the option to sit in a corner, hardly noticed, in contrast to the option of dancing or moving in ways that make one visible, taking up space in ways that can (re)construct the venue itself as the materialization of queer potential. If Ben Gurion street calls for particular gendered and sexuality-based movements, the hip-hop venue is comparatively freeing, allowing walks and sashays, leg crossings, and gesticulations that might draw unwanted ocular scrutiny and movement impeding harassment in other environments. During one hip-hop DJ set, a friend who attends many shows at the popular Kabareet and Scene bars, walked liked a model on a catwalk, crossing his thighs over each other with each step, before turning on a dime and walking the same distance back. In the midst of this movement, he turned his head to face a group of young men who were smiling and chuckling at his performance, jokingly yelling at them “Sorry straight boys, you can’t have me. I’m gay!” My group of friends and the young men he had spoken with erupted into laughter at the performance, which immediately affected the environment in ways that signaled the continued loosening of the visibility and mobility regimes that lay in wait just outside the venue entrance. The importance of publicity in these movements and visual displays is a key element in understanding going out as an identity forming practice. As per Wagner and Ritchie, mobility and visibility regimes in Israeli-Palestinian, public spaces render out, queer Palestinians subject to a range of checkpoints, from the West Bank wall to the entrance of a gay bar in Tel

Aviv, which can deny one’s Arab-ness predicated on their queerness, or deny their queerness predicated on their Arab-ness, materializing a gauntlet of obstacles highlighted in the metaphor

87 of the closet as a set of circular walls. However, if mobility and visibility are two constitutive elements of what coming out purports to offer, then the hip-hop venue is a space where queer

Palestinian partygoers have flexibility in performances that are not subject to the same ethno- religious, heteronormative, and gender normative regimes of visibility and mobility.

V. Secluded Publics

The two main sites of hip-hop in Haifa, Kabareet and Scene Bar, both feature regular hip- hop shows, often including weekly appearances by DJs and rappers, and attract arguably the densest crowds of any contemporary music venues in the city. The bars are located within a hundred meters of each other, Scene (a play on the English word Scene and the Arabic letter siin) on a street front corner and Kabareet more secluded down an alleyway off the same street. Though they cater to the same crowd of young Palestinians, the construction and aesthetic of the bars differ, with Scene, as the English name would suggest, offering a vibe more akin to a nightclub, while Kabareet looks and feels more like an underground coffeehouse turned bar.

Neither venue can be viewed easily from the outside: the windows at Scene are mostly blacked out, and Kabareet’s only windows face to an outside patio also hidden from public view. This construction is functional for queer Palestinians in that both venues are what I term secluded publics, built environments that exist at the periphery of the nightlife center of Haifa and yet whose construction offer seclusion from the regimes of visibility and mobility that are enforced publicly in the proximal downtown area. Secluded publics thus create the experience of liberation offered by being visibly and kinesthetically “out” in public, an experience both thought and felt. Queer practices of going out mobilize towards these spaces and are made visible within them. In Kabareet and Scene, a dynamic emerges between the affects of queer visibility and mobility and the affects of the built environment. It is not merely the discursive, cultural

88 associations of these venues and hip-hop music that attract and accommodate queer Palestinians, but the feel of them when filled with partygoers. This is not to say that they are not places to see and be seen, but that they function at and as the periphery of the city center and therefore offer a shift into different, non-hegemonic, though nonetheless encompassing, embodied and embedded, regimes of visibility and mobility. This section approaches the notion of secluded publics from two directions, first, the location of the venues within the city, both within and yet outside the popular nightlife areas, and second, within the venues, examining the construction of the spaces and the queer, hip-hop practices that take place within.

While the hip venues of downtown and Ben Gurion Street attract young Palestinians looking to see and be seen, those spaces constitute the material landscape in which hegemonic, ethno-religious, gendered, and sexualized regimes of visibility and mobility function. As the example of a young, straight couple going out to Ben Gurion Street to show off their newly approved relationship suggests, most gendered and sexual performances in the city center reinforce the aesthetic and kinesthetic logics of heteronormative and gender normative sociality instead of using passing as and passing through to challenge and subvert them. Nonetheless, as the previous section highlights, queer Palestinians do challenge gendered assumptions about appearance and movement through acts of passing as while passing through those nightlife centers en route to Kabareet and Scene. Though both venues are approachable from one side without going through those centers, the people filling those streets are often on their way to the more mainstream nightlife center, without plans to stop in at either venue. As a result, many people walking by take notice of the small crowds formed in front of either venue, sometimes waiting to go in or smoking a cigarette, a public viewing that forms the last moment

89 of ocular enforcement before one slips inside to a different visibility and mobility regime, a different, more secluded public.

What is curious about this particular relationship between location, constructed space, and affect, is the recurrent metaphor of the checkpoint utilized by Ritchie to describe Palestinian experiences of entrances to gay bars in Tel Aviv. Certainly Scene and Kabareet have entrances that function as a type of checkpoint. They typically have either security to check IDs or someone to check a guest list or take a cover fee. However, as both Ritchie’s and this example suggest, the experience of the checkpoint is (in)formed by the differing regimes of mobility and visibility that exist on either side of that checkpoint, not solely by the various acts of checking practiced there. The built and practiced checkpoints of Kabareet and Scene, therefore, materialize the shift in regimes of mobility and visibility, regimes that function through embodied and embedded identities. Consequently, women and men might experience the venue checkpoint differently. As venue managers look to cultivate gendered and sexualized environments (e.g. ladies night, LGBTQ night), the bouncer often must assist the manager in that endeavor, deciding on appropriate numbers of men and women (as perceived by the bouncer) for the event. For partygoers, the movement from the nightlife center to a space outside/within means a shift in regimes, an affective shift that reflects in the aforementioned movements and visual displays found within the venues. Thus, the checkpoint can be approached with apprehension, or excitement, depending on one’s relationship to the spaces on either side of the checkpoint.

As one moves into the venue, the excitement of a changing visibility and mobility regime is immediate. Indeed, much of this shift relies on the discursive meanings attached to the spaces; they are known both by their regulars and those who avoid them as counter-cultural spaces,

90 where you are said to avoid judgment for being aesthetically queer and/or Palestinian. However, one cannot separate the built environments of Kabareet and Scene from their exciting and transgressive feel. Scene is a two-tiered space, whose upper level overlooks the street level, while offering a space with tables and chairs to sit for a drink or cigarette. The street level is open as a dance floor, the bar along one side and a DJ booth opposite the entrance. Kabareet sits off a long alleyway, which you turn from into a narrow path leading to the venue’s entrance. The venue is split-level from the outside, with an entrance that takes you down about four feet to the inside, which, combined with the limestone archways throughout the venue, creates a feeling of being in a cave. Images of famous Palestinian artists and political figures and traditional

Palestinian artwork decorate much of the space and a stage adorned with a rig for lighting sits on one end. Both venues are comparatively dark inside, perfect for dancing to a DJ set or live rapper, and characteristic of most dance venues, including hip-hop and EDM. Both venues also have a contrast between the center space of the dance area, where people are easily visible, and the edges, where small walls and alcoves offer more seclusion.

Thinking about the specific places in which hip-hop and queer cultural practices overlap, namely Kabareet and Scene, as secluded publics harkens to extant literature on (queer) counterpublics that routinely focus on specific (queer) places that often have many characteristics of public space. The (lack of) barriers to entry, the forms of viewing, the modes of participation that define many public spaces carry into counterpublics, but contrast with a counterpublic’s “cultural horizon against which it marks itself off is not just a general or wider public, but a dominant one” (Warner, 2002, p. 98). That wider, dominant public has been discussed in this chapter through notions of mobility and visibility regimes that contrast with those in secluded publics. As Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner (1998) write:

91 “Queer culture constitutes itself in many ways other than through the official publics of

opinion culture and the state, or through the privatized forms normally associated with

sexuality. Queer and other insurgents have long striven, often dangerously or

scandalously, to cultivate what good folks used to call criminal intimacies...Queer culture

has learned not only how to sexualize these and other relations, but also to use them as a

context for witnessing intense and personal affect while elaborating a public world of

belonging and transformation. Making a queer world has required the development of

kinds of intimacy that bear no necessary relation to domestic space, to kinship, to the

couple form, to property, or to the nation. These intimacies do bear a necessary relation to

a counterpublic - an indefinitely accessible world conscious of its subordinate relation. (p.

558).

In the sense that Berlant and Warner theorize counterpublics, I would argue that Kabareet and

Scene qualify, and my specific theorization of secluded publics considers the sorts of intimacies and acts of performance and witnessing that have informed their and others’ scholarship on

(queer) counterpublics (See also Fraser, 1990; Muñoz, 2009). My use of the term secluded publics recognizes the publicity of these places, as with other counterpublics, but tends to the centrality of the means by which the venues are secluded from the dominant public

The constructions of these two venues, constructions central to their function as secluded publics, facilitate erotic encounters that would attract more aggressive and violent forms of policing in the mainstream nightlife areas of Haifa. Acts of policing invoke and perform the prevailing visibility and mobility regimes, regimes not only directed against non-hetero sexualities, but also used to enforce hetero-normativity between heterosexual people. Though it certainly does occur, young, straight couples do not typically engage in regular public displays of

92 affection and eroticism, even on Ben Gurion Street after receiving the familial blessing to be together. Perhaps a reflection of a larger sexual culture in which sex acts and sexuality are not publicized, either through display or quotidian conversation, this low level of visible, heterosexual, public eroticism is important to recognize when discussing how secluded publics facilitate queer eroticism. The establishment of queer cultural spaces in countries where coming out practices are normalized has not eliminated a still extant difference in levels of comfort with public eroticism between straight and queer people, highlighted by the myriad gay bars which become the main spot for straight couples to come and dance, grind, and kiss. If coming out practices are intended to gain access to less oppressive regimes of visibility and mobility, then examining acts of public eroticism, including dance, can help assess where and when those regimes have shifted.

For queer Palestinians, where practices of going out function in contrast to practices of coming out, the question becomes to what degree going out can realize a shift in regimes of visibility and mobility that facilitates public eroticism. In the case of Scene and Kabareet, my perspective as a participant observer tells me that, depending on the night and event, acts of queer eroticism might be more visible and mobile than heterosexual eroticism. Young, queer

Palestinians can take over the dance floor, while simultaneously filling the more secluded and intimate alcoves. As mentioned before, these spaces offer liberation for heterosexual couples from the normative regimes of visibility and mobility that suppress public eroticism. However, both places have a culture of seclusion that extends within and beyond the spaces themselves.

Photography of any sort in the venue is often prohibited to protect the identities and aesthetic and kinesthetic practices of venue goers. At both venues, there is also a code of not discussing what was seen and done at the event with people who were not there, and certainly not with people

93 who support the logic of heteronormative and gender normative regimes of visibility and mobility. This culture of seclusion could be perceived by outsiders as intended to protect some presumed identitarian collectivity of partygoers, but actually functions to extend an organizational ethic of relationality or collectivity to those who (have not yet) attended shows. Thus, these publics seclude straight and queer Palestinians alike, as the shift in regimes of visibility and mobility bring straight and queer Palestinians together, indicating that the function of Kabareet or Scene as affective arrangements emerges not from an essential collective of partygoers, but from the ability of that arrangement to respond to shifting relations of heteronormativity and the corresponding mobility and visibility regimes. In other words, the shift in regimes requires cooperation between and among straight and queer Palestinians to keep the experience thereby maintaining a space that challenges heteronormative kin(a)esthetics for both groups. Scene and Kabareet, therefore, gesture towards a queer geography that is distinct from a gay or lesbian geography, a geography built around practices of going out, not coming out, practices of deferral, not declaration, practices which differentially construct identity through the affectivity of aesthetic and kinesthetic performance.

Dance figures heavily in hip-hop events in ways that further stress the important role of visibility and mobility in queer eroticism. The affectivity of dance and movement has been well studied in the electronic dance music (EDM) scene (See Garcia, 2016; Collin & Godfrey,

1997; Fikentscher, 2000; Jackson 2004), but similar studies have not been conducted at length within the context of hip-hop cultures (Walter, 2007 provides one example of such work). Dance is an integral part of hip-hop practices, one of the oft-mentioned four pillars of hip-hop, turn- tabling or DJ-ing, rapping, b-boying or breakdancing, and graffiti. Each of the pillars represents a different sensory enterprise, musical, vocal, kinesthetic, and aesthetic, respectively, with the last

94 two harkening to the visibility-mobility dynamic. We might refer to a recurrence of kin(a)esthetics in EDM scholarship that highlights the imbrication of movement and visibility in dance practices, as dancers use visual cues from other people to attune their dance styles to the music, the built environment, and to the larger crowd of people. Garcia’s (2016) study of the

EDM scene explored the tactile function of music, highlighting “an important sensory–affective bridge between touch, sonic experience, and an expansive sense of connection in dancing crowds” (p. 60). Garcia’s work portrays EDM venues as “spaces of heightened tactility and embodied intimacy,” but departs from established scholarship on EDM culture, dance, and affect to “go beyond the representation of tactility in lyrics and visual imagery, turning instead to the sound of EDM itself, which foregrounds percussion, texture, grain, and other sonic elements that resonate with heightened haptic experience” (p. 60). His attention to the tactility of sound resonates with a study of queer affect in the hip-hop scene, as hip-hop lyrics have often included homophobic and sexist language, yet still are played in queer spaces where affinities develop between dancers and the music. A study of queer hip-hop practices, therefore, cannot rely solely on the lyrical content of songs to understand their appeal to queer audiences, but must address the sonic tactility of hip-hop music played in queer spaces. Perhaps this is best highlighted by the fact that some queer, Palestinian youth who attend hip-hop shows do not listen to hip-hop regularly at home, but go to the shows because of the kin(a)esthetic practices found therein.

Hip-hop event attendees come together to dance in ways that reflect a relationship between the built and sonic environments, the socio-cultural meanings attached to the event, and the tactility of sound. Humans display a relatively unique ability for beat induction, the ability to extract a beat pattern from a complex array of sounds, an ability rarely identified in other species

95 (Patel et al., 2008). By extension, humans express the ability to entrain, a term emerging from biomusicology, referring to the synchronization of internal and external beat patterns, such as that between one’s own bodily rhythms and the music being played, or between oneself, other dancers, and the music. Hagen and Bryant (2003) argue that the ability to engage beat induction and entrainment served an evolutionary purpose for humans, and, more specifically, that dance and music form a basis for human cooperation and communication. More than a biologically determined expression, however, dance practices depend on both beat induction/entrainment and particular socio-cultural meanings attached to the music. Within hip-hop venues, there are styles of dance and specific moves that are more common, such as grinding with a partner or raising one’s arms to correspond with and express approval of the music. When practiced in large, group settings, these dance moves serve as the basis for inter-subjective entrainment and, as per Hagen and Bryant, human cooperation.

Though not everyone dances in the exact same fashion, the cooperative practice of entraining with the music is affective, providing a tactile and kin(a)esthetic basis for affinities between dancers. Carla Walter’s (2007) work on hip-hop dance practices suggest that they are “a function of identity construction,” a suggestion that offers space for theorizing the queer potential of dance in hip-hop venues. But since dance moves do not speak or make declarations, in a traditional sense, their role in identity construction in group settings depends on the ability for dancers to affect and be affected, not only by others in the room, but also by the built and sonic environments. The example of the young man blowing glitter from a tube in the opening of this chapter highlights how the mere perception of another person dancing can produce queer affinity absent any discursive cues from lyrics, conversations, or intimate, tactile dancing. When touching, the practice of grinding between two or more dancers is another example of the

96 relationship between the socio-cultural meanings attached to particular musical genres, the inter- subjective practice of dance as beat induction and entrainment, and the embodied, kin(a)esthetic performance of identity and eroticism. In conducting research at hip-hop shows in Kabareet and

Scene, in contrast to other spaces in Haifa and across Israel-Palestine, the styles of dance one sees often correspond with the degree of seclusion of the events, with grinding appearing more in secluded publics, and less in spaces subject to prevailing mobility-visibility regimes. Thus, hip- hop partygoers utilize dance practices to co-construct hip-hop publics in ways that queer hegemonic, hetero- and gender-normative mobility-visibility regimes.

VI. Conclusion

The intersections of the queer and hip-hop scenes in Haifa are not surprising to those who frequent them. They reflect a growth of hybrid spaces; hybrid in not only the multitude of bodies they seek to accommodate, but also hybrid in the events they host that draw from different cultural practices. One could do a similar project on the EDM scene in Haifa and perhaps draw similar conclusions about the intersections of queer and EDM cultural practices. What merits attention is not some pre-supposed, essential ability for hip-hop to draw marginalized populations into performances, but the role of space and place, movement and visibility in differential, queer approaches to going out to hip-hop performances that take place in secluded publics. Theorizing going out and secluded publics in relation to movement and visibility regimes highlights the divergent and convergent operations of Israeli settler colonialism and Palestinian homophobia, dispelling the notion that either one solely informs queer

Palestinian experiences of the city. While the hip-hop scene in Haifa cannot serve as a representation of other places in Israel-Palestine, including in terms of the specific gendered and sexual politics of the city’s hip-hop scene, it still offers some suggestions for thinking about the

97 relationship of space and identity formation that reverberate across other hip-hop scenes I researched in Israel-Palestine. The metaphor of the checkpoint, the role of space and proximity in hip-hop practices, and the relationship of dance to eroticism, emerge again in proceeding discussions of Jerusalem, Ramallah, and the digital networks linking the Palestinian hip-hop scene to other places around the globe.

The checkpoint appears across literature on Palestinian political geography, both as a mechanism for hailing various subjects and as a physical mechanism built into mobility and visibility regimes. Wagner’s (2013) discussion of queer, Palestinian experiences of Israeli military checkpoints, and Ritchie’s (2010) description of the checkpoint as more than a place of inspection, but “as a ubiquitous subjective process wherein citizens and noncitizens alike check themselves” (p. 557), gesture towards the problematic role checkpoints play in the daily regulation of mobility and visibility of Palestinians. However, less explored is the ways in which

Palestinians employ checkpoints of their own and why, an exploration discussion of the function of checkpoints in protecting free or safe spaces. While Ritchie describes the checkpoint as a

“ubiquitous subjective process” (p. 557), the preceding discussion of going out and secluded publics suggests an additional, complimentary description of the checkpoint as a spatio-affective process, one that materializes shifts in mobility and visibility regimes, an affecting process that can alter relations of embodiment and embededness, allowing feelings of connection, closeness, and eroticism. These complimentary approaches to the checkpoint, as a “ubiquitous subjective process” and a “spatio-affective process,” reflect scholarship on affective arrangement as a

“material-discursive formation” (Slaby et al., 2019,p. 7) and reappear throughout my discussions of hip-hop spaces in Ramallah and Jerusalem, as different checkpoints therein function as either regulatory mechanisms of Israel (including along the West Bank barrier

98 separating the two cities) or a mechanisms deployed by Palestinians to claim and protect hip-hop spaces.

Though processes of transnational cultural exchange, including with the music sharing and social media platforms discussed the following chapters, the role of the venue as the main site of hip-hop socialization is certainly changing, but its significance as a physical place remains in the hip-hop scene in Haifa, especially as it brings audiences into close proximity with each other and with the artist, be they a DJ, rapper, or group. Proximities are one trigger for affecting and being affected, often uniquely attended to in the ability for one researcher to view multiple parties at once involved in an affective arrangement, standing next to each other or perhaps dancing. While the proximity of individuals in a hip-hop venue lends itself to researching affective relationality, it is not a prerequisite for the analysis of affective arrangements. While the concept refers to “situated, heterogeneous, ensembles of humans and non-humans, materials, things, artifacts, spaces, discourses, behaviors, and expressions” (Slaby et al., 2019, p. 3, emphasis added), that situatedness is not predicated on material proximity, despite the development of the concept largely through studies of bound physical places. This chapter and the chapters on Ramallah and Jerusalem indicate proximity is one element in how these

“ensembles of humans and non-humans” relate. However, as the chapter on Ramallah will discuss, the digital world complicates approaches to proximity, or affective relationality, predicated on material closeness or mutual embededness, encouraging us to think about how felt and described commitments to the hip-hop scene or to Palestine mediate across geographic or spatial discontinuities.

The role that dance plays in affecting queer eroticism specifically, and identity formation more broadly, indicates the importance of mobility and visibility to expressing one’s identity.

99 Dancing in group settings is important as a form of kin(a)esthetics that might allow one to communicate and feel affinity without the use of language. Moreover, the use of dance for affecting queer eroticism in secluded publics can be tactical, sometimes masked by the larger crowd or its appearance as a social, yet not erotic, practice. However, it is that same obfuscation that can make dance so threatening in secluded publics. Abbas and Van Heur’s (2014) analysis of women’s public spaces in Nablus demonstrates how the physical organization of spaces and the audiences therein influence women’s spatial opportunities, suggesting that a women’s mobility (for example, jogging in Nablus) might be limited by who is able to view her in a public space (p. 1221). Abbas and Van Heur describe one trend in their research, describing how:

Most of the interviewees shared similar desires regarding the existence of semi-public spaces

in order to fully avoid public spaces in which they would be subjected to the observation and

surveillance of others. Instead of explicitly resisting these social expectations, our

interviewees largely internalized these constraints and suggested the need for more semi-

public spaces such as sport spaces, female recreational spaces, and neighborhood community

spaces. (1220)

Abbas and Van Heur suggest that spatial planning enterprises utilize ground-up approaches that consider women’s experiences of public spaces. As discussed in the proceeding chapter on

Ramallah, establishing free spaces, including secluded publics, as safe spaces (particularly for women-identified concertgoers), is a feminist undertaking that operates parallel to the ongoing drive among female artists to garner an “authentic” place in hip-hop. Rather than internalizing social constraints, however, women’s participation in spatial planning has been vital both for female artists looking to establish credibility within the scene and for female fans hoping to build safe spaces.

100 CHAPTER 2:

Hip-Hop Ramallah: Space-making Enterprises, Glocalization, and Feminism

I. Introduction

Ramallah might be one of the first cities mentioned when talking with someone about

Palestinian hip-hop. The city of roughly sixty thousand residents (two-hundred thousand in the greater municipal area) boasts one of the largest hip-hop communities in Palestine and has been a major fixture in the Palestinian hip-hop scene since its beginnings, producing individual artists and collectives since the early 2000s. Ramallah is located in the West Bank, twenty kilometers north of Jerusalem, separated by the barrier wall. Between the two cities is the heavily frequented Qalandiya checkpoint, where thousands of Palestinians cross daily to work in

Jerusalem, a checkpoint known for hours-long lines and routine abuses of Palestinian commuters

(Lieber & Tress, 2016). Ramallah has been the site of multiple clashes between Israeli military and police forces and Palestinian residents in addition to a handful of larger, coordinated military incursions into the West Bank, including from 2002 until 2004 when Yasser Arafat was held under siege in his Palestinian Authority government compound. Ramallah remains the seat of the

Palestinian Authority, with President Abbas and the Fatah party operating from Al-Muqata’a, the presidential compound adjacent downtown Ramallah. In distinction to Jerusalem and Haifa, the hip-hop scene in Ramallah is heavily influenced by the simultaneous operations of the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority, despite Ramallah being in the Oslo-designated “Area

A,” intended for sole administration by the Palestinian Authority. This political context affects not only what hip-hop artists can say, but also who can practice hip-hop, where, and how. As I demonstrate in this chapter, participants in the Ramallah hip-hop scene must navigate the fissures

101 and consistencies between Israeli and Palestinian politics of public space, flexibly and differentially creating or co-opting spaces for hip-hop.

In addition to its important geo-political location and role in Israel-Palestine, Ramallah is noted for its diverse and liberal social and cultural life (Luongo, 2010). The downtown area and adjacent neighborhoods are spotted with cafes, bars, and performance venues. Some of the most decadent hotels in Palestine can be found in Ramallah alongside restaurants that cater cuisine from myriad countries. Government driven economic development in the West Bank has been focused disproportionately in Ramallah, contributing to the growth of a population with more expendable income that can be channeled into enjoying the nightlife. The political role of

Ramallah has also contributed to the diversification of transnational cultural practices therein as the city became the diplomatic home of dozens of countries and a site for investment by non- profit and non-governmental organizations interested in working within Palestine (Cooke, 2005;

Mukerji, 2004). Those organizations might be dominated by service groups, like the

International Red Crescent, but also include cultural organizations that affect the direction and force of the Ramallah hip-hop scene. As I will discuss, the role of these organizations in funding and organizing hip-hop events has contributed to the transnational reach of Palestinian hip-hop.

In this chapter, I pay particular attention to a complex relationship cultivated between Ramallah and Berlin by organizers, artists, and fans of the overlapping hip-hop and electronic dance music scenes.

The cultural reputation of Ramallah is not, however, due solely to the operation of transnational cultural, economic, and political organizations in the city or the hybridization of

Palestinian and foreign cultural practices, but to its own history as a site for progressive, identity- based cultural organizing. Often touted as the hub of feminist organizing in the West

102 Bank, Ramallah has long been home to multiple women’s cultural organizations, including the national offices of UNESCO’s expansive programming for women and girls in Palestine. Public life in Ramallah, especially in the downtown areas near Al Manara Square, has multiple women’s social spaces, including the cafes Jasmine and Ladies. Given the strong relationship between prevailing gender norms and utilizations of public space, these venues enact a feminist politics of public space, insisting against the problematic enforcement of men’s only spaces like hookah lounges while recognizing the need for recuperative women’s spaces. Public celebrations, including hip-hop events, can take on particular importance as places where gendered spatial norms are enforced or challenged. Dancing, for example, is often done in gender segregated groups, though in the same room or on the same dance floor (Abou Jalal,

2017). These practices often rely on and reiterate tropes about women’s sexuality and respectability as in need of protection, often for the purpose of maintaining family honor. Thus, women’s uses of public spaces can enact critiques of those tropes. While Ramallah is a good city for researching how women participate in the Palestinian hip-hop scene, it is important to note that it is not representative of the West Bank more broadly. Gendered norms pertaining to public space vary by kilometer within Ramallah, let alone between cities, and thus there is no set of gender norms that ubiquitously affect all public spaces in the city. Many people have drawn criticism to the disproportionate economic investment and political infrastructure that Ramallah receives (Abunimah, 2014, p. 84-87), both of which have helped bolster attempts to advance a feminist politics of public space. I am invested in this political and economic criticism, but cautious of how it runs alongside a larger cultural criticism of Ramallah as a regional exception, distinct from an otherwise cohesive Palestinian culture and attendant gender norms. I disagree with the implication that there is cultural or political cohesion between the rest of the West Bank.

103 That assumption, one which renders Ramallah as somehow outside/within Palestine, carries the potential towards pathologizing Palestinian gender norms as cohesive and distinct from the (read transnational, global, Western) gender norms of Ramallah and erasing the vast and dispersed feminist and queer work that is taking place across Palestine. In contrast, this chapter tends to the gendered, multi-scalar geographies, both political and cultural, of Ramallah, ones that reach to other cities in the West Bank, in Israel, and around the globe.

The hip-hop scene in Ramallah has been active since the early years of Palestinian hip- hop, producing early collectives like Ramallah Underground, individual rappers like Stormtrap and Boikutt, and producers like Al-Nather. Today, decades of hip-hop in the city have influenced Ramallah’s supportive, inter-generational approach to hip-hop. Newer artists are able to consistently cite the early Palestinian rappers who inspired them in Ramallah, and older artists celebrate the growth of a new generation of Ramallah-based artists. The older generation of artists, largely born before 1990, were sampling U.S.-based hip-hop, well developed by the early 2000s, and utilizing makeshift technologies, like computer mics and hand-held tape recorders, but the newer generation likely grew up with Palestinian hip-hop and with access to cheaper and more user-friendly, digital audio production technology. Despite the different resources available to the older and newer artists, the different generations of hip-hop artists in

Ramallah have deep, inter-generational ties and relationships. Older artists mentor newer ones, teaching them how to use different technology, produce beats and tracking, develop and edit lyrics, and work on delivery. For example, longtime Ramallah-based producer and rapper Al-

Nather, who has worked with acts in the city and across the Levant since the early 2000s, has become a mentor, producer, and member of newer hip-hop acts in the city. Within Ramallah, he has mentored newer rappers like Haykal, co-founded the hip-hop crew Saleb Wahed, formed the

104 Palestinian record label BLTNM (pronounced Platinum) with artists Shabjdeed and Shabmouri, and through it released multiple albums, some of which he collaborates on as a rapper (Tapponi,

2019). Finally, live shows also highlight the inter-generational relationships as older artists often feature their mentees as opening acts, perhaps the main way in which newer artists are able to get bookings and a mechanism that female artists have used to make entries into the scene.

The Ramallah scene is dispersed, with some regular artists and many audience members living outside of the city in nearby parts of the West Bank. The scene in Ramallah is, arguably, one of the biggest in Palestine, attracting artists from across the country and world to perform there. Just a few kilometers away, Palestinians in Jerusalem are also producing a large and attractive hip-hop scene, and for those who are able to travel, it is not uncommon for Jerusalem artists to perform in Ramallah. Hip-hop music production often takes place in small home studios, and performances are dotted across venues predominantly near or in the downtown area of the city. While no venue only features hip-hop, bars like Berlin and Garage, clubs like Radio, and performance centers like the Khalil Sakhakini Center, are known as more hip-hop friendly than the more mainstream nightlife spots. City and municipality-sponsored events occasionally feature hip-hop artists performing in outdoor, public areas like city squares or parks. Another defining spatial dimension of Ramallah’s scene is the popularity of house parties (Ganim, 2015), often hosted by hip-hop artists, promoters, or fans who live on their own, rather than with family.

House parties might feature local rappers alongside EDM DJs and other artists.

This chapter unfolds as a cultural geography of Ramallah’s hip-hop scene, grounded in interviews with artists and event organizers and participatory experience attending hip-hop shows and recording sessions in the city. Central to the chapter is a focus on space-making practices that hip-hop adherents engage, including the co-optation of extant cultural spaces and

105 the creation of new ones. While space-making is often positioned as a pre-condition for hip-hop practice, I argue that space-making is a hip-hop practice that co-constitutes producers and consumers of hip-hop in relation to each other while elaborating an aspirational geography of hip-hop. Space-making enterprises are social practices that reflect both a practical need for more hip-hop spaces and a desire to connect Ramallah’s hip-hop scene to new places. Thus, this chapter highlights how pragmatic and aspirational approaches to space-making can coexist in ways that highlight continued salience of localized cultural politics alongside the globalization of hip-hop practices, what we might describe as the glocalization of Ramallah hip-hop. The first section in this chapter details the broadly expressed need for spaces in Ramallah, identifying who participates in space-making enterprises, and how those enterprises reflect the simultaneous glocalization of hip-hop and of Palestine. The concept of glocalization, as stated by

Herbert and Rykowski (2018), “enables recognition of how local values function within what has rapidly become a global process of data exchange that encompasses daily life. This is important when taking into account that the use of local musical traditions can serve as a vehicle of global strategies for promoting certain nationalities” (p. xx). The section begins by outlining some of the local political constraints on making and using public spaces in Ramallah, constraints which local artists and event organizers must tactically navigate. The section highlights two transnational dimensions of the Ramallah hip-hop scene’s response to those constrictions, the work of the non-profit cultural organization Enter the Void and the recent hosting of a Boiler

Room show in Ramallah. Finally, I examine in more detail the hip-hop circuit between Ramallah and Berlin to think through glocalization in relation to Palestinian diasporic identity formation.

The second section tends to the ways in which gender mediates experiences of hip-hop spaces by looking at how female artists and fans have approached space-making in notably feminist

106 ways. Hip-hop spaces, and music spaces more broadly, have gendered practices that are not welcoming or accommodating in many instances. Ideologies about rappers or hip-hop fans being male, lyrics that demean gender and sexual minorities, and instances of sexual harassment at shows are common examples, ones that have collectively coded and enforced hip-hop as a hetero-masculine scene. In contrast, female DJs, rappers, and fans in Palestine have made inroads combatting that culture, inroads which commonly manifest through space-making enterprises. This section looks at how hip-hop adherents in Ramallah are employing a feminist approach to space-making, one that further reflects the glocalization of Ramallah’s hip-hop scene. The concluding section takes the insights of the preceding two and uses them to think through glocalization as a concept that can further apply to contemporary, intersectional studies of identity-formation in Palestine.

II. Space-Making Enterprises and Music Glocalization

The Need for (Hip-Hop) Space

The need for space is one of the biggest constraints that artists cite in interviews when discussing what they would like to see change in the Palestinian hip-hop scene. In Ramallah, it is no different, with artists and listeners alike attesting to the need for more hip-hop spaces, studios, venues, and collaborative spaces. While one might categorize these as being spaces of production on one hand, or consumption on the other, hip-hop spaces expose the intractability of productive and consumptive practices. While the studio is a place where tracks are produced, that process is a social one, often involving anyone who is hanging out in the studio as artists and their companions listen to, discuss, and collectively decide on edits to the music. In performance spaces, DJs and rappers do not simply play pre-recorded tracks, they listen to and watch their

107 audiences in order to take cues on how to adjust anything from volume to body language during a performance. Rather than separating production spaces from consumption spaces, this chapter frames hip-hop spaces as primarily concerned with socialization. This framing, meant to reflect the complex, shifting array of peoples and practices that simultaneously produce and consume hip-hop, allows us to approach the artist and listener as co-constituted in relation to each other and to particular spaces. Any shift in the artist, listener, or space can change how hip-hop can affect people and mediate social practices and identity formation. While hip-hop as cultural practice does not always require a physical place, hip-hop adherents consistently cite the comparative lack of hip-hop space in Ramallah as a deterrent to the growing scene and its ability to attract popular support.

In multiple interviews, rappers and DJs mentioned the bars and other venues they associate with the Ramallah hip-hop scene, Radio, Berlin, and Garage frequently among others, but noted how there are still few venues that regularly host hip-hop or EDM shows, and none devoted solely to the scene, despite the lively social nightlife in the city. In one interview with

MC Makimakkuk, I asked if there are enough hip-hop spaces in Ramallah. She described such a lack accordingly: “No there is not enough at all. I think we need different kinds of spaces also. It is not only restaurants or pubs that you need. You need cultural centers, you need more theaters, you need clubs…So yeah, you need a lot more spaces. The desire is definitely there, but you don’t have enough resources.” Other producers and rappers cited a lack of studio spaces that can produce hip-hop. On one hand, a general lack of high-end and community-accessible studios forces artists to build home studios. On the other, the few high-end studios available are either price-exclusive or do not have staff who are used to working with hip-hop music. Certainly, home studios can still produce fantastic music, but when integrating analog sources, whether it

108 be live drums, wind, or acoustic instruments, or, perhaps more importantly, vocals, well- constructed studio buildings and sound booths can prove to be indispensable.

The lack of hip-hop space in Ramallah is a product of many influences. Certainly, broad- based apprehension of Western cultural practices and a desire to support and sustain Palestinian cultural traditions plays a part. In comparison to the few hip-hop friendly venues in the city, there are ample cultural spaces that support traditional Palestinian dance and music education, as well as government and private monies available to support such endeavors. Finances play another huge role, as the Palestinian hip-hop industry is not particularly lucrative for artists, producers, or venues. The vast majority of even the most popular Palestinian rappers get their income from another profession; local and international record labels rarely pick up Palestinian hip-hop artists, seeing little possibility for profit and, thus, forcing many artists to pay to self-produce; and, with a still growing, primarily young fan base, major venues see little opportunity for profit in hosting hip-hop events. With the exception of a half-dozen or so large, annual events, hip-hop shows in

Ramallah are typically limited to free or low cover shows at smaller venues and often contain artists from other genres, notably EDM DJs, who appear at length in this chapter.

The Political Landscape of Hip-Hop Spaces

Beyond the cultural and financial limitations to opening and supporting hip-hop spaces, political constraints on public space severely limit organizer’s ability to host shows. While these constraints can and do target myriad types of public events, hip-hop events draw unique scrutiny as places where groups of young people gather, often in ways that prefigure political alliances directed against both the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority. With local,

Palestinian police forces throughout the city and sporadic, targeted incursions by Israeli military, many public events, not just hip-hop shows, develop in a precarious state, subject to cancellation

109 at any moment leading up to or during the event. Throughout Ramallah, the processes through which government operatives curtail the use of public space often reveals the important and recognized role that cultural practices play in political activism, whether it be directed at Israeli or Palestinian institutions and individuals. For the Palestinian Authority, under the leadership of the Fatah Party, Ramallah seems to play a particularly important, public role. With the government headquarters located near the city-center, protests and other public demonstrations in

Ramallah take on significant symbolic meaning as they unfold within the very presence of the key physical manifestation of PA government power. The Fatah party has sought to unite

Palestinians under their banner, not just those in Gaza, but those in the West Bank who would criticize the party. However, rampant criticism of the PA as financially and morally corrupt has persisted, especially after the 2006 Gaza elections and subsequent deepening of rifts between

Fatah and Hamas, or more broadly between the West Bank and Gaza governments (Giovannetti,

2019). As Fatah brands itself as the party of progress and modernity, the need for (the appearance of) complicity and support from its populace, especially in Ramallah, takes on particular importance, and public events directed against the PA or its policies become easy objects for the police and media to seize on.

For example, in 2016, over ten thousand protesters took to the streets in Ramallah as part of a movement for higher teaching wages (Wiles, 2016). At the event, protesters were met with considerable government suppression, with two occurrences highlighting the overlapping processes of curtailing free speech and curtailing free assembly. First, protesters succeeded in marching past local government offices, intending to draw attention to their concerns directly in front of the recognizable government buildings. The local police, under direction from the PA, attempted to stop the protesters from marching past government buildings, but were unable to do

110 so. Protesters who had arrived the night before to avoid temporary checkpoints at the city’s entrances, combined with local residents who showed up, far outnumbered the police forces.

Second, the event became a rallying point for critics of PA corruption, arguing that the lack of financial support for teachers exists within the context of a corrupt government and not due just to an intractable economic crisis resulting from the colonization of Palestine. One teacher at the protest mentioned how Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah’s recently stated, “wait until we find oil in Ramallah, and then we’ll pay gratuities to the teachers”, but quickly noted how “we are not in Saudi Arabia and there is no oil here” (Ziv, 2016). During the march, protesters passed by the

Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) offices where Palestinian Member of Parliament (MP)

Najat Abu Bakr was staying. Abu Bakr had stated her support of the strike and threatened to expose corruption in the PA. Due to her public comments alleging corruption, Abu Bakr had to remain in the PLC offices to avoid arrest. These dual occurrences, the suppression of public assemblies and the suppression of free, dissenting speech, mirror dual prongs in an ongoing campaign by the Palestinian Authority to limit physical and ideological dissent among

Palestinians living in the West Bank.

While Israeli media coverage often overlooks Palestinian protests against the PA on domestic issues like education funding, there is no attention lost when it comes to physical and discursive dissent against the continued colonization of the West Bank. Not surprisingly, the two elements of physical and discursive suppression mirror in the response by the Israeli government to public protest in Ramallah. The proximity of Ramallah to Jerusalem does nothing to ease

Israeli government scrutiny of the political happenings in the city, and despite the separation wall between Ramallah and Jerusalem, Israeli forces often enter the city (Magid, 2019). Much as with the exertions of force by the Palestinian Authority, the Israeli government restricts public space

111 in ways that implicitly recognize the power of cultural practices to shift political relations and

“common sense” political ideologies. Entities that might be quickly described as cultural institutions or culture producers face physical and discursive suppression. In 2012 and again in

2016, Israeli forces, in coordination with the Ministry of Public Security, shut down Palestinian television stations operating out of Ramallah. Termed “pirate TV” by the media, the stations, including Al-Watan TV, Jerusalem Educational TV, and Musawa TV (formerly Palestine 48

TV), all offered general programming, but also regularly featured coverage of Palestinian protests directed towards Israeli policies (Kubovich & Khoury, 2016). While these television stations, and other local Palestinian television content providers, operated partially or completely over digital channels, Israeli forces successfully directed the raids at the physical places of those channels.

Music events can be affected by such closures at a moment’s notice too, targeted variously by Israeli or Palestinian-implemented restrictions. In one interview with Thomas

Scheele, a cultural organizer with Enter the Void, a project discussed at length later, he evidenced the punitive and largely reactive nature of such restrictions, describing one incidence at the popular Octoberfest in the nearby village of Taybeh, home to a well-known brewery. The festival is also a popular annual stop for some of the biggest names in Palestinian hip-hop, including DAM, and local artists. As Thomas described to me, “It [the restriction on music shows] is also important for the venues, because, you know, there was this one situation where there was Octoberfest in Taybeh, and they had a big fight, I think with knives. It was band shows, rock and music. So here in Ramallah, they forbade events with dance music for a couple of weeks, maybe six weeks or so…even though they are separate scenes, they still affect one another.” Over fifteen miles away, separated by multiple towns, and happening during rock

112 shows, the event in Taybeh nonetheless led to restrictions on any youth music events in

Ramallah for over a month. MC Makimakkuk similarly described to me how, “Like we had a show, had a party, at Radio. Julmud, Muqataa, and I, and Haykal, were supposed to play DJ sets, last weekend, and it got cancelled, because the police didn’t give permission for the party. And a couple weeks back, we had a friend from Berlin, he is a hip-hop DJ, he is Japanese. His main show was supposed to be in Ramallah, and his party got cancelled. But we still took him around, showed him around, had jam sessions together.”

The precarious nature of hip-hop events in terms of the potential closures of public spaces arguably reflects political and cultural norms that similarly affect the lyrical content on

Ramallah’s hip-hop music. Though lyrical analysis is not at the center of this project, it was notable that multiple artists I interviewed mentioned their need to code lyrics in their music. To speak critically of the Palestinian Authority might be more dangerous than doing so about the

Israeli government. In one interview, an anonymous local artist described this trend in Ramallah as compared with other places, notably Israeli cities, where Palestinian artists perform.

I don’t know if it’s understandable this much to everybody who listens to this kind of

music because a lot of the lyrics are coded. It’s not clear. It’s not direct. It’s not easy.

This is what I think is different maybe between the hip-hop in Ramallah and DAM, for

example. They are straightforward, they have their message, they are straightforward.

Well the hip-hop scene here is a bit, is much more poetic. That is for sure. It has so many

images. So many like coded things…And it talks about taboos. It brings a lot of taboos. It

talks about sex. It talks about religion. It talks about politics, you know, so it breaks all of

these taboos, but then it’s coded. Because you cannot say like everything you want to

say…Like when I am talking about corruption in one of my tracks, I wouldn’t

113 say mas’ul [accountable], I would say mashghul [busy]. You know? Because I don’t

want, because immediately it would connect to Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas], or to a

minister, or whatever, and then you will get grabbed by that. And I don’t wanna be

grabbed just yet. I want to bring more my message and my music more to the people,

until I am ready to have a confrontation and be one hundred percent sure how to defend

what I am saying. Anything you say on Facebook, you can be arrested by the PA or Israel

so you need to be careful, you know? You need to be smart, and I think that’s why

actually like the coded hip-hop, the coded lyrics, came out in Ramallah. It’s because of

how much you have many places that can attack you for what you say…You’re under

their nose. When you want to criticize, you need to do so in a way that does not get you

in so much trouble, but still your message gets heard. And there is room for interpretation

because it is more artistic those lyrics, not direct. It is like everyone can connect it to their

lives in their own way and understand what they want. There are lots of sentences that

have double or triple meanings.

Given the small geographic area of Israel-Palestine, it is worth noting how local restrictions on movement and speech in Ramallah are inextricable from larger geographies of (im)mobility that both connect and separate different groups of Palestinians. As hip-hop adherents in Ramallah begin to build connections with other local hip-hop scenes, especially in Haifa and Jaffa, the separation wall proves a particularly frequent roadblock to their efforts. On frequent occasions, artists travelling from Ramallah to cities in Israel are denied temporary travel passes. On other occasions, international artists coming to Ramallah to perform are intimidated or denied by the

Israeli government. While Palestinian artists and fans who hold Israeli citizenship have an easier time travelling to Ramallah, the frequent and often unannounced closure of checkpoints,

114 particularly the Qalandiya crossing, by Israel can end a hip-hop show, even mere hours before it begins. In December 2018, Israeli military incursions into and occupation of large parts of

Ramallah effectively closed the Qalandiya crossing for days. During that month, Acid Arab, a

Paris-based electronic music group with Middle Eastern influences intended to tour in Israel-

Palestine. Organized in part by the Haifa-based Jazar Crew, the tour included stops in Haifa and

Jaffa, with another stop planned in Ramallah. Hours before the show was set to begin, Facebook posts from both Jazar Crew and Acid Arab announced the cancellation of the show. Jazar Crew posted:

For all our friends in Ramallah - our apologies to announce that Acid Arab's show tonight

is cancelled due to the crimes of the occupation and its NOW encirclement on Ramallah

city.

Power to the people, power to the people, power to the people!!

While Acid Arab posted:

Due to local military events there was no choice but to cancel our party in ramallah. we

are very close to ramallah right now and feel sorry for those who wanted to come.

hopefully we will make it another time.

Additional posts from artists in the hip-hop community attested to the frustration felt by the organizers and fans. As their post implied, the members of Acid Arab were unable to cross into the West Bank, along with thousands of others who would daily cross at Qalandiya.

Space-Making and Glocalization: Enter the Void and the Boiler Room Show

It is against this political landscape that hip-hop adherents in Ramallah craft their spatial endeavors, navigating the overlap and fissures of Israeli and Palestinian government-led efforts to regulate the use of public spaces. The goals of Israeli army and PA-led restrictions on space-

115 making enterprises in Ramallah are arguably different, colonization in contrast with attempts at forced political unification, but the mechanisms and effects of those are eerily similar as experienced by/in the hip-hop scene. For hip-hop space-makers and organizers, the ongoing feeling of precarity persists, unsure of why and from where the next restriction or eviction will come. Combined with the aforementioned apprehension of imported cultural practices (i.e. hip- hop) and the disproportionate government and organizational funding given to older, more established Palestinian art forms, hip-hop space-makers must engage in creative and sometimes legally questionable endeavors to establish and maintain hip-hop spaces. The funding of foreign

NGOs and cultural organizations has provided one avenue for hip-hop organizers to navigate that landscape, addressing both the question of funding and the apprehension towards new cultural forms. Foreign, often European-based cultural organizations are comparably familiar with hip- hop as a progressive and youth-attracting cultural form and interested in funding efforts to produce and promote Palestinian hip-hop music and events. What remains is the prevailing politics of public space detailed above, a multi-sited effort not to restrict public space in ways that identify opposing pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian individuals and organizations, but a complex, shifting, and unclear set of laws that differentiate between good and bad subjects of either the PA, Israel, or both. Foreign cultural organizations have proven adept at navigating that landscape, but not without considerable roadblocks, both literal and metaphorical.

Enter the Void: Appropriating Urban Spaces to Underground Youth Culture (ETV) is perhaps the most recognizable such project, working in Ramallah since 2017. Enter the Void is a project based in Berlin that began as a city-based network of cultural organizers including those in Budapest, Amsterdam, and Riga, with Ramallah added later as a fifth city and the first outside

116 Europe. The German Kulturersatz organization began planning ETV in 2011, describing the project thusly:

The project aims to set up a dialogue between young people and decision makers, flanked

by multi-disciplinary experts, to facilitate the access of young actors of music-related

underground culture to urban space. The project enables the exchange of international

examples of good practice and aims to spark concrete action in the form of local satellite

projects, informing ETV as content laboratories (Enter the Void).

Besides organizing workshops, conferences, and music shows in 16 different countries, Enter the

Void provides resources and consulting to actors who wish to promote free, undetermined, or low-threshold approaches to reclaiming and democratizing control of urban, youth spaces. The various participants in ETV’s organizational work are largely artists, producers, and venue owners that populate and support the overlapping EDM and hip-hop scenes. While ETV is not explicitly focused on EDM and hip-hop, their programs have focused on appropriating urban spaces specifically for youth musical cultures, of which hip-hop and EDM are two of the largest.

In Ramallah, ETV was spearheaded by Thomas Scheele, a Berliner who had moved temporarily to Ramallah to oversee the project. As a network, ETV did not have formal, permanent offices in

Ramallah, but functioned through the various shows and workshops the project held in the city and the resources generated through those events.

The 52-page long ETV ZINE, published once in 2017, was “the project's final publication, summarizing its main themes, actions, learnings, as well as its radical playfulness to inspire both young citizens and decision makers to create policy frameworks for more self- organized, participatory, culturally diverse and fun cities” (Enter the Zine). The articles throughout detail the work of ETV over the past year, but largely unfold as a series of how-to

117 guides directed towards organizers and participants who seek to establish and promote spaces for youth culture. Describing itself as a “compendium of experiences of cybernetics specialists, a night mayor, allies of the oppressed, urban placemakers, and citizen activists which build the cities of their future” (p. 2), some of the articles inside include “The Role of Music in Mobilizing

Protests in Hungary”, “Rave Awareness - Party as a Safe Space”, and “How to Make Your Own

Open Air Party”. While the ZINE itself is focused on answering the “how-to questions” about event organization and spatial appropriation, actual organizers across ETV’s network provided those answers for the publication. Thus, the zine can be read simultaneously as an elaboration of

ETV’s aspirational framework and as a reflection on the practicalities of establishing (safe) spaces for urban, youth culture. While the next section focuses intently on the question of “free spaces,” “safe spaces,” and feminist interventions in the Ramallah hip-hop scene, I return here to the question of Ramallah’s political landscape and how ETV has been successful in creating or promoting spaces for hip-hop in Ramallah. Not only does ETV’s framework allow organizers to navigate the complex geo-political relations within Ramallah by working with and around policymakers, it does so in part by linking Ramallah with other cities around the globe (in particular, Berlin) and raising a shared consciousness pertaining to urban space, youth culture, and identity.

In the opening pages of the 2017 zine, one author makes a call to the audience, hailing those who might seek to alter the cultural landscape of their communities by offering a customizable letter that readers might send to those who mediate the use of public space in their city, including “a board member of an NGO”, “city officials of your municipality”, or even “the president of your country” (p. 5). The letter opens with the following:

118 As a local citizen, I am writing you to address an issue. I insist of immediate action. The

future of our local, creative, and cultural community is in strong demand of new spaces in

order to maintain its responsibility in our society. I would like to raise awareness that in

times of increasing urbanization there is a decline of low threshold spaces for young

creative to organize themselves, engage in their urban environment, and increase their

social, cultural, and political participation in the city. Without undetermined spaces we

are withholding citizens the opportunity to unfold their full potential. (p. 4-5)

Following the opening letter, the zine has a “Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)” section that expands on the conditions against which youth, musical space-making enterprises work, conditions linked to the class, race, ethnic, and gender-based politics of urbanization. Reflecting on Berlin’s techno scene in the 90s as one that did not “seek a dialogue with policymakers” (p.

6), the authors describe a contemporary cultural landscape where “access to spaces where we can stay under the radar is getting smaller in most cities, either for economical or political reasons”

(p. 6). In an effort to counter-act that trend, ETV “started with the idea to go actively overground and talk about how public spaces need to be re-designed for music events, how permission procedures need to be simplified, how – after all – we can create more space for the party to happen and keep gentrification and intolerance from eating us up” (p. 6). While it might seem that this platform speaks to a particularly non-Palestinian experience of public space, where gentrification threatens public space more than colonization, the authors quickly nuance their discussion of urban transformation, stating that “In some cities (like Amsterdam and

Berlin), gentrification eats up the abandoned spaces, the homes and havens of subculture, and leaves no affordable alternative. In other cities (like Budapest and Ramallah) vacant space is still existing, but the government is applying strict legislation” (p. 6). While certainly that

119 characterization is not without exceptions and overlaps, it captures the range of ways in which space is rendered unavailable or precarious. As an overground attempt to establish urban youth spaces, ETV’s work has been well-documented through news articles, its various collaborative institutions, and its own social media and other webpages. Not surprisingly, many of the

Ramallah-based participants in Enter the Void helped to organize one of the biggest hip-hop events in Palestine to date, the hosting of a Boiler Room show.

On June 22nd, 2018, Ramallah played host to a Boiler Room show, the first of its kind in the Middle East. Boiler Room is a London-based music project in the form of a “global online music-broadcasting platform commissioning and streaming live music sessions around the world”. Boiler Room has produced shows in almost a hundred cities, with some shows attracting hundreds of thousands of live viewers around the world. Though the visual format of the live streams can change depending on the venue, most Boiler Room shows are live broadcast so you can see both the artist (mostly DJS, but also rappers, bands, and other musical groups) and the audience at the venue. Not only can you see how the artist embodies the music they produce, but also how audiences move in different spaces and to different sounds. Though

Boiler Room shows are focused on the artist in title and promotion, the visual layout used draws attention to the audience and artist simultaneously, preventing one or the other from dictating how one should feel about and move to the music. What is also important about the visual format of Boiler Room shows is that they are broadcast around the world. Music-sharing services are largely dominated by a focus on the artist. The artist and their music are able to travel around the world through digital circuits, but the local audience gets let behind.

The setlist highlighted the diversity of Ramallah’s music scene, both in terms of the mix of EDM and hip-hop music, but also in the list of artists drawn from multiple music generations

120 and featuring women and men. The show progressed through the setlist over five hours, featuring:

Muqata`a Sama’ Jazar Crew Al Nather ft. Shabjdeed Julmud and Dakn ft. Haykal Makimakkuk ODDZ

Muqata`a, Al Nather, Julmud, and Dakn represent the older generation of Ramallah’s scene, some having been producing music or rapping for upwards of a decade. Muqata`a formerly went by the stage name Boikutt (Muqata`a is the Arabic word for boycott), including as a member of the 2003-founded hip-hop group, Ramallah Underground, an early fixture in Palestinian hip-hop.

He has also mentored many young, aspiring artists, including Haykal, an up and coming new in the city, and Makimakkuk, a local female MC. Jazar Crew is a Haifa-based electronic music collective responsible for organizing many shows for themselves and other artists across Israel-

Palestine and the only artists at the Boiler Room show not from the West Bank. Sama’ and Makimakkuk are both female artists, a DJ and MC respectively, whose music pulls from hip- hop and techno beats and instrumentation.

Although only one of multiple hip-hop events located in Ramallah that have drawn on transnational cultural networks, including the cancelled Acid Arab show, the Boiler Room set provides a snapshot of the transnational aspirations of Ramallah’s hip-hop scene in similar ways to the work of ETV participants in Ramallah. Those aspirations, which I argue, drawing from

Hebert and Rykowski (2018), reflect processes of “music glocalization”, simultaneously connect

Ramallah to outside audiences and participants, while asserting the important role local context plays in the specific forms and functions of Ramallah hip-hop. In the remaining part of this

121 section, I discuss briefly the extant scholarship on music glocalization, focusing on scholarship that resonates with or focuses on Palestinian music cultures, to foreground the specific processes of hip-hop glocalization in Ramallah. I identify two elements that I view as important to

Palestinian music glocalization within the context of hip-hop shows: the role of locals as two- way ambassadors of Palestinian and non-Palestinian music cultures and the imbrication of hip- hop artists and Palestinian audiences in Palestine. Each of these elements are specific to my analysis to hip-hop events, ones that utilize public, material space, but there are undoubtedly ways to analyze the degree to which music glocalization emerges in non-public and/or digital spaces.

The concept of music glocalization has been discussed in scholarship from the early

2000s, with the term first being seen in the 1980s (Heber and Rykowski, 2018, p. xxiv). and remains an enduring concept for looking at and through notions of global and local in a world of constantly changing, multi-sited, and increasingly digital musical practices. Hebert and

Rykowski’s edited volume on music glocalization describes the concept “as a re-emphasis on local traditions and tastes as a transnational response to the pervasive forces of globalization (p. xxiii). Music glocalization is not a utopian concept or process; scholarship on glocalization often foregrounds the unidirectional flows of music traditions, often from the West, to the rest of the world, a flow that often corresponds with processes of cultural imperialism. Thus, for Hebert and

Rykowski, “It follows that a prominent theme in in the study of music glocalization is the question of how individual musicians creatively respond to global flows, while simultaneously respecting local and global traditions” (p. xxvi). At the same time as scholarship on music glocalization utilizes the terms local and global, the concept of music glocalization reveals the imbrication of notions of local and global. Manfred Steger describes globalization as “a

122 thickening of the ‘local-global nexus’” (Steger, p. 2, qtd in Hebert and Rykowski, 2018). Steger takes up sociologist Roland Robertson’s (1992) use of glocalization:

Arguing that cultural globalization always takes place in local contexts, Robertson rejects

the cultural homogenization thesis and speak instead of glocalization – a complex

interaction of the global and local characterized as cultural borrowing. The resulting

expressions of ‘hybridity’ cannot be reduced to clear-cut manifestations of ‘sameness’ or

‘difference’. (Steger, 80, qtd in Hebert and Rykowski, 2018)

Literature on music glocalization has a fractured relationship with literature on cultural imperialism, and its more specific iteration as media imperialism, focused on the major media conglomerates of the U.S. and West (See Seago, 2004). Pil Ho Kim and Hyunjoon Shin (2010), discussing the glocalization of rock music in South Korea, summarized the relationship between cultural imperialism and glocalization scholarship thusly:

The mass media–propaganda model of cultural imperialism is not wholly adequate to

capture the great diversity and autonomy of local music cultures vis-à-vis global Anglo-

American pop… These counterarguments against cultural imperialism do not necessarily

deny the global dominance of American pop culture. Rather, they point to the difference

between cultural dominance and political and economic domination. As far as pop music

is concerned, American dominance hinges on “style over substance”; no matter how

much its profit margin has shrunk in the world market, the U.S. music industry still

maintains a privileged status as the originator of most, if not all, global pop styles and

genres… Since its impact on local culture is often complex, subtle, and politically

ambiguous, American pop music’s symbolically imperial status prompts us to

123 “deconstruct” the meaning of cultural imperialism in conjunction with the political

dynamics of globalization and local agency. (p. 202)

The salience of local traditions and of local agency is a recurring theme in literature on glocalization. The dynamic between local and global, then, is often portrayed as a space where capitulation and resistance can occur. Citing Victor Roudometof’s work on glocalization,

Alexander Coloumbe (2018) discusses the concept as involving “the dynamics between cultures or products that resist or accept change seen in a global network, or even within and between localities” (p. 6). Coloumbe details three elements that glocalization should be concerned with: 1.

How many music genres are always already global, 2. How local artists and fans can “replace or compliment” non-local music, and 3. How music connects people between localities and across the globe in shared musical communities (p. 8). All three of these realities inform the form that glocalization takes and its resistant potential against, and not as capitulation to, forces of economic and political dominance.

Literature on glocalization and hip-hop has dealt with a few issues specific to hip-hop communities, yet salient as glocal concerns for artist of multiple genres. One issue relates to the origins of hip-hop in relation to is uptake and glocalization in non-U.S., non-African contexts around the globe. Morgan and Bennet (2011) contend that African American history and language ideology maintains a salient aspect of hip-hop cultures around the world. They explain how:

Hip-hop language ideology remains central to the construction and continuation of all

hip-hop cultures, local and global. The use of dialects and national languages, including

complex codeswitching practices, serves as a declaration that hip-hop culture enables all

124 citizens of the hip-hop nation to reclaim and create a range of contested languages,

identities, and powers. (p. 182)

Another related concern is in how notions of hip-hop authenticity relate to processes of glocalization. Adam Kruse (2018) points to the role of language and knowledge in constructing notions of hip-hop authenticity, explaining how, “Numerous studies have reported how the use of English demonstrates global commercial viability and authenticity based on knowledge of

Hip-Hop's origins while the use of local languages and dialects serves to earn credibility based on local expectations of authenticity” (p. 156). Kruse does not portray artists as unaware victims of cultural imperialism or solely success-driven. Rather, they are active agents of glocalization who are keenly aware of what that role entails, “In addition to balancing attempts at commercial success on the global level against claims of relevance and authenticity at the local level, successfully glocalizing Hip-Hop musicians are often astutely aware of how they are perceived”

(p. 156).

Music glocalization, thus conceived, involves multiple parties, artists and fans, multiple, sometimes competing music ideologies, and a strong focus on the agency of locals in selectively appropriating global music cultures while reasserting a focus on local music traditions. This section continues to consider two key elements in the glocalization of Palestinian hip-hop, ones that emerge from my research on ETV and the Boiler Room show and therefore attend to aspects of space-making, both in terms of establishing new spaces (ETV) and utilizing extant spaces

(Boiler Room). Those two elements include the role of local music ambassadors and the imbrication of artist and audiences in representations of the local music scene.

Music ambassadors come in many forms, ranging from individuals who travel, as an ambassador might, to other locations, sometimes acting as representatives of a larger group, to

125 others who serve as a local ambassador to a larger, global music culture. These individuals could be event organizers who do not perform or artists whose performances introduce audiences to a global hip-hop culture. In the case of the former, organizations like ETV that involve artists, venue owners, producers, and culture influencers in space-making enterprises built on the shared values discussed above, intentionally involve local scene members in larger, transnational networks. Those networks are important, as they connect directly with foreign organizations that fund continued cultural work in Palestine. Thomas Scheele described ETV to me as “an original underground collective supported by an established network, that can also bridge this gap to the policymakers.” He explained further the statistical importance of these connections, providing anecdotally that, “if you look at the cultural sector in Palestine, with over 700 cultural organizations, almost none of them are community financed, almost all are dependent on international NGOs.” The approach of ETV avoids the simplistic assumption that Thomas could serve as a one-way conduit, focusing on involving Palestinian scene members in all aspects of

ETV’s organization work. The ETV zine discussed above evidences those connections, including content that is derived from grounded knowledge of particular music scenes in Berlin,

Amsterdam, Budapest, Riga, or Ramallah.

In some instances, ETV was responsible for what amounted to an actual ambassador approach where space-makers from its member cities were flown to Berlin to participate in collective planning and sharing sessions meant to build the space-making capacities of the alternative music scene in all the cities. Thomas described this approach in relation to the spatial constrictions faced by hip-hop adherents in Ramallah:

With the political attention, with no parties allowed, how do you progress as a musician?

A DJ? An event organizer? Sometimes it is good to have the opportunity to know people

126 or to help organize a trip because collectively…so you go there (Berlin) for two weeks or

two months just to get some playtime. Some places where you can play until five o’clock

in the morning. Where people know the codes. Where the legal situation is clear. Where

you have a good sound system, good techniques. And then you bring it back and tell the

people more and more, and it becomes normalized in public.

While this might seem, on the surface, as a unidirectional flow of knowledge from the European to the Palestinian music scenes, it reflects glocalization and evidences the role of local agency in the selective application of musical space-making practices. Steger’s (2018) discussion of

Robertson above, specifically about the ways in which “cultural globalization always takes place in local contexts”, is reflected in the work of ETV in Ramallah. Ramallah’s norms around public space differ from those in the other cities of ETV’s network, a difference not lost on organizers like Thomas. Differing legal codes, notions of privacy, and senses of accountability to your

(un)known neighbors can affect the approach of different space-makers, even if involved in the

ETV network. Thomas evidenced this in a conversation where he explained that:

You want to go into the refugee camps. You want to go to other people, because it’s a

Palestinian issue. Meeting together, bringing the people together, is super important.

That’s what makes it completely different from the subculture in Berlin. For example, we

say ‘fuck the police, fuck my neighbors, who are these guys’, but you don’t want to bring

people even further apart…there are these codes of sharing is caring to build the scene

more.

This flexibility in ETV’s organizational approach make the notion of a music ambassador not only real, but important to the music glocalization. Alongside those involved in ETV’s network, artist themselves are also a sort of local music ambassador. DJs and MCs are ambassadors

127 inasmuch as they are doing the labor of studying and integrating new beats, rhythms, samples, styles, and other musical devices that emerge and become popular within a global hip-hop culture. Local artists present an alternative pathway to learning about new music, whether trendy or not, to the notion of a unidirectional movement of Western-originated music to other places.

On one hand, those artists demonstrate the agency to play or not play music.

MC Makkimakuk described how she can intervene in Western-based music trends:

I don’t take requests, for example. This is like out of the question because I am not a

venue DJ. I am not a wedding DJ. And last party, a couple days ago, a guy came to me

and told me ‘I want Despacito’ and I am like, ‘No way. No way’… I want to bring you

music that you haven’t heard before that is really good; that I think is really good, and

that doesn’t have coverage.

Describing parties where audiences might expect a Despacito-like track to be played, she continued:

When I play at other venues where you have audiences that listen to mainstream music,

but you also want them to enjoy the party, you are not playing mainstream, but you want

them to enjoy the party, so I would go for more melodic, more upbeat, tracks.

While Makimakkuk was discussing events in which the only audience was in the venue, the

Boiler Room event presented a uniquely different situation where the whole event was visible to a global audience. In this instance, not only did the DJ serve as a music ambassador, selectively sampling music from a global hip-hop oeuvre, but also serves as an ambassador of the local hip- hop scene to a global audience, sampling Palestinian music throughout their performances and reasserting its importance alongside global hip-hop music. Most Boiler Room shows feature a single artist, with multiple shows happening in bigger European cities like Berlin. In this case,

128 the Boiler Room show was about the city’s music scene, showcasing seven different sets.

Marketed as “Boiler Room Palestine,” the event felt like a debut, of sorts, of Ramallah’s alternative music scene to a global audience.

The Boiler Room show is also a useful event for discussing how the imbrication of audience and artist, their various relations of trust, intimacy, and physical closeness at events, can contribute to music glocalization. During the Ramallah Boiler Room show, it was made clear that Palestinian musical artists do not need to leave Palestine to perform to a more open global music scene, leaving behind a harsh, unaccepting cultural environment, as might be implied from the disproportionate attention paid by the global hip-hop scene to Palestinian hip-hop artists in the diaspora, like DJ Khaled or Shadia Mansour. Rather, viewers get to see the Palestinian artists in their local element, performing to the very visible mass of young Palestinians standing behind them. Rather than framing Palestine as a place for artists to escape, the dual focus on artist and audience, intimately enmeshed in the venue, imply that Palestine is a place for artists to thrive.

Compared to many other Boiler Room shows, the Ramallah set was so filled and lively that, at times, the DJ gets subsumed in the ebb and flow of the surrounding crowd. To further stress the closeness and feelings of mutuality within the Ramallah music scene, each DJ and MC danced and cheered to every other person when not performing, hyping up the audience for their fellow performers. When groups made up of multiple individuals performed, they appeared like a well- choreographed dance, a nearly seamless stream of music and bodies as one performer left the turntable and mixer setup to be quickly replaced by the next. It was this intimacy, this closeness of audience and artist, put on a global platform, that made the Boiler Room Palestine show stand out.

Rethinking Glocalization Across the Diaspora: The Berlin-Ramallah Connection

129 There exists a very strong connection between Palestine and Germany, and Ramallah and

Berlin specifically. The hip-hop popularity of the bar named Berlin, located in the city center of

Ramallah, is hardly a coincidence. Palestinians view Berlin, as do many around the globe, as a destination and creative hub for alternative music. Germany, and Berlin specifically, have some of the largest populations of diasporic Palestinians outside of the Middle East. Since the mid-

1900s, Berlin has received a large number of immigrants from Palestine specifically and the

Levant in general; “Berlin has had an Arab population since 1960, when then West Germany invited in thousands of Moroccans as ‘guest workers’ to help rebuild the country’s post-war economy. In the 1980s and early 1990s, tens of thousands of Lebanese and Palestinian-Lebanese migrants arrived, fleeing Lebanon’s civil war” (Alkousaa, 2018). In 2015, Germany also took in over 1 million Syrian refugees, many of who had families who came to Syria from Palestine. As a city outside of the Middle East, Berlin has one of the largest Palestinian populations. More than

100,000 Palestinians live in Germany, with at least 25,000 residing in Berlin, though these estimates are likely low due to the lack of demographic measures of “Palestinian nationality” within Germany (Palestinian Federation of Businessmen Associations). More Palestinians continue to immigrate to Germany, with many young Palestinians interested in moving to Berlin in particular. I have had two family members and a few friends move to Berlin, either for a few years or permanently, most of whom were artists in some way.

Within Berlin, the Neukölln neighborhood is home to a large number of Palestinians and is particularly attractive to younger Palestinians looking to live in a space that blends German and Palestinian cultural practices, including musical ones. The neighborhood is known as a hipster district, and one thoroughfare, Sonnenallee, is variously known as Little Palestine, Little

Istanbul, or Little Beirut (Pearce, 2015). This neighborhood in particular, and Berlin in general,

130 are spaces where Palestinian cultural practices can exist in and even take over spatial relations.

For example, when the Palestinian Cultural Foundation (2018) interviewed Mahmoud Mawed, a

Palestinian Syrian refugee, about his feelings on the city, he said, “I do feel sometimes that I am home, particularly when I pass or go to Sonnenallee Street where you always hear our language and can buy Arabic stuff and food, and even see friends [you haven’t seen] since you left Syria”

(PCF). It is in diasporic spaces like these that we can begin to rethink the transnational circuits that we use to frame local-global relations or processes of glocalization. We might begin by asking where Berlin figures in the preceding discussion of glocalization? Can we talk about a local Palestinian culture in Berlin? In Neukölln? On Sonnenallee? If we can, how does that shift our mapping of glocalization and our understanding of how people participate in music glocalization?

These questions lead into a much larger conversation about the Palestinian diaspora, a conversation well beyond the scope of this chapter. Even with transnational communication technologies like satellite television and the internet that have shifted the geography of Palestinian cultural practices, there are material, social, and psychological differences between living in the diaspora and living in Palestine (or Israel-Palestine). Diasporas involve many topics, including collective memory, memory loss, alienation, investment in a homeland and a desire to return, and specific forms of diasporic consciousness (Cheran, 2004), and thus a longer study and discussion of diasporic Palestinian hip-hop practices is merited. However, the preceding discussion of glocalization, music ambassadors, and the transnational circuits of Palestinian hip-hop, specifically the circuits between Ramallah and Berlin, relates to extant scholarship on the

Palestinian diaspora, transnational media, cultural practices, and identity formation.

Khalil Rinnawi’s (2011) work on global Arab media and the Palestinian diaspora in Berlin has

131 been instrumental in exploring how nationalist Palestinian identity and belonging is facilitated by new media technologies. Rinnawi writes that:

We must consider the wider transformations that are occurring in contemporary media

industries and markets - transformations associated with the development of new ‘space-

transcending’ technologies (satellite television and the Internet). An important

consequence has been the construction of new transnational communicational and cultural

spaces in and across the continents. In this new media order, communities that were

once marginalised as ‘minority interests’ within national broadcasting regimes may now

be transformed into significant elements in transnational services that embrace diasporic

interests and identities. (p. 1454)

Rinnawi (2011) explains how Arab media are increasingly producing content and marketing to a global (diasporic) audience. Rinnawi’s focus is predominantly on news media and the creation of

“instant Nationalism” or “imagined coherence”, a sense of belonging to a cohesive national group that is geographically or physically dispersed and separated. Rinnawi explains how, “when asked about the effects of the consumption of Arab transnational media, interviewees stated that they felt more a part of the Arab world, culture and heritage than before the introduction of transnational media” (p. 1465). Rinnawi and other scholars have focused on national identity and new media, primarily through satellite television and primarily among an older generation. However, he concludes that the younger generation of Arabs in Berlin, including recent immigrants and first- generation Berliners, were less likely to consume news media, more likely to consume newer cultural media, and more likely to use the internet instead of television to access media. This chapter helps to explore new territory that largely compliments Rinnawi’s general conclusion about the importance of new media technology to diasporic identity formation, doing so by

132 addressing the role of the internet in broadcasting Palestinian hip-hop cultural practices globally and the increasing role of music ambassadors who travel between Berlin and Ramallah.

What the glocalization of Ramallah’s hip-hop scene tells us, especially in terms of identity formation and new media, is that evolving cultural practices and communication mediums have allowed hip-hop practices in Ramallah to develop circuitously with Berlin and mediate diasporic identity formation. First, the role of music ambassadors has meant that Berliners, including

Palestinians, have been able to participate in the development of Palestinian hip-hop practices in

Ramallah, while music ambassadors from Palestine have been able to do the same in Berlin. Rather than a one-way transmission of media from Palestine to the diaspora, as might be the case with a corporate television news station, the Ramallah-Berlin connection represents a circuit in which content, ideas, and people circulate between the two cities. Not only might this afford diasporic

Palestinians more agency over shaping their own meanings of Palestinian identity, but it allows for Palestinians in Ramallah to have more control over the ways in which global hip-hop culture influences local hip-hop culture in the city, what I have already discussed here as the glocalization of Ramallah hip-hop. Second, if Rinnawi (2011) associates news media on corporate or national

Arab television with “instant Nationalism,” then the internet represents a more dispersed medium that affords more people agency to be in charge of messaging. The implication of that is that the internet might offer a more diverse snapshot of cultural practices in Palestine globally, crucially important given the misrepresentation of Palestine in mainstream Western media (Barghouti,

2017). Consequently, the internet is a medium through which Palestinian hip-hop practices have circulated transnational messages about Palestinian identity formation beyond a nationalist frame, including through the highlighting of feminist space-making practices.

III. Gender, Feminism, and Hip-Hop Space-Making

133 Despite a preoccupation with female-firsts in the Middle East, from “The First Female

Driver in Saudi Arabia” to “The First Female DJ in Palestine”, women have been a constant, yet overlooked, part of the cultural, political, and economic histories of the region. Within

Palestinian hip-hop, women have been present longer than commonly assumed, with DJs and rappers beginning their careers more than a decade ago. Today, the list of female DJs and rappers is long, including all-female rap groups like Arapeyat from Acre or Dmar from Nazareth. Sama’ and DJ Sana, who is co-owner of Scene Bar in Haifa, have both been DJing long enough to be recognized as part of the first wave of female, Palestinian DJs. Ramallah’s inter-generational hip-hop network provides one structure for this growth in female artists, as they collaborate with more established artists who feature them as opening acts or as collaborators. Even the most popular hip-hop group, DAM, has routinely focused on issues pertaining to gender, including the separation of gender roles (“Who You Are?”) and the practice of honor killing (“If I Could Go

Back In Time”), and recently took on a female member, Maysa Daw. The presence of so many women in the Palestinian hip-hop scene is notable, especially when considering the commonplace, categorical dismissal of many female rappers, often characterized as pop artists instead of rappers.

The presence of female artists, especially as DJs and rappers, in a field dominated by men is an important development in the hip-hop scene, especially if we seek to find feminist potential in hip-hop practices. The growth of female artists is, however, just one part of a larger strategy to make hip-hop feminist or even just female-friendly. The attention to sexism within hip-hop practices has focused heavily on the artist, highlighting both the absence of female artists and the prevalence of problematic lyrics and actions by male artists. While myriad practices exist that discourage women from pursuing careers as rappers or DJs, those and other practices also

134 discourage women from being fans of the genre, listening to music at home, or going to shows.

Thinking beyond just the content of the songs themselves, beyond just the persona of the artist, women in Ramallah are focusing on how hip-hop space and place-making enterprises can be feminist, establishing safe and free hip-hop spaces while simultaneously (re-)coding Ramallah as a place for women to participate in social and cultural life. This section attempts to detail those enterprises, looking at the unique concerns and responses elaborated by feminist hip-hop practitioners in Ramallah. I begin first by looking at established scholarship on gender and public space in Ramallah specifically, and Palestine more broadly, to elaborate the context-specific constraints women face when participating in public spaces. Then, I turn to a discussion of the specific concerns women in Ramallah express towards hip-hop spaces, focused primarily on sexual harassment and stereotyping directed at female hip-hop fans and artists. I conclude this section with a discussion of the specific techniques used to establish and maintain feminist hip- hop spaces, including how notions of privacy and trust between organizers, artists, and audiences further that work.

Gender, Public Space, and Privacy in Palestine

This background on women’s participation in public spaces in Palestine, and specifically

Ramallah, is important to understand how hip-hop space-making enterprises can hold feminist potential. Public spaces, spaces of socialization, can be sites of simultaneous government repression and individual and collective resistance. Drawing from

“Foucaudian and Lefebvrian power-space concepts” and their own research of the popular

Dawar intersection in nearby Nablus, Zahraa Zawawi and her colleagues summarily describe such public spaces as “a case of two interconnected phenomena, namely the exercise of both disciplinary and sovereign powers that are directly connected to the generation of resistance… a

135 space appropriated temporarily and permanently both by the Palestinian resistance and by the

Israeli military occupation” (2013, p. 756).

Not unlike other Palestinian contexts, whether near the West Bank barrier wall or not, women’s experiences of public space in Ramallah are affected by the various physical checkpoints erected temporarily or permanently by the Israeli military. Those checkpoints and their personnel, including at the aforementioned Qalandiya crossing and the more impromptu barriers that accompany military incursions into Ramallah, look for, read, and interpret gendered cues in their differential processing of passers through. Gendered stereotypes of Palestinian men and women as differently threatening certainly can impact how Palestinians get treated by Israeli military and police, occasionally allowing women mobility denied men, a mobility nonetheless fraught with contradiction (Sinno, 2013). Conversely, women can be subject to different forms of

(sexual) harassment by the Israeli military (Zawawi, Corijin, & Van Heur, 2013). The concern over the simultaneous ethno-religious and sex-based discrimination by the Israeli military has remained across the decades.

Yet in Ramallah and elsewhere in the West Bank, women’s experiences of their cities are shaped by a range of factors beyond the effects of military occupation. Prevailing social norms interact with those space and place to “explain the effect of the physical environment and the embedded culture on shaping the urban experiences of women” (Abbas & Van Heur,2014, p. 1215). In other words, women’s experiences of public space can serve as a basis for investigating the constrictive mechanisms of systematic sexism. Ample scholarship points to the dual role of public space in the lives of (Palestinian) women as both a site of oppression and as a forum for diverse modes of resistance. Women’s experiences of public space in Ramallah have changed over time, though not in consistently progressive ways. While the 1960s and 1970s were

136 marked by an increasing momentum of a diffuse Palestinian women’s movement (Hasso, 1998) and a more centralized participation of women in Palestinian governance (Aldaqqaq, 2014), newer factors, including family planning programming and a resurgence of traditional marriage values (Abu Baker, 2016) or the disproportionate increase in household debt in Ramallah

(Harker, Sayyad, & Reema, 2019), have contributed to what might be described as a re- domesticization of Palestinian women across Israel-Palestine. In many ways, social norms and diffuse institutional practices encourage women to express a strong preference for women’s only, semi-public or private, domestic spaces (Abbas & Van Heur, 2014). It is against that backdrop of re-domesticization that we can better understand how and why women want to participate in more public spaces, both indoor and outdoor.

The preceding chapter on Haifa’s hip-hop scene and its overlap with queer cultural practices evidences the subtle role that privacy can play in experiences of public spaces. The women-only cafes that began in Ramallah are one example of a simultaneously public and private space, akin to my notion of secluded publics. Scholarship on Palestinian public spaces has similarly evidenced the role of privacy in public spaces as important to women’s experience of those spaces. While the preceding chapter on Haifa certainly depicts an indoor and private yet publicly accessible space, similar to the women’s only cafes, outdoor spaces, which can often be the sites of hip-hop performances in Palestine, have a different relationship to privacy. Mokarram Abbas and Bas Van Heur (2014) describe how despite a broad interest of

Nabulsi women in semi-public, indoors, women’s social spaces, the favorite social space for most women was the outdoor mutanazahat, small public parks designed for socializing, recreation, and entertainment. These authors explain how three factors, “space audience, spatial opportunities, and spatial organization” affect women’s “spatial options and behaviors” (p.

137 1214). While these authors argue for the need to center women’s experiences in the design of public, outdoor spaces, I am more curious about how women co-opt or reclaim extant public space, both indoor and outdoor, for hip-hop practices.

Nonetheless, Abbas and Van Heur’s (2014) research is useful in a study of women in hip- hop spaces for identifying the importance of perceived privacy on women’s use of public spaces in general. Their research also corresponds with and corroborates multi-sited research on the enduring presence of street harassment coupled with a strong taboo against discussing sexuality in general, including sexual harassment. It bears mentioning here that site-specific research on one city cannot transfer directly to other contexts. Ramallah has different gender norms than other cities, and neighborhoods in Ramallah vary from each other in the same regard. Taking trends from other Palestinian cities is useful inasmuch as we can recognize those trends occurring in Ramallah. While I cannot, therefore, provide statistical evidence of rates of street harassment between different cities, the contemporary work being done by women in Ramallah to address those issues indicates that the problem endures. For example, from 2012 to 2014, a website called Ramallah Street Watch allowed users to report instances of street harassment through an app, including location, descriptions of the assailants, what took place, and even photos.

More recently, in March 2018, women, girls, and some men and boys held a march through Ramallah calling attention to a range of issues, of which street harassment was at the forefront (Regan, 2018). One of the participants in the march, Yasmeen Mjalli, held a sign reading “#NotYourHabibti”, habibti being the Arabic word for “my beloved” though is commonly translated as “my sweetheart.” Mjalli began a campaign utilizing that slogan in

Ramallah, looking to break the taboo around not discussing sexual harassment, including street

138 harassment that often comes in the form of being called “habibti.” Her campaign works by collecting stories of harassment from Palestinian women and publishing them anonymously on social media while also organizing public rallies (Miller, 2018). Another interesting aspect to Mjalli’s campaign is through a clothing campaign that uses hip, fashionable clothing made by women in the West Bank and Gaza and adorned with the campaign slogan. I choose this last part of the campaign to highlight how women’s own performance of their gender identity, including through clothing or music, is affected by concerns over where and by who they might face harassment. If space-making enterprises are concerned with “spatial audience, spatial opportunities, and spatial organization”, then feminist hip-hop space-making enterprises can be read as simultaneously responding to extant forms of sexual harassment while articulating a new vision for their own gendered performances, fashionable, musical, or otherwise.

Sexism in Hip-Hop in Ramallah

As mentioned previously, hip-hop has a questionable record when it comes to the representation of women specifically and to sexism, broadly construed. One of the less discussed, but nonetheless pernicious trends is in the consistent failure to recognize female rappers as rappers. So often, female artists who predominantly rap in their music still get categorized as pop artists and rarely considered in hip-hop charts or “best rappers of” lists. In the

U.S., artists like Iggy Azalea, Nikki Minaj, and Cardi B are easy examples of artists that could easily be considered rappers, and, to be fair, sometimes are described as such, though typically labelled pop artists. One of the more discussed sexist practices in hip-hop music is in the lyrical representation of women as sexual objects and the parallel visual representations found in music videos. Ample scholarship has connected lyrical and visual representation in U.S. hip-hop to sexism (Rebollo-Gil & Moras, 2012; Adams & Fuller, 2006; Weitzer & Kubrin, 2009), though

139 no such scholarship has addressed the presence of sexist representations of women in

Palestinian-made hip-hop. In both of these examples, we can see a disconnect between Western discussions of sexism in hip-hop and Palestinian ones. Though by no means universal, female rappers in Palestine are overwhelmingly described as such and very few examples can be found of explicitly sexist Palestinian hip-hop music other than that sampled from English language artists (and the two exceptions that come to mind live and produce notably in Israel, not the West

Bank). Seemingly the most pronounced concern of Palestinian women regarding the hip-hop scene is in the experience of the more social aspects of the scene, going to shows and hanging out with other hip-hop and alternative music fans. In many regards, the concerns expressed by the women I interviewed parallel the sketch of gender, sexism, and public space outlined above.

Many young women come into the hip-hop scene, or other alternative music scenes, through friends or because of the social aspect of the scene. Music provides a reason to get together, a common language, a shared cultural space. MC Makimakkuk described her transition into MCing as a somewhat coincidental decision among friends. She “started by doing playlists with my friends” at house parties using her cellphone or computer and then transitioning to the program Virtual DJ and later, Traktor. Shortly thereafter, around 2012 or 2013, as Makimakkuk describes, “I started mixing. I started going to gigs with my friends. You know?

Like I would start opening up with them, or they would let me mix up with them. And I started to learn, little by little.” The friends who mentored her and included her in shows include Ramallah fixtures Muqata’a and Julmud, among others. For Makimakkuk, her experience as a female MC in the local music scene was overwhelmingly positive, but contrasted that with some early experiences:

140 On the other side, is, uh, trouble sometimes when I started DJing because nobody was

taking me seriously. The guys were always making all the decisions, at the beginning,

they weren’t taking any of the girls seriously, and stuff like that. But then, you know, you

prove your ground with the time and stuff like that. And now, my DJ friends, they take

my opinion and they care for it and I organize parties for them as well. So, they trust me

to do that as well, and this is very nice.

The “decisions” Makimakkuk describes include:

Lineups, deals with the venues, design…Like they have been doing everything, all in all,

you know? And when they made decisions regarding the lineup, for example, I would

know about it last minute…I was always, most of the time, I was opening, but at the same

time I didn’t think about it much not because I was a girl, but just because I did not have

a lot of experience. But after awhile, I began to feel like yeah, maybe it is because they

are not taking me seriously just yet, you know?...But now, I don’t mind opening up, even

when I DJ with Muqata`a, Al Julmud, we don’t care who opens up. It depends on the

music that we are playing and how hard it is to the audience.

The inter-generational nature of Ramallah’s hip-hop scene has positive and negative effects highlighted by the narrative above. On one hand, those networks can provide important support and mentorship to new artists, even securing sought-after spots on setlists with established artists. On the other hand, with a scene heavily driven by social connections, who you know and who chooses to “bring you up” into the scene can be affected by unconscious biases that work against women and (in)form patterns of male socialization.

For the significantly larger number of female hip-hop and alternative music fans, the scene has its own barriers to entry that revolve around the events themselves. Talking with

141 multiple DJs, MCs, and rappers, the question of sexual harassment in venues is a real concern.

One local artist summarized the problem as relating to false assumptions about the alternative music scene in Ramallah, describing how scene outsiders cause most of the problems:

It’s mostly the guys approaching the girls, trying to get to know them. Sometimes it is

okay if they are from the scene, or they understand the kind of music. But there were

times where we opened the party at Q Pub to the entire public, like anybody could come.

We were not stopping guys at the door, guys coming alone, saying come and see what it

is and everything…and generally with this type of music, electronic music, people they

usually do not dance together. It’s not salsa, they are not dancing in pairs, you know? So,

the girl is dancing on her own and the guy expects she is dancing on her own because she

wants somebody to approach her. So, they approach her, touch her in places she doesn’t

want to be touched, and then trouble can, may happen. So, this also happens from the

music because when people who are not exposed to this music, they hear it, they think it

is crazy music, it is devils music, it is drug music. So when they hear it, and the darkness

of the space and everything, it creates so many different misunderstandings also from the

people, you know?

The above narrative parallels similar ones provided by other interviewees in Ramallah. In this narrative, we can see so many factors that might be of concern to feminist space-makers: privacy and trust (“Sometimes it is okay if they are from the scene”), space design (“the darkness of the space”), and cultural stereotypes (“they think it is crazy music…devils music…drug music”). As suggested by Abbas and Van Heur (2014), it is the combination of these factors that are shaping women’s spatial options, including sexual options, in hip-hop venues and beyond.

142 This is not to say that women do not attend music events for the social and sexual aspects of the scene. Meeting people at music shows, dancing, or just enjoying music together are common ways that intimate relationships can form. However, prevailing gender norms and the attendant modes of policing women’s visibility and movement present very real threats.

Here, the role of privacy comes up again relative to sexuality, as one local artist describes:

Unless it’s a house party and its really all friends who know each other, because then it

would be more comfortable. Each one with a girls or boy, there sitting on a couch,

making out, it’s okay, it’s normal. Or even like friends themselves leaning on each

other…but at parties, in public spaces, you can’t really do that.

In many other instances, it is not only the unknowability of event attendees, but the potential threat of those outside the venue. Makimakkuk’s contribution to this project through an extended interview with me was particularly generative since she contributes to the scene not only as an

MC, but also as an event organizer. As she described, efforts to establish new music spaces are often stymied by community members who view the alternative music scene as a problem:

There have been trials to open up clubs here. It never worked out because immediately it

gets a really bad reputation…At the street you will have a lot of men standing, waiting

for the audience to come out to like make trouble.

These testimonies highlight the intertwined practices of sexual shaming that portray women’s perceived immorality as both a mark of their sexual desire and an implicit justification for sexual assault. These testimonies of gender discrimination or sexual harassment exist among other, aforementioned practices that threaten Palestinians’ use of public space and structure their spatial options. For another anonymous local artist, discussing her experiences witnessing or being made aware of sexual harassment at alternative music shows, the point was made that it is one of

143 many potential threats to the spaces and people that always contribute to a precarious since of safety, including the omnipresent specter of military and police, that differentially target

Palestinians based on their location in systems of sex, gender, ethnicity, and religion.

It doesn’t happen often, it rarely happens, but there is always the possibility. It’s always

there. So, it’s not really unique to [our scene]. Because in ten years or twelve years of

doing parties, we had worse shit happen in parties. A long time ago, we had

teargas…Once in a while, they throw a fucking Molotov at Radio. That is an outdoor

event.

Her testimony also implies there exists fruitful room for elaborating a spatial politics of hip-hop that simultaneously addresses colonization and sexism. The proceeding discussion addresses that potential through a focus on the specific responses of feminist space-makers in Ramallah that bring audience and artist together in an effort to establish free, safe spaces.

Feminist Space-making

Efforts by women and men in Ramallah to establish feminist hip-hop spaces reflect the concerns over sexism in public spaces in general and hip-hop spaces specifically. As I will argue, these efforts reflect the related trends in establishing free spaces, a term circulated widely in alternative music scenes, and safe spaces, a term circulating widely in feminist scholarship and activism. Moreover, they re-affirm the importance of dynamics highlighted in the preceding section on music glocalization, notably the dynamic between artist and audience, as central to a spatial politics built on advancing shared understandings of trust and privacy. The potential byproduct of that dynamic is an enjoyable music experience, one in which a freedom to perform one’s gender and sexuality is respected and protected, and in which women take on roles

144 in hip-hop as musicians, space-makers, and unquestioned fans, not merely props in a music video or as the object of men’s projections of simultaneous shame and desire.

The literature on free spaces and the literature on safe spaces provide a useful conversation for thinking through feminist space-making in relationship to music scenes. Free spaces have been variously described in music scholarship as spaces, both real and virtual, in which intimacy, voluntary and democratic participation, creativity, and political mobilization are key elements. Francesca Polletta (1999), one of the most cited scholars on free spaces, defines them as “small-scale settings within a community or movement that are removed from the direct control of dominant groups, are voluntarily participated in, and generate the cultural challenge that precedes or accompanies political mobilization” (p. 1). Polletta was particularly concerned with “how the form and substance of associational ties in different contexts shape the emergence of mobilizing identities” (p. 25). Polletta further defined three types of free spaces, indigenous, transmovement, and prefigurative, the last being of interest to me. Prefigurative free spaces are “’created in ongoing movements,’ are formed “in order to prefigure the society the movement is seeking to build,’ and that contain relations that are ‘defined by symmetry’”

(Polletta, qtd in Culton and Holtzman, 2010, p. 271). Other scholars have discussed the role of free spaces in the punk scene (Culton & Holtzman), the white power music scene (Futrell and

Simi), the hip-hop scene (Prier, 2013), in independence movements (Waren, 2012), and in youth music culture broadly (Bloustein & Peters, 2003). Certainly, free spaces are not “truly free,” especially as the value of that freedom to participants can change. Discussing a “disruption” in the punk scene in Long Island, New York, Culton and Holtzman explain “that although the infrastructure of spaces in the punk scene was strong, this did not preempt the development of an ideological schism” (p. 270).

145 Safe spaces emerged, by contrast, from feminist discussions of spatial experiences and spatial organization. While safe spaces might carry come of the same qualities as free spaces, sometimes involving intimacy, prefiguring political mobilization, or existing outside dominant social relations, their origin was specifically focused on how sexism is experienced in particular spaces and how people can approach spatial design and organization to reduce instances of sexism. Safe spaces emerged in the late 20th century women’s movement and have taken many forms, as different approaches to feminism can suggest different approaches to building and maintaining safe spaces. Excluding virtual or digital safe spaces, including those utilized by Arab women (Stephan, 2013), physical safe spaces have taken form as “separatist” safe spaces or

“inclusive” safe spaces (The Roestone Collective, 2014). While some separatist safe spaces, including the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, have been criticized as invoking essentialist notions of belonging (Bernhagen, 2013), many have been useful as sites of consciousness raising and political mobilization. Perhaps the most common development of safe space is in programming for female victims of sexual assault or other forms of gendered violence

(Kuribayashi & Tharp, 1998), with more recent attention focused on safe spaces for LGBTQ individuals (The Roestone Collective). Even in Israel-Palestine, there has been a well- documented desire among women for safe spaces of various types (Arnd-Linder, Harel-Shalev,

& Daphna-Tekoah, 2018). While the specific dynamics that contribute to creating and maintaining safe spaces are of more interest to me here, it is important to note how many approaches to safe space have been criticized for their reliance on essentialist definition of race, gender, or sexuality as a metric for determining entrance.

The Roestone Collective (2014) encapsulates such a tendency in their analysis and reconceptualization of safe spaces:

146 We argue that safe spaces should be understood not through static and acontextual

notions of “safe” or “unsafe”, but rather through the relational work of cultivating them.

Such an understanding reveals several tendencies. Namely, safe spaces are inherently

paradoxical. Cultivating them includes foregrounding social differences and binaries

(safe–unsafe, inclusive–exclusive) as well as recognizing the porosity of such binaries.

Renegotiating these binaries is necessarily incomplete; a safe space is never completely

safe. Even so, we encourage the critical cultivation of safe space as a site for negotiating

difference and challenging oppression.

I take seriously the Roestone Collective’s (2014) insight in my own discussion of feminist hip-hop spaces. In particular, I attend to the productive overlap of free and safe spaces, both of which I see as forces operating in the feminist space-making endeavors in

Ramallah’s hip-hop scene. By attending to the “relational work of cultivating” feminist hip-hop spaces, I identify how the synthesis of free and safe spaces accomplishes both sets of goals, avoiding both the essentialism that defines some safe spaces and the sexism that can prevail in free spaces that are driven by ideologies that ignore sex and gender.

While virtual spaces can certainly be conceived as free spaces and safe spaces, where anonymity can play an instrumental role, my interest here is in the specific spaces and places of Ramallah’s hip-hop scene and the embodied intimacies and performances found therein that are driven, in part, by the female artists, fans, and organizers who cultivate those spaces.

MC Makimakkuk elaborated on her love of producing and performing music for audiences with women in them, describing an affecting of musical affinity between her and some of those women:

147 What is unique is that I feel a lot of times that the girls at the parties connect a lot with

me. Maybe because, I am not so sure why, but they say sometimes that I play music that

is close to their hearts and stuff like that. So, I feel sometimes that I can be a little bit

closer to the girls. So, it is a unique experience, that is for sure. To be praised by the girls

also there, so like girls can be competitive with each other, and be harsh on each other.

If only by playing music that might not be selected by male performers who have been socialized to prefer certain musical styles, female MCs, DJs, and rappers begin to foster an environment in which female audience members can feel a stronger sense of belonging in and ownership of the hip-hop scene. Witnessing not only a female artist performing, but other women responding positively to that music can feel empowering and inviting.

Contrasted with a public environment, streets and alleyways that can invite shaming or harassment if you express yourself outside of gendered codes of dress, comportment, and other behavior, the hip-hop venue can become a place in which diverse expressions of femininity can coexist, a key tenet of what defines a safe space. Makimakkuk continued to discuss such a possibility in the connection between music, dancing, and self-expression:

You need to like loosen up. Generally, in our lives, in the city, enough, we all walk the

same, we all dress the same, you know? We don’t express that much emotion in the

streets, you know? So, this is a space where you can actually express it. I really do think

that dance can help really to express yourself a lot. So, I think movement is

really really important.

When it comes to dancing, those self-expressions through dance can be quite personal, a way of redirecting stress or negative energy from your life. According to Makimakkuk, “I really like people who just close their eyes, and just be unto themselves and just think about themselves and

148 their lives or whatever is going through their mind and letting it out while dancing.” It can also take on social and sexual dimensions, as a way of connecting with your friends, or even with a romantic interest. Though making out had been described as more of a house party occurrence, certainly the hip-hop venue can be a place where people hug and kiss, as one event organizer explained:

If it’s dancehall or if it’s some kinds of hip-hop as well, it’s a space where you can

actually like be with your friends and express yourself, and be in a safe space. This is

what we try to do at most of our parties, is have a safe space where you can actually be

with your girl or your boy and just hug them and kiss them and you friends as well.

Definitely the music we play, people end up hugging each other and kissing each other

and not making out. I mean, it’s not very acceptable to end up making out, but a little bit

of grinding here and there, it would happen.

The hip-hop scene in Ramallah clearly has shown potential as a feminist, free, and safe space, but that has come as a result of intentional efforts of feminist space-makers. Those efforts are being made to address the occasions of sexism in Ramallah, including the enforcement of restrictions on women’s self-expression and instances of sexual harassment.

The space-making work of female hip-hop practitioners in Ramallah take many forms evidenced above, from organizing events to curating playlists, a lot can go into constructing a safe and free space. I find that those efforts reveal the productive overlap of literature on free and safe space, despite their development in scholarship as distinct concepts. While safe spaces attend to the role of identity in the experience of spatial opportunities and the function of space as recuperative, and free spaces attend to concepts of democratic participation, shared values, and the prefiguring of political mobilization, both sets of spaces contain elements of closeness

149 and intimacy. The overlap of those concepts, the development of free/safe spaces, is exemplified by the work of feminist space-makers, as evidenced by the women quoted in this section. The notion of free/safe space can reveal the liminality of concepts of reactive and proactive politics, a space that is both recuperative and world-building, responding to real instances of gendered spatial marginalization and, at the same time, developing an intimacy and set of shared values that can prefigure political mobilization. That political mobilization need not be narrowly focused on sexism as distinct from other systems of oppression but can elaborate an intersectional politics that responds to the overlap of sexism and colonialism as experienced in specific spaces and places. Discussing the experiences of women and girls in the riot grrrl feminist punk music scene, Lindsey Bernhagen (2013) describes how “efforts to forge relationships through shared, embodied musical experience served as antidotes to young women’s gendered experiences of isolation and violation” (p. iii). That insight resonates here, and with Bernahgen focused on notions of safe space in her work, I would complement her insights by stressing the role of safe/free spaces in prefiguring political mobilization that extends beyond that particular space or event. However, the growth of free/safe spaces in Ramallah’s hip-hop scene rests on the ability for those events to cultivate relations of trust and privacy.

The concepts of trust and privacy are not mutually exclusive, often depending on each other. A sense of privacy can help to build trust among participants. Thinking in terms of free/safe spaces, these concepts are wrapped up in notions of mutual support and feelings of intimacy and closeness. Nonetheless, I try her to highlight different space-making considerations that relate to privacy, trust, and both. Feelings of privacy can be built in ways that engage with both place and space. Physical places can be private, as is the case with the secluded publics of

Haifa’s scene, and organizers take different approaches to different places. While street

150 performances are not very common per se, the venues that organizers pick for hip-hop shows are mostly private, shielded from public view from the street. While there are certainly exceptions, the venues listed in this chapter, ones which I experienced as pre-eminent hip-hop venues, all fall into that categorization. This fact also serves to validate much of the existing literature on the role of spatial design and organization on women’s spatial opportunities, notably the “the relationship between the physical form of public spaces and women’s need for privacy as a physical, social and cultural phenomenon” (Al-Bishawi, Ghadban, & Jorgensen, 2017, p. 1560).

Beyond the sense of being shielded from street view, other non-physical aspects of event design come into play. One of the biggest ones is the use of a guestlist. Guestlists can convey a sense of exclusivity that can breed feelings of privacy. Moreover, guestlists are normally built through personal associations, with those closest to the artist, organizer, or venue more likely to get on. Here, we can see the easy slide from notions of privacy to notions of trust. Guestlists, and the social networks they implicitly reflect, can provide a sense of accountability and trust. Makimakkuk described how open events can be sites of more frequent sexual harassment:

There were times where we opened the party at Q Pub to the entire public, like anybody

could come. We were not stopping guys at the door, guys coming alone, saying come and

see what it is and everything…

Both venues and the meanings attached to those places can have strong impacts on the sense of privacy in an event. The last common concern of organizers and artists is over the presence or absence of a security guard or door person, as the above quote attests. Makimakkuk further explained how the presence of a security guard helps avert problems that threaten both women in hip-hop spaces and the sustainability of those spaces as a result:

151 The girls they feel much more comfortable with this kind of music, with the DJS, with

the venues, usually because there is security at the door [checking] who comes in, who

goes out. Generally, Ramallah has a groups and couples policy when it comes to parties

because if its guys coming in and they get really drunk. If they like harass, like throw a

word at a girl, if the girl doesn’t get in a fight with him, her friends, her male friends will

get in a fight with him, and the party will close.

Again, we see the relation of privacy to trust. Trust not only in the individuals in the room, but in a larger system of shared values and accountability that reflect a free/safe space sensibility. The security guard plays a role in that system along with shared approaches to that space vis-à-vis a group and couple policy. The function of the door person specifically in this case reflects the same sort of border crossing discussed in the preceding chapter. In both cases, the presence of a door person might help to produce relations of privacy and trust. Thus, the doorman symbolizes and enacts a shift in visibility-mobility regimes from outside to inside, a shift that takes on identitarian significance for marginalized peoples, including queer and female Palestinians.

The above quote further stresses the relationship of trust between DJ, or artist, and audience. Knowing the artist or artist performing affects how people approach the space. With guestlists often meaning extant social networks will populate events, included due to their closeness to the artist, that artist plays an important role in the maintenance of feelings of trust needed in an intimate space. When asked about her approach to cultivating a particular emotional experience for her guests, Makimakkuk had this to say:

It is not an emotion, but the feeling of being on a journey, the feeling of being on a trip.

Being spaced out, like drifting. If there are any vocals, you know, even in another

language, it will give you a sentimental feeling somehow. When it’s dark, it’s really

152 heavy emotions too. And I know at that night the friends are coming with good energy to

dance or with bad energy. They are looking to get out on the dance floor. So, if its dark

music, I am expecting a lot of the friends coming are not feeling good and they need that

music to get it out, to go into that, you know?

Lindsay Bernhagen’s (2013) work on women’s music spaces explores “how music is deployed precisely for its ability to engage the body, incite pleasure, and enable intimacy” (p. iii). Her intervention rests on the assertion that, “Despite widespread agreement both scholarly and popular that music is an important and powerful element of cultural activity, there persists a lack of focused and sustained discussion exploring why the sensuous aspect of musical sound (as it is distinct from other media) might be such a moving element of human experience” (p. 1). Her assertion animates my foregrounding of the artist as key to the cultivation of feelings of trust and privacy, especially in their intersection with feelings of intimacy that music can affect. The above quote from Makimakkuk ascribes power to music as something that can affect intimacy in way that cannot be explained using solely lyrical analysis, especially in the all too common absence of lyrics.

When all the right elements come together, the effect can be immediate. The result is, as Makimakkuk describes:

A space where you can actually wear what you want, move how you want, say what you

want, to a certain extent, everything to a certain extent, but it gives you much much more

space than what the street gives you in the first place, but also it gives you

much much more space than the normal cafes or restaurants or that have a certain dress

code or criteria…Generally, our crowd, you know, they will start dancing immediately. If

they like the track, and they know the DJ, they will just start dancing immediately.

153 Trust, privacy, intimacy, shared values, and a love of music come together to produce the experience of being in a free/safe space. There are always shortcomings, “everything to a certain extent”, and issues of sexual harassment still occur on occasion. However, the feeling among many women in the hip-hop scene is that it offers something better than other public spaces, something that they can participate in as space-makers, artists, fans, or organizers, in ways that are both recuperative relative to experiences of public harassment and also proactively articulating new understandings of gender and space in Ramallah.

Rethinking Glocalization Beyond Nationalism: Feminist Space-Making Broadcast

Globally

This chapter primarily discusses glocalization in relation to ETV and the Boiler Room show. However, the feminist space-making practices discussed here also function within the same transnational hip-hop circuits and share the same features involving the role of music ambassadors and the imbrication of artist and audience. Locating local feminist hip-hop space-making within transnational hip-hop circuits can highlight how such space-making is a matter of glocalization.

Herbert and Rykowski (2018) focus their study of music glocalization on “local music traditions” as capable of reasserting “nationalities” in a globalizing era. Certainly, this chapter compliments their assertion, especially when considering how Rinnawi (2011) connects new media across the diaspora to nationalism and identity-formation. Ramallah’s hip-hop artists often rely on local musical traditions when producing their music, integrating instruments, rhythms, and melodies from the Palestinian musical tradition. The regular use of hip-hop for political messaging has demonstrated its capacity for conveying nationalist messages, a relationship more studied in scholarship on Palestinian hip-hop than the relationship between hip-hop and gender or sexuality.

154 As a study that focuses primarily on spatial practices, including evolving space-making practices, I would argue that the focus on local music traditions elides an equally important focus on emerging music traditions, specifically feminist space-making. Shifting our focus from local music traditions to emerging, music-oriented, feminist space-making initiates a shift from a focus on nationality and nationalist identity-formation, to a focus on gender identity-formation. This shift is important for both scholarly and activist reasons. On a scholarly level, much mainstream scholarship on gender and sexuality emerges from and represents the interests and investments of

Western scholars. The preceding chapter on Haifa addressed this critique in relation to queer theory and post-colonialism. Similar critiques have been levied against the ways in which feminism and feminist theory have developed largely as Western, colonial projects, defining concepts of women’s rights or women’s liberation against Western backdrops. The call for universal womanhood or global sisterhood from Western scholars have erased the particularities of feminisms outside the West and erased the overlapping feminist in decolonial movements found in the Global South. On an activist level, Palestinian feminist activists have long had to grapple with the Orientalist and colonial depiction of the Middle East, and Palestine specifically, as devoid of women’s rights regimes or feminist activism, a depiction that dually justifies Western militarism and Israeli claims to Palestine through an appeal to modern political expertise. Western media coverage of sexist practices in Palestine routinely ignores the grassroots feminist political organizing that continues across the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel. As previously discussed, such a depiction further enforces the notion that Israel is a regional city upon a hill when it pertains to feminist and queer activism and rights.

Against that backdrop, feminist hip-hop space-making enterprises seems particularly important in Palestine at a time when Palestinian cultural practices are increasingly globalized

155 and glocalized. When artists like Makkimakuk design hip-hop spaces with feminist sensibilities and serve as music ambassadors while mediating the experiences of female audience members, they do so to make hip-hop public spaces more accommodating for women. Broadcast globally, including through the Boiler Room show, such endeavors provide alternative means for Palestinian identity formation than the narrowly nationalist ones that mainstream television news media allow.

I think such endeavors have particular importance for Palestinian women outside of Palestine, for whom traditional, Western media outlets do not provide means of identification with a Palestinian feminist movement. Specifically, the global hegemony of Western feminisms is enabled by the marginalization of non-Western feminisms, and the glocalization of hip-hop through feminist space-making in Ramallah is one way to combat that marginalization. The broadcasting of the

Boiler Room show, for example, provided young Palestinian women across the diaspora with points of identification, women like them, who are artists, performing in public spaces populated with women, and demanding the attention and respect of their mixed-gender audiences. In the face of a globalizing and colonialist Western feminism, these performances signal the persistence of a local, glocal, decolonial, Palestinian feminism. While this chapter is primarily concerned with the glocalization of Ramallah’s music scene in terms that are relevant to hip-hop practitioners in

Ramallah, Palestinians across the diaspora might find hip-hop from Palestine to be a useful mechanism for exploring the meanings of Palestinian identity, not only national, but feminist and feminine as well.

IV. Conclusion

Thinking through the work of ETV, the Boiler Room show, and feminist space-making in tandem allows us to reflect on the applicability of glocalization as a concept to highlight

Palestinian identity-formation through hip-hop practices. Two particular lines of thought seemed

156 salient in terms of the preceding discussions of Ramallah’s scene. First, there exist very strong transnational hip-hop circuits between Palestine and the world, including specifically between

Ramallah and Berlin. Those circuits connect space-making practices in Palestine with other places across the globe, including through the work of ETV. They showcase artistic agency through the co-optation of global hip-hop practices alongside the assertion of local music traditions, both newer, hip-hop traditions and older music traditions. The Boiler Room show demonstrates how music glocalization exerts itself through global communication technologies like the internet that allow for the display of local embedded and embodied hip-hop practices to an audience elsewhere through an established, global medium. The density of the circuit between

Berlin and Ramallah also challenges us to think through how the diasporic structure of

Palestinian cultural practices affects our understanding and mapping of glocalization. Second, I discussed feminist space-making and feminine identity formation as glocal phenomena in an attempt to expand what musical glocalization can do conceptually. While Herbert and Rykowski

(2018) discussed glocalization in terms of the relationship between “local music traditions” and

“nationalities”, I supplemented those foci with an attention to space-making practices and identity formation beyond a nationalist frame. Specifically, I demonstrated how, by locating feminist hip-hop space-making in the context of global hip-hop circuits, we can further illuminate the relationship between music glocalization, decolonial feminism, and feminine identity-formation.

Building on the insights on the previous chapter, this study of Ramallah’s hip-hop scene helps further develop key themes in this dissertation. Broadly, this chapter furthers our understanding of space and identity formation in Israel-Palestine, describing different types of space, the prevailing (political and gendered) constrictions on utilizing public space, and the

157 resulting space-making strategies employed by hip-hop practitioners. However, this chapter extends new analyses of those themes grounded in the specifics of Ramallah’s scene.

Specifically, it allows us to revisit and expand upon the role of place, space, and visibility and mobility regimes as central elements in hip-hop experiences and practices.

Regarding public space, this chapter both reiterates insights of my study in Haifa, while suggesting new directions for thinking through hip-hop space as feminist as well as thinking through the role of digital media and digital spaces in relation to identity formation. A recurring topic when speaking with hip-hop organizers is the importance of space-making, including through spatial design, event promotion, and even the presence of a guard at events. Specifically, this chapter implies that secluded publics are not unique to Haifa’s hybrid queer, hip-hop scene.

On a material level, the venues mentioned in this chapter, like Radio and Berlin, are all physically secluded, preventing someone on the street from easily viewing the practices or people within. Beyond the built environment, the space-making practices engaged especially by female artists and organizers indicate that a built environment alone cannot guarantee a particular feeling of privacy, safety, trust, or freedom. In other words, built environments are affective, but their affectivity shifts based on the other entities with which it becomes arranged, including bodies, behaviors, and discourses. The use of guest lists and a door guard, entities that many might argue are constrictive, has been shown to benefit feminist space-makers in ways that parallel queer space-makers in Haifa who often rely on the same resources. It bears mentioning that hip-hop events in Ramallah do attract queer Palestinians as well as in Haifa. As a grounded theory project, the presence of queer Palestinians in the hip-hop scene in Ramallah did not emerge as a recurring topic. However, it is my belief that the physical spaces of secluded publics, the reputation of hip-hop as a new and edgy cultural form, and the collective desire for privacy,

158 safety, and trust, allow hip-hop events to be radically open to new groups and individuals. To use the language of affective arrangements, “affective arrangements lure individuals into their positions by providing opportunities for attachment” (Slaby et al., 2019, p. 9). By utilizing secluded publics as one element in the cultivation of private, safe, and trusting space, hip-hop space-makers, whether knowingly or not, lure new participants by providing those same

“opportunities for attachment” often denied in other spaces.

The one exception to this tendency to rely on physical places, specifically secluded publics is the Boiler Room show which took place in an outdoor space and which was broadcast globally, opening up the question of who could be viewing the attendees and artists. This difference in space calls for different analytic tools to unpack the significance of such an event for Palestinian identity formation, especially if we are to understand identity formation in terms of affect, emerging through the cultivation of a feeling of belonging within a particular arrangement. Such an analysis is beyond the scope of this chapter, but should be a priority for

Palestine studies scholars in an era where Palestinian cultural practices increasingly rely on digital technology. Thus, it is my belief that digital communication mechanisms, specifically the internet, social media, and media sharing services, allow for Palestinians outside of Israel-

Palestine to identify as Palestinians in ways that are more intersectional than the narrow nationalisms of corporate television. However, as a matter of academic practice, such conjecture can only be validated through research grounded in places beyond Israel-Palestine. For example, the Berlin-Ramallah connection discussed in relation to ETV, Boiler Room, and music glocalization cannot just be studied from Ramallah. Studying hip-hop from the perspective of affective arrangements benefits from a reliance on a single physical place, as I do throughout this

159 dissertation, but this chapter gestures towards the need to start mapping the different elements of affective arrangements that rely on digital spaces to involve Palestinians in collectivities.

This chapter also furthers our thinking on mobility and visibility regimes as they relate to and animate hip-hop practices. Every city in Israel-Palestine has differing mobility and visibility regimes, and the regimes that constrict the use of public space seem particularly salient to hip- hop practitioners. The preceding chapter introduced mobility and visibility regimes in relationship to the intersections of sexual identity and ethnicity, specifically how queer

Palestinians navigate mobility and visibility regimes that constrict their spatial opportunities in public spaces. Key to that navigation was the arrival at the hip-hop venue and the shift, through a checkpoint of sorts, into a different regime. This chapter builds on those insights by mapping a different set of power relations and mechanisms of containment, specifically the uniquely overlapping mechanisms of the Israeli army and the Palestinian Authority police used to regulate and constrict uses of public space. Beyond the overtly political mechanisms used to affect mobility and visibility regimes, this chapter further expanded on the sociocultural practices used in Ramallah to enforce a patriarchal, sexist mobility and visibility regime that dictates how women should appear in and utilize public spaces. We could frame mobility and visibility regimes in relation to affective arrangements, specifically highlighting how feelings of comfort, safety, or belonging depend on particular mobility and visibility regimes. Different elements in a mobility and visibility regime, including sociocultural practices and behaviors, discourses about space and belonging, and surveillance practices, could easily be mapped as elements in an affective arrangement. Alternatively, we might suggest that a mobility and visibility regime is itself an affective arrangement.

160 In both this and the preceding chapter, what we begin to identify is a contradictory relationship between prevailing mobility and visibility regimes or affective arrangements in public spaces defined by hegemonic power relations on one hand, and the specific form and function of hip-hop spaces, especially secluded publics, on the other. The space-making practices of Ramallah’s hip-hop scene both respond to extant forms of spatial oppression and elaborate new ideas for the use of public space, including secluded publics. For Enter the Void’s work, the space-making practices they employed were a direct response to the precarity of public spaces intended for youth cultural practices, a precarity that ETV connected directly to militarism and policing. For feminist space-makers, the same holds true, where the cultivation of hip-hop spaces was seen as a direct response to the sexist constrictions on public space they faced, especially through street harassment. Perhaps, what makes the hip-hop spaces in Ramallah and elsewhere so alluring, including to groups commonly marginalized in mainstream hip-hop like queer people and women, is that they offer the promise of belonging to people who are too often told they do not belong in other public spaces. The next chapter takes up a similar line of thought, focused instead on Palestinian men and masculinity, arguing that the prevailing mixed city and coexistence discourses in Jerusalem render Palestinian masculinity abhorrent and violent, thus constricting how male Palestinian rappers perform their gender. By contrast, Arab-organized mixed events in secluded publics offer those rappers room for expression not otherwise permitted in public.

161 CHAPTER 3:

The Forced Trade-Offs of Mixed Cities: Palestinian Masculinities and the Pursuit of

Coexistence in Jerusalem

I. Introduction

Jerusalem’s historic global iconicity extends perhaps most prominently from its positioning as the religious center of the world, home to holy sites from three of the world’s major religions. As a home to significant amounts of religious history, both stories long past and buildings still standing, Jerusalem (Al Quds in Arabic) attracts the fascinations and cultural projections of people around the world. Today, Jerusalem is certainly one of the most important cultural centers in Israel. Historic sites, museums new and old, and event spaces ranging from art galleries to music venues are all complemented by a major tourism industry that attracts everyone from religious pilgrims to thrill seekers. Alongside its attraction to foreign travelers and its rapid growth of (gentrification-driven) mixed-use commercial/social/residential neighborhoods is a reputation for appealing to religious families. It is not uncommon to hear people in other cities in

Israel-Palestine remark about how Jerusalem attracts the religiously devout, Israeli and

Palestinian, Jewish, Muslim, and Christian. While it is hard to assess those claims, there are aspects of Jerusalem that can easily stand out to those who feel they are true. For one, the mechanisms of Israeli occupation take on particular religious significance in Jerusalem, with religious sites often targeted by both the Israeli military and police and Palestinians protesting myriad Israeli policies and practices (Heller, 2018; Jaradat, 2019). Jerusalem also has large number of religious conservatives for a city of its size, and numerous accommodations are made to Orthodox Jews in the city. Private bus lines cater to those who prefer men and women sit separately and Jerusalem sees large street and neighborhood-based driving bans during Yom

162 Kippur, a practice typically reserved for Jewish settlements and non-mixed cities. For Christians, residents, clergy, and travelers alike, Jerusalem is home to multiple significant Christian sites that collectively drive a massive Christian tourism industry (Ben Zion). Perhaps the most iconic religious space is that of Haram Al-Sharif, the raised courtyard upon which rests Al-Aqsa

Mosque (referred to in English as the Dome of the Rock), and on one side of which is the

Western Wall, known to Jews as having been part of the Second Jewish Temple built by Herod the Great. This place has been subject to contestation through so many means and across so many platforms and in ways that manifest ethno-religious identity and history within and through place.

Jerusalem’s contemporary global iconicity extends as well from its symbolic and strategic position within the fight between a Palestinian call for self-determination and Israeli claims to a

Jewish homeland. On a symbolic level, Jerusalem is still actively claimed as the historic capital of Israel and Palestine by different groups of people (Fisher, 2017). On the level of language (Al

Quds vs. Jerusalem; Haram Al Sharif /Al-Aqsa/The Dome of the Rock vs. The Temple Mount, street names), the city is contested through competing attempts to portray the city as belonging to particular peoples and histories. After wars in 1948 and again in 1967, Jerusalem remained politically contested, still claimed by Palestinians and Israelis alike as the rightful capital of their respective countries. After the Six Day War, the United Nations and many individual member countries reasserted the belief that Jerusalem’s administration should be shared by Israelis and

Palestinians (or in some cases, by international administration), and consequently established their embassies in Israel in Tel Aviv. The question of Jerusalem’s status, relative to a one or two state solution, is one of the most enduring and intractable dimensions of the occupation and proposed “peace processes” (Elgindy, 2018). United States president Donald Trump’s decision

163 to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, a de facto recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, was consequently met with international criticism, portrayed as contributing to an already intractable conflict (United Nations, 2017). Jerusalem thus takes on not only the religious projections of Jews, Muslims, and Christians mentioned above, but the intersecting political projections of Israelis and Palestinians who view Jerusalem as a crucial symbolic and strategic holding.

Jerusalem is fundamentally a mixed city, especially when considered from the perspective of hip-hop practices. However, on a purely geopolitical level, Jerusalem is not so easily defined.

Jerusalem has multiple parts existing at different scales. The division of East and West Jerusalem is one important separation, (re)established after Israel annexed Jerusalem and some surrounding villages after the Six Day War in 1967. The 70,000 Palestinians in then-established East

Jerusalem were designated “permanent residents” of Israel. Today, Israel continues to expand settlements into parts of East Jerusalem, which often involves seizures of Palestinian homes

(Goldenburg, 2020). Despite facing different visibility-mobility regimes than Palestinians in the

West Bank and despite having access to some social services in Israel, East Jerusalemites are not citizens of Israel, cannot vote in national elections, do not have passports, and experience a uniquely precarious status as such. For many Palestinians living in refugee camps in East

Jerusalem, access to Israeli social services ranges from constricted to non-existent. Places like Shu'fat refugee camp, home of Muhammad “Jabid” Mughrabi, founder of the JABID hip- hop collective, rely primarily on service provision from the United Nations Relief and Works

Agency (UNRWA). Consequently, many East Jerusalem residents and organizations routinely hold demonstrations and do advocacy work to get the right to citizenship in Israel for East

Jerusalemites and to halt settlement expansion and home seizures (Estrin, 2018).

164 In Jerusalem, residential neighborhoods are mostly de facto segregated, especially between

East and West Jerusalem (Schaeffer, 2014; Yacobi & Pullan, 2014), with certain areas of the city implicitly designated as Arab or Israeli. Arguably, those areas can sometimes be quite small, with a movement of a couple blocks revealing a new demographic of residents. With that rapidly changing makeup of residents in Jerusalem, the cultural practices therein, and social scenes and nightlife specifically, often take on dimensions of mixing (of people) and hybridity (of cultural practices and products). Many of the most popular and hip restaurants, clubs, parks, and shopping centers are all filled with Palestinians and Israelis alike. The hip-hop scene in the city is no exception, with aspects of mixing, hybridity, and collaboration more prominent to me in comparison with hip-hop scenes in other Israeli mixed cities like Haifa. This is not to suggest that mixed hip-hop spaces and events do not exist in Haifa, but simply that hybridity and mixing play a different, more prominent role in the music, events, and identities of Palestinians practicing hip-hop in Jerusalem’s scene. A large body of literature has dealt with “mixed cities” in Palestine studies, and I add to that literature by looking specifically at hip-hop practices in relationship to different types of mixing and their attendant framings vis-a-vis notions of coexistence.

The hip-hop scene in Jerusalem is quite expansive, including many people, places, and spaces. Some of the most well-established artists, like Muhammad “Jabid” Mughrabi and Abu

Baker, hail from and perform regularly in Jerusalem. Mughrabi’s JABID collective has included multiple artists (Raed Bassem and Muzi Raps prominently among them) and helped mentor others in music production. As in other cities, the hip-hop and EDM scenes overlap considerably, with some artists, like DJ Spinoza, and places, like the Ha-Mazkeka venue, considered to be a part of both scenes. Artists in Jerusalem benefit from well-established music infrastructure not

165 present in many other cities. While Mughrabi has built a gorgeous home studio in his Shu'fat family apartment, other artists, like Abu Baker, record in commercial studios, including the historic Sabreen Studios in East Jerusalem. Hip-hop events typically take place in two main ways in Jerusalem. As with other cities, Jerusalem has a large number of hip-hop shows at smaller venues, clubs and bars, that occur multiple times in a normal week. Unlike most other cities, Jerusalem has a comparably high number of larger, typically outdoor music events.

As I will discuss, this plays into the question of hybridity and mixing. Smaller events are easier to produce and market as distinctly Arab or Palestinian, which might include publishing promotional materials in Arabic and hosting at Arab-owned venues. Larger, outdoor, more public events, which can pay more than smaller shows, are typically mixed, and overwhelmingly do not engage with the explicit discussions or position-taking regarding the occupation and/or

Palestinian identity and culture. For Palestinian artists looking to make a career out of their music, this prompts important and difficult questions regarding where, for who, and how to perform.

Everything mentioned here about Jerusalem affects hip-hop practices and their attendant meanings. From its historic religious iconicity to its contemporary political significance, from the varying geopolitical constrictions faced by Palestinians across the city to the continued mixing of

Israeli and Palestinian residents, and from its more recent hip-hop aspirations to its established music studios, so much factors into the goals of hip-hop artists, the needs of hip-hop consumers, and the forms hip-hop events take on in Jerusalem. This chapter seeks to unpack some of those dynamics as they reflect the relationship between geography and masculine identity formation as expressed through hip-hop practices. I begin the chapter with a brief review of existing scholarly and journalistic framings of coexistence narratives and mixed cities, scholarship which promotes

166 the individual and collective opportunities of mixed cities in Israel in contrast to the documented geopolitical inequalities faced by Palestinian men in mixed cities. That review is intended to foreground a number of questions of importance to Palestinian hip-hop artists in a mixed city like Jerusalem: How do different notions of mixing align with coexistence narratives? Do those notions of mixing serve to silence any recognition of Palestinian suffering or structural critiques of the occupation? Do notions of mixing align with binary notions of (Palestinian) tradition and

(Israeli) modernity, favoring the latter while erasing the former? What type of masculinity is imagined and constructed for the “ideal” Palestinian resident of a mixed city?

That review and the questions it evokes find answers in the ensuing section, grounded in interviews with two artists and an analysis of their practices in the Jerusalem hip-hop scene.

First, I begin with a brief history of two artists who align themselves with coexistence narratives and associated cultural practices, events, and spaces. Muzi Raps is one such artist, promoting himself as the “first ever peace rapper” in Palestine, and drawing some criticism from Palestinian fans for his perceived (a)political stances. Saz is another rapper, self-described as the “first Arab sex symbol” (Vice, 2015), who embraces traditional Palestinian musical and dress traditions, while also embodying global notions of the male playboy celebrity. Second, I outline how Muzi and Saz face a set of forced trade-offs to be successful in the more lucrative Israeli music scene, trade-offs that limit men’s ability to perform aspects of their intersecting masculine and

Palestinian identities, both on and off stage. Third, I draw out key themes in the cultural politics of both artists, highlighting how a focus on individual mindset change and a bootstraps approach to success couple with the promotion of a humanistic approach to identity focused on collectivity, commonality, and a shared love of music. Finally, I look to two event series, the

Corner Prophets and Monolingua as productive examples of mixed hip-hop events with radical

167 potential that provide space for Palestinian masculinities not deemed permissible elsewhere in the public sphere. The chapter concludes with a return to the questions above, critically reflecting on the limits of coexistence and whether notions of coexistence and mixing can be resuscitated through cultural practices in an attempt to bolster a decolonial, pro-Palestinian politics that allows room for Palestinian men to express and perform diverse masculinities.

II. The Geopolitics of Mixed Cities

The term mixed cities came into usage within Israel to describe typically urban cities in which a Jewish majority exists alongside a sizeable Palestinian minority. There is no official percentage of a city’s population required to designate it as a mixed city, but there is little disagreement about what cities might fall under the umbrella of the term. Typically, a list of mixed cities includes Jerusalem, Acre, Haifa, Jaffa, Ramle, and Lod (Choshen, 2013). Some newer cities that were built intentionally under government direction after 1948 to balance the

Palestinian majority population in neighboring cities, such as Upper Nazareth bordering

Nazareth proper, have since seen large numbers of Palestinians move in, making them mixed cities in many senses of the term. Other cities and smaller towns have developed as intentional living communities for Israeli and Palestinian families to participate equally in most aspects of city life, such as Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Estimates range that between ten and twenty-five percent of Palestinians in Israel live in mixed cities

(Choshen), with that number on the rise steadily in some cities. Mixed cities have a controversial place in Israeli, Palestinian, and global cultural imaginaries, with some people viewing them as representing a cooperative political future, others as proof that cooperation is impossible, and others that mixed cities and coexistence narratives represent a form of political whitewashing.

168 Some people prefer to live in mixed cities, finding other options untenable, while others try as much as possible to avoid mixed cities.

This section begins with a theme in both popular and scholarly literature on mixed cities that positions them as offering a set of positive opportunities, individual and collective, that can help society and the nation progress within and beyond the city limits. The section then turns to critiques of mixed cities as not presenting unique or progressive opportunities to Palestinians.

Here I highlight how geopolitical realities for Palestinians in mixed cities reframe notions of mixing/mixed as always fractured and incomplete signifiers, ones that contrast with segregated urban spaces and a disparate extension of rights and resources. The negative perceptions of coexistence held by many Palestinians often correspond with their disenfranchisement within mixed cities, an actual lack of opportunity which prompts regular returns to Palestinian majority cities to access that which is denied them in mixed cities. Further, as I will explain, the realities of mixed cities for Palestinians cannot be understood outside of the gendered politics of the occupation, politics which construct Arab masculinity as abhorrent, anachronistic, and violent.

The section concludes with a turn to hip-hop in Jerusalem, explaining how the geopolitics of mixed cities are a hip-hop concern, with certain opportunities existing in contrast to certain restraints, and male rappers left to navigate the tension between them.

Mixed Cities as Opportunities

A. Individual Opportunities: Identity and Everyday Choice

On the individual level, many of the opportunities desired by Palestinians who relocate to mixed cities and experienced by those who live there pertain to identity, specifically gender and sexual identity. Literature on mixed cities occasionally points to the greater range of opportunities available to Palestinians in those cities calculated in terms of the daily practices

169 and choices made by gender and sexual minorities. Certainly, the Orientalist and Islamophobic framings of Palestinians as culturally and socially anachronistic and oppressive that have contributed to the pinkwashing and whitewashing of the daily mechanisms of occupation should give us pause here, and the preceding two chapters highlighted some of the Palestinian queer and feminine/ist work and hip-hop practices in Haifa (a mixed city) and Ramallah. Nonetheless, for many Palestinians living in mixed cities, the cultural, social, and political diversity offered therein means more options for the expression of their own sexual and gender identities. Hanna

Herzog (2009), through interviews with twenty-five Palestinian women living in mixed cities including Jerusalem, demonstrated how those women described quotidian choices, what Herzog contextualizes within feminist scholarship on the “politics of the everyday,” as a key characteristic of their lives in mixed cities. One respondent, Dima, described her experience of a mixed city in terms of daily choices:

Here you choose. You came to live here and you can choose who you want. People who

suit your way of thinking, your views, your ideology, so its already a matter of choice

and not coercion…Here you can decide which friends to choose, which neighbors to

visit…what to cook, whether to cook… (p. 7).

Herzog (2009) contrasts the element of choice as a matter of everyday politics with the ongoing realities of occupation and a predominate ethnonational state, but suggests those realities “are underscored, and often reconfirmed, in the women’s stories of their decisions, their struggles, and the price they pay” living in a mixed city (p. 19, Emphasis Added). What is highlighted, then, within Herzog’s work is a politics of “individual rebellion that does not set off revolutions” (p. 19), what I interpret as a non-intersectional feminist politics divorced from decolonization movements. Feminist space-makers in mixed cities certainly engage in a politics

170 of the everyday, engaging in “acts of small-scale politics that take place in everyday life [which] exploit the cracks that exist in urban spaces and in power arrangements as a way of generating change” (p. 19), but they can do so in ways that are more overtly connected to decolonial and feminist movement building, to the (re-) establishment of Palestinian cultural spaces, and to cultural glocalization that reasserts the salience of Palestinian traditions as we saw in Ramallah. However, as this chapter will highlight, those intersectional politics are often ignored in mainstream media or re-framed as a form of feminist progress only possible in Israeli mixed cities and, consequently, divorced from Palestinians’ decolonial critiques of Israel and the occupation.

The above discussion of the politics of the everyday and opportunities for women could similarly apply to sexual identity, expression, and opportunities within mixed cities. Many queer

Palestinians I have met in mixed cities in Israel who have relocated from Palestinian majority cities elsewhere in Israel express a preference for their new homes in terms of sexual freedoms and the queer social scene. Larger personal networks of queer Palestinians, more spaces that are inclusive of queer cultural practices, and the increased likelihood that heterosexual youth are supportive of their queer friends are three main elements that make mixed cities appealing to queer Palestinians. The ability to express or perform aspects of your sexuality while maintaining

Palestinian spaces and cultural practices is not unique to mixed cities, but in contrast to the heavily segregated Tel Aviv, where the highly-lauded gay friendly culture marginalizes and excludes Palestinian gay men (Ritchie, 2010), other mixed cities can appear preferable to many queer Palestinians. Music spaces like Kabareet and Scene Bar in Haifa or Ha-Mazkeka in

Jerusalem cultivate atmospheres and support cultural practices that are both Palestinian and queer.

171 Nonetheless, much as with the preceding discussion of gender and choice in mixed cities, the opportunities afforded queer Palestinians in mixed cities often do not address the specificity of their Palestinian identities. Events, like pride parades or history festivals, and places, like newly established gay bars, routinely divorce sexual politics from decolonial politics, unless those events and spaces are designed with Palestinian input or ownership. Mixed cities are arguably more likely to hold events like pride parades than Palestinian majority cities (Matar,

2018). Numerous news articles detail the ways in which Jerusalem, Haifa, and Lyd are challenging Tel Aviv’s position as the “gay mecca” in Israel. Arnon Allouche, director of an

LGBTQ center in Haifa, described their perception that, “all the young gay people in this city who want to live openly view Tel Aviv as virtually their only option” (Maltz, 2018). The Haaretz article quoting Allouche covered Israel’s first Queer History Festival, celebrating, in part, that the festival was a queer first that was uniquely not held in Tel Aviv. The author, Julie Maltz, lauded the mixed nature of Haifa, describing the city as “a model of coexistence – a rare example of a city where Jews and Arabs live peacefully side by side,” but never used the term Arab again and never quoted from any Palestinians.

Not all mixed cities are alike, however, and Jerusalem is not perceived to be as queer- friendly as Haifa or Tel Aviv. In Jerusalem, a pride parade in 2015 saw six participants stabbed by a conservative Jewish man who had previously attacked the parade in 2005. Since then, participation in the annual parade has grown, with near to 15,000 attendees at 2019’s event

(Snelling, 2019). In 2019, a gay orthodox rabbi was ordained in Jerusalem, after being “denied ordination by a liberal seminary in New York... breaking a longstanding taboo against homosexuality in the Orthodox community” (Sokol, 2019). Certainly, Jerusalem is not the same as the purported “gay mecca” of Tel Aviv. Despite a growing LGBTQ population in the city,

172 “the gay community's visibility in conservative Jerusalem tends to draw vocal protest from members of the city's substantial Orthodox population” (Debre, 2019). As Satchie Snellings, describes, “the city is home to one gay bar and, like all Israelis, the residents are privy to extensive LGBT rights. The challenge in Jerusalem is the presence of homophobia in the city, especially in regard to the ultra-Orthodox community, and the suggestion that, in Jerusalem, homosexuality should remain a bit more covert.”

As my study in Haifa suggested, mainstream media coverage of queer cultural practices in mixed cities, even in liberal Israeli outlets like Haaretz, consistently ignore the Palestinians whose very presence is needed to make a city mixed, with few capturing the role Palestinians have consistently played in queer life and politics. The presence of Palestinians in mixed cities is presented not as a central element in the cities’ cultural and political life, but as an aside or afterthought, a set of lucky participants implicitly assimilating into an otherwise Israeli and

Jewish social milieu. The message this omission sends is that any freedoms achieved within mixed cities for women or queer individuals are a result of work by Israelis, occurring despite, not because of, the Palestinians there. What female and queer Palestinians are left with in mixed cities, then, is certain increased individual opportunities that require identity-based trade-offs, namely the separation of one’s Palestinian identity from their gender or sexual identities, trade- offs that effectively preempt a revolutionary, decolonial politics.

B. The Collective Opportunity of Coexistence

In some mixed cities, Palestinians live in neighborhoods that are nearly entirely Palestinian, go to social and cultural spaces that are similarly populated and organized by Palestinians, go to schools that only have Palestinian students, work at Palestinian owned businesses, and otherwise live their lives in geographically and socially Palestinian spaces. However, in most cases, mixed

173 cities have mixed neighborhoods and countless mixed spaces, from parks, to trains to popular eateries (Black, 2018). Consequently, a large swath of research on mixed cities has addressed the topic of coexistence, a floating signifier used to describe everything from periods of comparatively low violence between Israelis and Palestinians to instances of collaboration, cooperation, or collectivity between the same groups. Despite its lack of fixity, coexistence is not loved by all in mixed cities. “Not everyone agrees with the concept, of course, and the ‘c’ word is often qualified, placed in inverted commas, or simply dismissed as propaganda”

(Black). Nonetheless, mixed cities become templates for future planning as well as political laboratories where policies and practices that might impact the nation on a larger scale may be developed and tested. Moreover, the makeup of mixed cities (in)forms cultural practices that differentially involve Israelis and Palestinians, often in the same places, and sometimes as co- planners or organizers. Thus, dominant framings and perceptions of coexistence often promote mixed cities as offering a collective opportunity for rethinking national belonging and Israeli

(and Palestinian) futurity.

Across articles focused on coexistence in mixed cities, one can perceive an investment and faith in the collective opportunity offered by those cities. If, people say, Israelis and

Palestinians can live near each other, use the same public spaces, work at the same jobs, shop in the same places, and generally have regular and peaceful contact with each other, then their experience can become a model for other. Consequently, any failures of people to coexist in mixed cities produces the opposite belief, that of the unavoidability and intractability of conflict on multiple scales. When reviewing four prominent scholarly texts on mixed cities in

Israel, Erez Tzfadia (2011) noted how popular fascination with mixed cities relates to their

(perceived) political potential:

174 Over the past decade, discourse on "mixed cities" - an Israeli term for urban localities

occupied by both Jewish and Arab communities - has been at the crux of social science

scholarship in Israel. There are two reasons for this emergent interest. First, there is a

growing awareness of the fact that cities are hubs for national socio-political relations.

From this perspective, mixed cities reflect interactions between Jew's and Arabs on a

national scale while simultaneously generating distinctive local discourses that challenge

national perceptions. (p. 153)

Alexander Shapiro (2018), writing about Lod/Lyd in The Times of Israel, invested the city with such potential as a hub for developing a future national politics:

Lod, located just twenty minutes outside Tel Aviv, is much more than this. It is one of the

few remaining places in Israel that could provide a model for effective Arab-Jewish

shared society. It represents a microcosm of Israel as a whole, containing mirror images

of the country’s diverse populations, history, struggles, and opportunities...It can provide

a model for the Israeli society it mirrors to move forward. But if shared society fails in

Lod, there may be few others places it can be born.

Gideon Levy (2019) similarly sees mixed cities as having a potential, stressing how, “We should also recall that there are genuine mini-examples of genuine living together in near-equality. The mixed cities in Israel might serve as an example of what might be possible. Haifa might provide a model for the future – not perfect, but certainly possible.”

Despite the focus on mixed cities as invested with individual (identity-based) and collective (coexistence-based) opportunities and as template for future development outside of the city, many voices are critical of such an approach, insistent that blind faith in coexistence masks the inequalities faced by Palestinians in Israel. In the vein of that critique, Isabella

175 Humphries (2009), writing for the Washington Report on Middle Eastern Affairs, describes coexistence as a meaningless term:

’Coexistence’ between Israel’s Palestinian and Jewish citizens is an empty notion indeed,

part of the ‘democratic’ image Israel projects in its ongoing international public relations

offensive…Yet any study of Israel’s “mixed cities” reveals that contrary to serving as

models of coexistence, cities like Acre and Jaffa present a microcosm of the state as a

whole—a space in which Palestinians are increasingly marginalized and excluded from

the benefits of the state of which they supposedly are citizens.

Mixing/Mixed: Curtailed Opportunities and Perceptions of Coexistence

Many things do get overlooked when thinking about cities in terms of mixing, which activists and scholars have identified in relation to absences of political, economic, or social opportunities and rights experienced by Palestinians in mixed cities. Mixing is never a completed process, despite the fixity of the term mixed. Mixing of Palestinians and Israelis, when thought of in social terms, might ebb and flow throughout the day depending on what daily tasks are being completed and in what spaces. Some days or times of year might bring a lot of mixing, such as at a grocery store before Shabbat or a high holiday. Conversely, physical clashes between the Israeli military and Palestinians can easily affect a retreat of Palestinians and Israelis from many spaces of frequent mixing almost instantly, such as shopping malls and public transport, due to fear of attacks for some or indiscriminate state harassment for others. Thinking in terms of language, it might be more appropriate to describe these as “mixing cities” rather than “mixed cities” (Nathanson, 2017).

One way to understand the incomplete and complicated degree of mixing in mixed cities is in the diverse perceptions of coexistence held by different residents of Israel and their

176 relationship to geopolitical inequality. In one study conducted across five mixed cities in Israel on perceptions of coexistence, Ghazi Falah, Michael Hoy, and Rakhal Sarker (2000) identified some of those differences of perception. Whereas Palestinians who reported negative perceptions of coexistence were typically low-income, did not own homes, and also reported discrimination in municipal services, when Israelis reported a negative perception of coexistence, it corresponded with extreme political views against Palestinians. Unfortunately, like many scholars, the conclusions of Falah, Hoy, and Sarker do not provide solutions that adequately address the structural nature of occupation and the relationship of those structures to one’s perception of coexistence. The authors do concede of extremist Israelis that “one cannot be very optimistic about changing extreme political views to a significant degree” (p. 793). However, they locate those views outside of the very structures of the Israeli state, and therefore have no trouble re-investing in that same state. The authors thus write:

Our results suggest that the best way to promote and consolidate the perception of

positive co-existence among Arabs in ‘mixed’ cities is to provide necessary municipal

services in a fair and non-discriminatory manner. This can be ensured within the existing

administrative structure if policies are introduced to hear Arab complaints related to

municipal services and to take immediate measures to deal with those problems. (p. 792-

93, emphasis added)

The reductive nature of implying coexistence would be perceived better by Palestinians if not for a few bad municipal workers is certainly disheartening, as is the naivety of assuming such policies were not already in place yet rarely enforced. This is because a focus on perceptions of coexistence often elides a focus on the structural inequalities that cause those very perceptions and the continued inability for the Israeli state to be an efficacious mechanism of redress for

177 injury done to Palestinians in Israel. As a result, the solutions proposed by proponents of coexistence typically fault individuals for maintaining negative views of the other, instead of institutions for maintaining relations of structural inequality. This is one tension that continues to track in popular writing on coexistence in Israel, the idea that coexistence is impossible because of either the extant structures of occupation and erasure or the angry Palestinian men who simply dislike Israelis and Israeli society and refuse to just get along. This second explanation, that of the angry Arab man who’s unwavering focus on ethnicity and religion is anachronistic, violent, and threatening to modernity (namely diversity and coexistence), plays into settler colonial logics that utilize that image to justify ongoing occupation.

Palestinian Masculinities and Hip-Hop in Jerusalem

Early scholarship on masculinity grew out of women’s studies programs and was based on a shared commitment to de-center men as the unmarked norm in scholarship. Critiquing the binary division between “research” and “research on women,” scholars sought to apply the same insights about the socially constructed origins of gender identity that had been used to discuss women to scholarship on men. This turn towards what has been termed critical masculinities positions masculinities as socially constructed, subject to (re)construction, multiple, and particular, rather than the previous framing of masculinity as universal, static, and essential.

Despite this trend in critical masculinities, scholars still identify the made-to-be-desired forms of masculinity that appear dominant or ubiquitous as “hegemonic masculinity” and “traditional masculinity” (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005). Connell’s groundbreaking work on masculinity

(1997; & Messerschmidt, 2005) has usefully elaborated masculinity not as something tied to male bodies, but as a system of meaning making in which multiple bodies participate. Connell’s rendering of hegemonic masculinity portrays hegemony as always incomplete, “always [re-

178 ]constructed in relation to various subordinated masculinities as well as in relation to women”

(1987, p. 183). More specifically, building on scholarship about violence against women, scholars have drawn attention to forms of masculinity that contribute to the oppression of women, namely “patriarchal masculinity”, or that contribute to harm to the self and others, including “toxic masculinity.” Finally, intersectionality has been a key framework in critical masculinities, as scholars locate masculine identity formation within systems of racial, ethnic, and national identity, among others (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005; Kimmel, 2010;

Whitehead, 2002). Within the field of Palestine studies, detailed and grounded studies of

Palestinian masculinities are lacking. However, scholars have integrated critical masculinities concepts and theories into their work on Palestine in ways that animate my investigation of hip- hop in Jerusalem.

Scholarship on Palestinian masculinities often takes as its starting point the various upheavals of Palestinian society that took place via settler colonial policies, including 1948,

1967, or the First and Second Intifada as turning points in the construction of hegemonic

Palestinian masculinity (Peteet, 1994; MacKenzie & Foster, 2017; Muhana, 2013; Shalhoub-

Kevorkian, 2011; Spielberg, Dajani, & Abdallah, 2016). Key to these analyses have been a description of how new colonial policies and practices directly upset the established gender order among Palestinians. It is important to note that Palestine was not free of sexism before the Israeli occupation. However, some scholars have identified how masculinity and violence became increasingly linked among Palestinians as a direct result of the occupation (Peteet; Shalhoub-

Kevorkian). More broadly, scholars have asserted that the occupation, through a range of policies that left many Palestinians poor, unemployed, and under-resourced, ultimately denied Palestinian men the ability to perform traditionally male duties, including familial ones like father and

179 breadwinner, and nationalist ones like the protector and defender of the homeland. Taraki described this trend in 2006 as a “crisis of the breadwinners,” a term which other scholars have adopted (Abu Naleh, 2006; McDonald, 2013). In Aitemad Muhana’s study of family gender roles in Gaza after the Second Intifada, she describes how:

Gazan men and women have never in their contemporary history experienced such

fundamental changes within the family and across their wider society. Many men feel

they have become valueless, with no role in life, whilst their women, in a fundamental

reversal of traditional Gazan family gender norms, have been forced to work or volunteer

outside the home as they search for sources of household survival…the Second Intifada

has repositioned both men and women’s selfhood in crisis. They have been forced to act

in ways contradictory to their moral perceptions of their gendered selves. (p. 129)

While based in Gaza, her analysis resonates in studies conducted elsewhere, including in

Jerusalem (Spielberg, Dajani, & Abdallah, 2016; Greenberg, 2009) and in the diaspora (Hart,

2008). The removal of Palestinian men from their traditional roles has resulted in a number of effects for Palestinian men looking to reclaim a masculine identity in the face of the occupation.

While I am hesitant about the language of a “crisis” of masculinity and the potential implication that a return to traditional masculinity can yield decolonial transformation, the effects of this change are detrimental to Palestinian men and women. Megan MacKenzie and Alana Foster

(2017) explained how a longing for traditional masculinity emerges among oppressed peoples, arguing that, “war and occupation create the conditions for masculinity nostalgia, or a yearning for a set of gender norms and relations linked to fantasies of a secure, traditional and ordered past. This masculinity nostalgia places pressure on men and also adds to men’s experience of victimhood and inadequacy in relation to the conflict” (p. 207). MacKenzie and Foster reiterated

180 the relationship of family roles, like father and breadwinner, to Palestinian masculinities, but further asserted that landowner is an additional masculine role uniquely denied to many by the practices of occupation.

As a feminist scholar, I am invested in thinking through how women are affected by these sorts of masculine nostalgia and desires for return, and am indebted to those who have engaged in that thinking. If nationalism is a frame through which many Palestinians craft resistant identities, then it is important to ask how nationalist aspirations take on gendered characteristics, or put differently, how women figure in the future imagined in nationalist movements. Joseph

Massad (2009) has suggested that nationalist movements, even ones that are anti-colonial in nature, still replicate the gendered order of their colonial counterparts, centering men as the stewards of the nation:

Although anti-colonial nationalist agency defines itself in opposition to European

nationalism, it does not escape implication within the same narrative The metaphor of the

nation as mother- or fatherland, the practice of defending and administering it with

homosocial institutions like the military and the bureaucracy, and the gendered strategies

of reproducing not only the nation and its nationalist agents, but also the very national

culture defining it, were all constitutive of the [Palestinian] national discourse…History

shows that other revolutions have foundered on “national first, women after” strategy; it

is not too soon to ask this question of Palestine and its vision of a post-colonial future. (p.

468-69)

This dissertation takes Massad’s provocation seriously and the preceding chapters have worked to highlight how intersectional approaches to Palestinian identity formation are more productive than narrowly nationalist ones. I would add here that the failure to engage in intersectional

181 thinking contributes to the coding of nationalism as a masculine endeavor and domain. Thus, I am cautious about the temporal dimensions of nationalist masculinity as a return to the past or a nostalgia wherein a “national first, woman after” logic can prevail. As MacKenzie and Foster

(2017) argued, masculinity nostalgia emphasizes the ways that yearnings for peace and security can be interwoven with yearnings for patriarchal gendered orders” (p. 220). Thus, in my discussion of masculinity in this chapter, I remain cautious about how masculinity gets deployed in hip-hop spaces in ways that could marginalize women.

Discussing masculinity in Palestine also involves looking beyond the effects of settler colonialism on gender norms within Palestinian communities to address how Palestinian men, and Arab men more broadly, get positioned in regional and global logics regarding modernity, colonialism, and militarism. Orientalist and neocolonial representations of the Middle East have historically and contemporarily rendered the Arab male as abhorrent, anachronistic, violent, and barbaric, in contrast to the masculinity associated with the modern nation-state. Roberta

Chevrette and Lisa Braverman (2013), analyzing Western media representations of Palestine, argue that:

The trope of the terrorist Other is primarily, although not exclusively, mapped onto male

bodies, rendering them as both feminized and irrationally hyper-masculine in a manner

distinct from the ‘proper’ hyper-masculinity mapped onto Zionist bodies through

gendered, racialized discourses of religion and modernity…This shift in the gendering of

the terrorist is made possible through assemblages of masculinity that present the United

States—and the US–Israeli geopolitical formation that has been the focus of our

analysis—as simultaneously a paternal protector, but also a victim of the terrorists who

seek to threaten ‘our way of life.’ (p. 97-98)

182 Eran Shor’s (2008) study of Palestinian athletes in Israeli sports leagues similarly attests to this dual rendering of Palestinian men as simultaneously hypermasculine and feminine. Shor writes that beginning in the 1930s, depictions of Palestinians in Zionist and then Israeli media portrayed them as “primitive, wild, bloodthirsty, vengeful, and deceitful” (p. 259). According to Shor,

“These hybrid depictions of Arab masculinity can still be found, although somewhat more moderately, in today’s media images…Arab men are largely shown both as hypermasculine— strong, simple, violent, and hypersexual— and as hypomasculine—submissive, cowardly, effeminate, and homosexual” (p. 259). Jasbir Puar (2017) has further argued that these portrayals

“queer” Arab men in ways that benefit a post-9/11 (neo)colonial regime in which the (male) brown terrorist body becomes a justification for military interventionism.

Focusing back on Palestinian hip-hop in Jerusalem, we can further elucidate the significance of hip-hop to a fanbase made up largely of young, Palestinian men. While men during the Nakba experienced an initial upheaval of an already established gender order, young

Palestinian men grow up in a Jerusalem already defined by a near-to-complete settler colonial project. In that upbringing, defined by settler colonial relations, young men are raised in an established culture of a stolen masculinity or masculinity in crisis. According to Spielberg,

Dajani, and Abdallah’s (2016) study of young men and masculinity in East Jerusalem, “The realities of racism and violent oppression— both physical and psychological—take their toll on the spiritual and psychological vitality of young men. The inability to partake in healthy and productive means of masculine expression leads to problems of aggression and control, self- esteem issues, conflicted dependency needs, and racial identity issues” (p. 275). This culture is further exacerbated by the realities of life under occupation, especially in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, where opportunities for advancement and healthy masculine development

183 are lacking, and many young men find themselves unemployed, unable to support a family, and seeking an alternative mechanism for masculine identity formation. One result of this is a turn to new media to fill time and seek out opportunities for masculine identification. Spielberg et al.

(2016) continue to elaborate how young men in East Jerusalem find an outlet through new media, stating that, “Nearly 55% of the respondents in the current study reported spending close to 4 hr a day on the Internet. They have an ‘Internet identity,’ which is largely based on popular music and consumerism… They identify with the music of ‘Black men’ (African Americans) in an area where they can demonstrate and express their own forms of political and psychological resistance to the ‘Occupation’” (p. 275). Another result in the desire to turn to violence as a means of reasserting masculinity. However, “this kind of behavior puts them in jeopardy.

Displays of defiance and assertiveness garner the attention of Israeli security police…The belligerence leads to further humiliation of these Palestinian boys and then greater acts of rebellion and defiance to attempt to repair their shame, lowered self-esteem, and perceived weakness” (Spielberg et al., p. 276). Though unknowingly, Spielberg, Dajani, and Abdallah highlighted a dynamic that runs through literature on Palestinian hip-hop and my own experience of the scene in Jerusalem, namely the positioning of hip-hop music in opposition to violence.

If settler colonial realities afforded Palestinian men limited opportunities for masculine identity formation, violence being primary among them, hip-hop music has been said to offer something different. Coverage of Palestinian hip-hop in scholarship has often contrasted the careers decisions of Palestinian musicians with other young men who “turn to violence” as a means of expression, a contrast contained neatly in the notion of “beats not bombs” (Heim,

2011). While this approach is seemingly reductive, ignoring how violence by Palestinians is not a viable option and how Israel maintains the right to what Chandan Reddy (2011) has called

184 “legitimate (state) violence,” Palestinian rappers have narrated their career choices as an intentional alternative outlet to violence both to me and to other scholars. Elia Greenberg’s

(2009) research on G-Town, an early rap group in Jerusalem’s scene and the group through which Muhammad Mughrabi got his start, is particularly telling in this regard. Greenberg writes that, “In the very emasculating context of the current practices of the occupation, rap has made the members of G-Town feel increasingly masculine in ways that other typical male activities apparently have not. In particular, rapping has enabled G-Town to express their anger against the occupation, something that they are prevented from easily doing in their everyday lives”

(Greenberg, p. 239). Greenberg further contrasts this choice of expression with earlier forms of

Palestinian masculinity defined by political violence and martyrdom: “Whereas during the First

Intifada confrontations with soldiers and beatings endured were construed as empowering, today, it is just the opposite; the occupation humiliates and robs Palestinian men of their most precious characteristic, their rujula [masculinity]” (p. 239, italics in original). The members of G-Town understood their music as a positive outlet for Palestinian men, especially given the lack of other positive outlets and the resulting preoccupation of young Palestinian men with the internet or social media that G-Town perceived as not masculine: “Being critical of those who remain passive to the Israeli occupation and whose masculinity thus becomes questionable is a common theme in G-Town’s rap” (Greenberg, p. 243).

Though G-Town is now defunct, their popularity grew considerably over time, as they performed across the West Bank, Israel, and even internationally. Greenberg (2009) correctly foresaw this increase in popularity and questioned how a shift in audience might affect their music. Greenberg suggested that, “as G-Town begins to rap across the West Bank and before international audiences, changing their sound and their focus, they risk losing their appeal among

185 mainly local young males, desperate for means of hypermasculine expression that helps them survive the realities of Jerusalem’s Palestinian ghettos under occupation” (p. 248). I am particularly drawn to this last conjecture of Greenberg, as it encapsulates a dynamic I address here, namely how audiences and event organizers dictate the options for masculine identity expression, especially for Palestinian artists in the context of Israel. Jerusalem, as a mixed city, offers Palestinian artists the possibility of performing for mixed audiences at shows organized primarily by Israelis. These events can prove more financially lucrative for Palestinian artists than events in the West Bank or in East Jerusalem, but come with a set of trade-offs that I believe reflect the prevailing politics of coexistence that animate the public sphere in mixed cities, of which hip-hop events are a part.

Mixed Cities: A Hip-Hop Concern

Many of the key themes in the literature highlighted above track in interviews with hip- hop artists and hip-hop practices taking place within the city of Jerusalem. Hip-hop artists report

Jerusalem as offering more opportunity than other cities might, including better infrastructure for producing music and more opportunities to perform for money. At the same time, they also report geopolitical discrimination as being a key factor in their desire to produce music and in the daily experiences that inform their music. Many of the hip-hop artists and hip-hop fans in

Jerusalem engage circular mobilities frequently, going to Ramallah or Bethlehem to perform or see shows. The realities of mixed cities, the questions they evoke, and the differences of opinion held towards them, all manifest in hip-hop cultural practices. While many Palestinian hip-hop artists have experienced discriminatory geopolitical policies directed at them because of their identity and profession, not all artists agree about the proper way to utilize cultural practices in relation to that discrimination within the context of a mixed city and mixed economy.

186 One recurring topic across interviews with Jerusalem based artists was their experiences of being targeted by the Israeli state, including police, military, and government ministries. The modes of targeting vary, from forms of physical immobilization that parallel the general immobilization of Palestinians in Israel-Palestine, to specific forms of censorship that artists face due to their particular politics. Regarding physical immobilization, Palestinian hip-hop artists in

Jerusalem are limited in their ability to pursue their art by the extant yet shifting mechanisms of

Israeli containment policies that differentially target Palestinians. One defining feature of Israeli containment policies, especially in Jerusalem, is the degree to which they can shift, even at a moment’s notice, to respond to the similarly shifting modes of spatial entitlement and co- optation Palestinians employ. The Qalandia checkpoint, located south of Ramallah as a major crossing point between Jerusalem and the West Bank, is one example of an extant, yet shifting mechanism of immobilization. The crossing can be closed without prior notice and, in general, does not maintain consistent hours. Jewish holidays can mean a closure, though not always, and

Muslim holidays typically witness the differential permitting of women and children, but exclusion of men, from crossing into Israel to attend prayer at Al-Aqsa Mosque (Fox, 2018).

Within the Old City of Jerusalem, similarly unannounced restrictions on passage can easily shut down access to Al-Aqsa. For residents of East Jerusalem, travelling into West Jerusalem is permitted with some regularity, but can easily be restricted, in ways that target individuals or groups (OCHA, 2016). Thus, for hip-hop artists, attending recording sessions and shows can be precarious endeavors due to the ever-looming threat of potential immobilization.

Palestinian hip-hop artists in Jerusalem are keenly aware of the geopolitical constrictions they face despite living in a mixed city and the differential impact those constrictions have on their identity formation and their hip-hop practices as artists. Muhammad Mughrabi, founder of

187 JABID, a sort-of-collective of artists that collaborate under a shared JABID signature and with a shared musical style, highlighted how geopolitical inequality and constriction impacted his growth as an artist. Since his adolescence, Mughrabi has lived in the Shu'fat refugee camp, designated as technically part of Jerusalem, but without any Israeli services, instead being administered by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. There is a separation barrier between the camp and Jerusalem, which can be closed, yet relatively unfettered access to the

West Bank to the east of the city. Shu'fat was largely built to accommodate Palestinian refugees forced to leave the Old City in 1967, most of whom had been relocated to the Old City in 1948 from cities that then became part of Israel. In his interview with me, when I asked whether he identifies more with Jerusalem or the West Bank, Mughrabi described his identity in relation to his formative experiences in Shu'fat:

I am from Jerusalem. I don’t go to Ramallah to shop or to hang out, I go to Jerusalem. I

identify myself as a person who is from Jerusalem. This is where my family works and

grew up. This is our city. To live here [in Shu'fat], you need to be patient, because this

place is out of control. There is no Israeli control or Palestinian control. There are no

police. It is very dangerous...You need a family to back you up, or a big group of people

to support you to be successful or to be respected in the refugee camp...You can get

soldiers knocking on your door or breaking in to your house when you are in your house

and doing a search without any papers, just because they feel like it. You can get shot by

someone in the street and there are no police to protect you or your house can burn

because there are no fire engines...The ambulances will not come here. You have to go to

Ramallah or you have to cross the checkpoint and they will take care of you from there.

This is very scary.

188 Another major fixture in the city’s hip-hop scene, Muzi Raps, who lives in the Old City, similarly attested to how his targeting by police and arrests were the final factor in his decision to go from a fan to an artist. Before one formative day, Muzi had turned down his twin brother’s requests to form a rap duo together when they were in high school. But then, as Muzi described:

I was coming down to the Old City, and one of the policemen, he asked me for my ID,

like if I was of age. I said, ‘I don’t have an ID. I have a paper that proves that I live in the

Old City.’ And I give it to him and he said ‘No, it’s not real. You are faking your ID.’ He

took me to the police station and I stayed for six hours there. After that, I went back to

my twin brother and said ‘You wanna sing hip-hop? I don’t care. But we are not going to

sing about love and shit...We are gonna do political songs, and I already had one from

those six hours I stayed [in jail].

This idea of geopolitical inequality impacting one’s locational identity in Jerusalem and one’s identity as a Palestinian carries across multiple artists’ accounts of their desire to pursue hip-hop as an artistic profession. In addition to the extant, ongoing mechanisms of geopolitical oppression they face as Palestinians, hip-hop artists can be additionally targeted due to their art.

With lyrics that often critique the Israeli state and occupation and popular concerts that celebrate

Palestinian culture while appealing to global and youth music cultures, hip-hop artists and shows become easy targets for repression and censorship, practices that are implicitly geographic, targeting specific spaces or the movement of specific individuals. Prominent Jerusalem-based rapper Abu Baker detailed a series of arrests he experienced as a teenager when he began rapping and one of his songs went viral on MySpace:

It got to the hands of the Israeli government, so they sent after me. They brought me and

they sat me down and they said, ‘Ahmad. We know what you are doing. Trust me we

189 understand every word you say in the song. Do you wanna continue in this and end your

life at some certain age? Or do you wanna change what you do and just do something that

is not connected to what you are doing?’ I said, ‘Ummm. I am just doing what I like. First

of all, you cannot tell me what to write about, because I am an artist. And for a musician,

I have a lot of ideas and these ideas come up out of nowhere. So, you wanna tell me what

to write about right now? You wanna help me write my lyrics?’ A detective, he sat me

down, he said, ‘Listen I am gonna give you a first and last warning. I am not gonna repeat

myself. Okay? I ain’t got no problem to let you sign on the paper right now that you are

not gonna rap about this again. I got no problem about that. I will let you sign it and if

you do anything about it, I will put your ass in jail.

At the time I was just a kid. I was crazy. I didn’t give a fuck about anybody. I was

a kid. I was sixteen and a half. I was on that kind of fame thing. I don’t care what you do.

And that gave me a plus one that they heard my shit. They know what I do. I came

outside, I was like ‘You know what, this is fucking cool man. The government knows my

shit! And it's not even one week since I released it. Not even one week and they know my

shit! Man, I better be something. I am not giving up on that shit.’ I went back. I made

another song and then they came and they fucked the shit out of me. They beat me. They

said, ‘Listen. We warned you. You didn’t listen. If you keep going were gonna put

yourself in jail for incitement.’

This testimony from Abu Baker highlights the violent censorship that targets Palestinian men who are vocally critical of the Israeli occupation. Beyond using their political experiences as motivations for pursuing hip-hop, Jerusalem’s hip-hop artists also routinely use their songs to variously represent and lay claim to the city. In Muhammad Mughrabi’s “My City,” he links his

190 claim to the city and his identity as a Palestinian, a rapper, and a JABID producer with the recurring hook, “Jerusalem city, my city, that’s why I love it / Jerusalem city, my city, got that

JABID,” followed by instrumentals reminiscent of traditional Palestinian music. Abu Baker’s song “Qalandia,” featuring female singer Shahd, is a similar testament to the Qalandia crossing from Jerusalem to the West Bank and to the small town of Qalandia just inside the crossing between Jerusalem and Ramallah. Despite not being an official part of Jerusalem, Abu Baker’s song details a relational geography of Palestine in which a feeling of closeness and belonging felt between many Palestinians in Jerusalem and those in nearby West Bank cities is presented alongside a recognition of the often-disparate experiences of those two groups. Relational geographies emerge in hip-hop not only between Jerusalem and other places, but also within the city itself. For example, Muzi Raps explains how his specific identity living in the Old City might separate him from other Palestinians around Jerusalem:

It's totally different because the people in Shu'fat do not live the life in the Old

City...In Shu'fat there is not one soldier there. And in the Old City, every twenty meters

there is a point for the soldiers and they are stopping me, checking me on the street,

taking my clothes off sometimes, taking me to the police station. If they are closing the

Old City, thank god if I can find a place outside the Old City to sleep, because they close

the whole city. If I can go [i.e. sneak in to the Old City during a closure],

I gotta be real careful about my life because I don’t want to get shot by soldiers. But

in Shu'fat, for example, they don’t have this stuff...but for me it is like reality.

The people who don’t see soldiers, who don’t see policemen, or Jews. They are

form the West Bank...it's only like Palestinians...but for me, I am living this like every

day. I am seeing Jews, seeing soldiers, meeting settlers…But the people form the West

191 Bank, they do not see that. My rap is reality and their rap is reality, but they do not live

the life like me.

As evidenced in the above interview excerpts, Palestinian hip-hop artists are very aware of the geopolitical oppression faced by Palestinian residents of Jerusalem and partially associate that oppression with their choices to pursue hip-hop. Alongside that awareness, however, is a recognition of particular opportunities Jerusalem provides as a large city for a hip-hop artist, whether it be the infrastructure of recording studios and talented producers of the comparative regularity of events that can yield a profit for artists and venue owners. This parallels the trends in scholarship and popular media that portray mixed cities as opportunity-laden yet still driven by an ethnoreligious political and cultural practices that oppress Palestinian residents.

While Palestinian hip-hop artists and fans seem mostly in alignment with critiques of the

Israeli state’s usefulness as a mechanism of redress or liberation, the questions which concern artists in the mixed city of Jerusalem seem to be more focused on the relation of cultural practices to that very critique. In 2019, Tel-Aviv hosted the Eurovision contest, after the

European producers decided against hosting in Jerusalem due to the potential implication that

Eurovision sees Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The event highlighted many of the disparate approaches to cultural praxis that Palestinians engage, what might be termed a broadly differential approach to cultural praxis. Early on, The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement targeted the event with a campaign asking artists to refuse to perform at the event.

Soon after, an alternative event, Globalvision, was created to stream video of Palestinian musical artists performing live across the globe to be watched instead of

Eurovision (“@WatchGlobalVision”). At the event, when the Icelandic band, Hatari, was announced as a finalist, they unfurled Palestinian flags and waved them to the audiences both in

192 the stadium and viewing across the world. The flags were quickly confiscated and Hatari was penalized by the event’s producers for violating a ‘non-political’ agreement in their contract.

After the symbolic protest by Hatari, two responses emerged from Palestinians, many of whom did not see the responses as mutually exclusive, but more a matter of priority or preference. One response, held by many including the organizers of the BDS campaign, was to criticize Hatari for participating in the event, preferring instead that the band boycotted the event

(Abunimah, 2019). The other response was to celebrate Hatari’s protest as an important interruption of an event that otherwise wholly ignored the structural oppression faced by

Palestinians in Israel-Palestine (Hanna, 2019). The combined position was that Hatari should not have participated in Eurovision, but that the way they participated in the event did draw attention to Palestinian political realities better than other artists who have broken the boycott. The

(dis)agreements regarding Hatari’s protest reflect larger debates about the relationship of cultural practices to the Israeli state within the context of Israeli society. While the BDS campaign does not produce the exact same concerns, pressures and practices among Palestinian artists as it does among international artists, the question of when and how to participate in Israeli cultural events, broadly construed, is one that concerns Palestinian hip-hop artists, especially in mixed cities.

Palestinian artists were not able to participate in Eurovision, though a campaign had been previously held in 2008 to include Palestine in Eurovision (Constantine, 2008). However, many events throughout Israel regularly feature Palestinian artists. While some artists rarely participate in cultural events that are not explicitly Palestinian, such as DAM, others view those events as an important terrain to spread their political messages. However, as the proceeding section argues,

Palestinian men who wish to perform at Israeli events face a set of racialized and gendered trade-

193 offs that require them to subsume the specificity of their Palestinian identity into a depoliticized, post-identity approach to diversity and coexistence.

III. Palestinian Artists Supporting Coexistence

“It sounds corny, but I’d rather be the bridge to bring people together than be the

bomb that divides them.”

-Saz (Mumford, 2014)

As a term, coexistence is clearly contentious and loaded with many, often conflicting meanings. Coexistence is understood by some as a matter of tolerance, by others as a matter of communication and understanding, and by others still as a matter of collaboration. While many commentators and organizers focus on coexistence as a matter of political or economic relations, and thus point to political or economic measures to make coexistence work, the remainder of this chapter is focused on cultural practices in relation to coexistence, not as distinct from the political or economic, but intimately wrapped up in political and economic concerns. In this section, I focus on two artists, Muzi Raps and Saz, who are both fixtures in the Jerusalem rap scene and rappers in support of coexistence and actively engaging in discussions of coexistence in whether with me or across the numerous media outlets who have covered them. While their specific reasons for supporting coexistence vary, as does their use of the term, both are faced with similar concerns and aspirations: how to become successful as male Palestinian artists in

Israel while maintaining a Palestinian identity and Palestinian cultural practices. This section begins with brief histories of the two men leading to their current reception as artists in support of coexistence before detailing how economic restraints push Palestinian hip-hop artists to participate in Israeli cultural events and spaces through a series of (cultural) tradeoffs. I finally expand on how strategies for marketing in coexistence correspond with artists’ (a)political

194 positions in relation to Israel-Palestine. Collectively, as I will argue, these trade-offs and the resulting approaches of the two artists are effects of a neo-colonial system that codes Arab and

Palestinian masculinity as abhorrent, violent, anachronistic, and thus a justification for ongoing colonization. Muzi’ and Saz’s careers can thus be read as a reflection of the limited opportunities for Palestinian masculine expression made available in the Israeli public sphere.

The Hip-Hop Histories of Muzi Raps and Saz

Though going by the artistic moniker Saz, Sameh Zakout is a native of Ramle, a mixed city located between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. While Saz is not a native of Jerusalem, his instrumental role in the evolution of Palestinian hip-hop, his life spent in another mixed city, and his regular shows in Jerusalem mean his impact on hip-hop in the city is larger than many

Jerusalem-born artists. Growing up in Ramle, a city known for its high crime rates and role in drug trades, Saz was influence by early 1990s U.S. rappers. Though younger and not with the group for very long, Saz helped form DAM with his cousin and DAM member Tamer Nafar.

In Ramle, Saz in known as somewhat of a celebrity, able to walk the streets to a regular barrage of greetings and occasional photo requests (Vice, 2015; Izikovich, 2013). Though making most of his money from his rap career, Saz has continued to work in his father’s garage in Ramle. As a teenager in Ramle, Saz participated for years in programming at Open House, one of many coexistence-focused organizations across mixed cities in Israel that provide programs for young

Israelis and Palestinians. Writing about his upbringing in Ramle, Jessica Steinberg (2012) described Open House as “a particularly symbolic place for Ramle Arabs. As a center meant to promote coexistence within the city’s mixed community...it’s a metaphor for life in Ramle and for what Zakout is trying to accomplish with his music.” Saz has arguably always been invested in coexistence, even from a young age in Ramle. A 2006 documentary entitled “Saz: The

195 Palestinian Rapper for Change,” followed then twenty-year-old Saz as a young artist, including while he participated in Open House programs and while he was recording with his long-time friend and collaborator Sagol 59, an Israeli rapper. Saz has always wanted to be a celebrity, not just in Israel-Palestine, but across the globe. He describes himself as an “international ethnic rapper” and the “first Arab sex symbol to the world” (Mumford, 2014; Vice, 2015). In

2012, Saz found himself as a last-minute addition to the Israeli reality show “Chai Be

La La Land,” a show about aspiring artists living together, filmed in Los Angeles. Though he did not win the show, Saz has since continued to perform widely and is one of a small, but growing number of Palestinian hip-hop artists who have performed across Europe and the U.S. He even had a song make the soundtrack for the FIFA 10 video game alongside artists like The Red

Hot Chili Peppers and Wyclef Jean (Steinberg).

Muzi Raps, taken from his legal name Mustafa Jaber, grew up in both Shu’fat refugee camp and the Old City, where he eventually came to reside after moving frequently due to homelessness. Like many artists, Muzi cites U.S. artists like Tupac and Biggie as influential to him before he discovered a cassette titled “Hip Hop Arabic” with music from DAM and MWR in the early 2000s. More attached to poetry himself, Muzi eventually started rapping at the behest of his twin brother after Muzi was arrested with little reason. They formed a group with a bunch of friends, as many as 17 at one point, called City Ghosts and had their first concert in the city center on November 26th, 2005, a date Muzi remembered easily when I asked. After seeing the showing in the crowd, Muzi was inspired, and though City Ghosts eventually broke up, Muzi has not stopped rapping. Muzi and Saz share a lot in common. Muzi makes much of his money from rap, as he told me, but works construction jobs as well to make ends meet. He also participated in a coexistence-focused organization, Heartbeat, which “focuses on the establishment and

196 facilitation of ensembles of young Palestinian and Israeli musicians (ages 14-20 years old) who come together weekly for sustained music-based dialogue programs” (“Israeli-Palestinian

Programs”). Muhammad Mughrabi from Shu'fat and Moody Kablawi from Haifa are two other hip-hop artists who also participated in the program. Today, Muzi performs regularly in both small, often Palestinian-organized shows and larger events within the city, sometimes even travelling to perform elsewhere in Israel, including at Palestinian majority towns.

While Saz markets himself to a global audience as an international ethnic rapper and global Arab sex symbol, Muzi is different, marketing himself to an Israeli-Palestinian audience as a peace rapper. But that label was not of his own making. As he described to me:

Actually, I didn’t call myself the first peace rapper. The news called me that because I

went to demonstrations for peace and stuff and the people were singing my songs at the

demonstrations. After that, they were doing events after every demonstration. They

invited me to come sing and stuff and, I forgot the name of the journalist, but she came to

me with a microphone and said, ‘Muzi, how do you feel about being the first peace

rapper in Jerusalem?’

Ever since, Muzi has embraced the descriptor, using it to describe and market himself to an increasing number of Palestinian and Israeli fans. Muzi and Saz are both artists continually on the rise, but their aspiration to be well-known and successful artists and their support of coexistence in their music are not unrelated. Rather, their vocal support of coexistence and their regular participation in Israeli cultural events and spaces exist in relation to a lack of economic opportunities for Palestinian hip-hop artists that force tradeoffs for many Palestinians in mixed cities, not just rappers. In the proceeding section, I draw from interviews with Muzi and Saz to expand on this set of tradeoffs. While I was able to interview Muzi twice during my multiple

197 stays in Jerusalem, Saz and I never sat down for a formal interview. I have, however, spent a lot of time with Saz at shows and hanging out with groups of hip-hop artists in Jerusalem. Below, I pull from both my and other’s interviews with Muzi and from other’s interviews with Saz.

Arguably, this might result in differences between the responses Muzi and Saz might provide to me versus a journalist who is unknown within the larger Palestinian hip-hop scene. However,

Saz and Muzi are both vocal and outspoken artists who do not shy away from giving open, honest answers to questions either to me or journalists. In fact, as the ensuing sections suggests, Saz and Muzi’s careers have been defined by controversy, even within the purview of

Palestinian listenership, controversies to which both artists have been outspoken in their responses. Put differently, Saz’ and Muzi’s dispositions and openness seem consistent across my interactions with them and their interactions with other journalists.

Economic Opportunities and Forced Tradeoffs in Mixed Cities

With exceptions like DAM and some U.S.-/Europe-based artists, there are no Palestinian hip-hop artists who survive off their music alone. Most work other jobs that account for the majority of their income with shows offering comparatively little money. This is the case across

Israel-Palestine, and as Muzi’ and Saz’s lives reflect, even for some of the most well-known artists in one of the largest cities, rapping alone is rarely enough. This is even more so the case when you focus in on the Palestinian market in particular. With markedly lower household incomes and expendable money than Israelis, young Palestinians living in Israel have less to spend on things like show tickets, albums, or merchandise, what would be the three largest sources of income for an artist. Combined with fewer performance venues and little to no government funding for any arts that are (or might be) critical of the government (Bishara,

2018), this means artists have little opportunity to turn their art into a steady income if they only

198 perform for a Palestinian market. When interviewing artists, I regularly asked them what they viewed as the biggest barriers to the growth of the Palestinian hip-hop scene in their city. Across the interviews, the most common answers were about a lack of hip-hop infrastructure, like recording studios, labels, and venues, that would allow artists to be more fully supported, and consequently, many artists work actively to build out such infrastructure, establish new spaces and venues, and support aspiring artists. However, despite the continued growth of such efforts, few Palestinian artists have been able to make a steady career out of their music.

One place that artists might turn is to the plentitude of larger, Israeli-organized music and culture events that have steadily increased in number over the past decade or more. These events typically come in a few forms: large music festivals that mirror similar recently popularized events in Europe and the U.S., city-based shows that celebrate local artists, and political events that feature musicians alongside speakers. Jerusalem is home to all these types of events, as are other major mixed cities across Israel, and they can prove to be lucrative for artists. Saz spoke to this difference between markets in his interview for the Vice News series directed by Mike

Skinner, “Hip-Hop in the Holy Land.” As Saz explained while speaking about the Palestinian market:

Seriously, to be an artist or a musician in Palestine or Israel, it is kind of impossible to

make it. It’s better to be a lawyer than to be a musician or artist. Seriously. But if you are

talking about the Israeli market or the Israeli scene, it is different.

That Israeli market in Jerusalem is filled with consumers interested in spending their money on shows even, at times, on Palestinian artists. As the case of Hatari evidenced, deciding if and how to participate in Israeli cultural events and spaces is a concern for Palestinian artists, though their opinions on the matter may differ. Some artists choose to avoid or officially boycott such spaces.

199 Others in the West Bank and Gaza are entirely unable to access them in the first place. Muzi and Saz fall into a third group, Palestinians who regularly perform for Israeli audiences at Israeli events and for whom such events might be comparatively lucrative. I cannot claim that participating in those events is itself a tradeoff, as no Palestinian artist who does has described their decisions as such. Both Saz and Muzi are happy to participate in such events, and, while those events can bring in more income than Palestinian-organized ones, it is difficult to contend that either artist would not participate in such events if they did not come with a paycheck.

Certainly, other Palestinian artists, including those who adhere to BDS practices, might view their choices as a necessary tradeoff to tap into a potentially lucrative revenue stream. What can be said, however, is that how Palestinian artists participate in such spaces requires a number of tradeoffs, including avoiding certain gendered and racialized stereotypes and potentially losing

Palestinian fans. In other words, Israeli cultural practices are not intended to include any and every Palestinian who wishes to participate. To do so requires them to fit a particular image, one that, as I later contend, is amenable to a neo-colonial politics of coexistence.

Perhaps the most prevalent tradeoff, one which both Saz and Muzi discuss, is in how they develop and portray their artistic persona. The difference between a show in front of Palestinians and a show in front of Israelis is not just a matter of performing the same songs with different audiences. Saz and Muzi have to put considerable thought into how they will modify a typical set depending on the audience. Not only the set list, but what you wear and how you comport yourself on stage can be important factors in avoiding being stereotyped as an angry Arab. The stereotype of the angry Arab is not new, nor unique to Israeli society. Media in the West and

North has been filled with stereotypes of angry Arabs for decades, stereotypes that are not only inaccurate and misrepresentative, but ones which help (re)form ideas about the very nature of

200 Arabs and Arab societies, justifying Western intervention in Arab societies. The angry Arab is masculine construct, typically portrayed as a politically narrow-minded, anachronistic, and racist man, hateful of Western cultures and peoples and incapable of being worked with towards common, cooperative goals. For Saz, this image is one that must be avoided. For Saz, this image is an inaccurate, over-circulated stereotype, but one that can only be avoided by accepting everyone’s views to avoid confrontation. As Saz described his approach to starring in the

“Chai b’LaLa Land’ series, he wanted to stand out as more liberal than his Israeli co-stars:

I am the most liberal, I accept everyone, I sit with them during Kiddush on the Sabbath

and I go to church out of respect ... I didn’t make a fuss and I stayed away from the image

of ‘the angry Arab,’ both because we have already seen those types and because I am no

longer that other. I am a different ‘other’ − educated, multicultural. (Izikovich, 2013)

The angry Arab is constructed as the antithesis of the Arab needed within a mainstream politics of coexistence: cooperative, content, and happy to adhere to the principles and practices of

Western modernity. Consequently, the angry Arab is a common scapegoat for when coexistence fails, portrayed as the only one unwilling to change or ‘meet in the middle’. This perceived anachronism, this state of being stuck in the past, is not lost on Muzi or Saz, both of whom associate not being perceived as angry with being progressive, future-minded, or, as Saz described, “educated and multicultural.” Muzi associates angry rap with a lack of imagination and open-mindedness, telling me, “The imaginations of angry rap about the future is really shit, because I heard a lot of new, racist songs. It’s like the future is only talking about stabbing attacks and killing Jews. Imagination is like really hard for angry rappers.”

201 Saz also sees an angry disposition as self-defeating for artists. When asked about how he handles career failures and a lack of success, Saz notably avoids feeling angry, even though ethnoreligious bigotry could play a large role in that lack of success:

I have learned how to take it. Anger is good if it motivates you. The problem is that it’s a

lot easier to take it toward self-pity. I don’t want to let myself be miserable − that doesn’t

get me anywhere. I am trying to think what my vision is and what I want to achieve and

also to make a good impression while doing it. (Izikovich, 2013)

It bears mentioning that the pressure to avoid this stereotype is compacted by one’s relationship to Israeli society such that Palestinians in mixed cities might feel more pressure to adhere to such rigid codes. Muzi highlighted the double standard experienced by him in one interview with me, saying that, in Jerusalem:

I am seeing Jews, seeing soldiers, meeting settlers. I have seen a lot of Jews who talk real

bad words about the messenger of Islam, Mohammad. It really pisses me off, but still I

cannot do anything. If I say one word, I will see myself in handcuffs.

While anger might be a very real response to the experience of artistic failures for Saz or of ethnoreligious oppression for Muzi, the reality is that it is not a sustainable disposition for

Palestinian men in Israeli cultural circles. Many examples abound of Palestinian (and occasional

Israeli) artists being denied entry into, or alternatively removed from Israeli cultural events because of their particular songs or disposition being perceived as too angry or too political

(Bishari, 2018; Zimet, 2019). In fact, the image of the angry Arab and the image of the political

Arab often overlap within Israel, such that to be angry is to be political and vice-versa, a form of silencing targeted at many marginalized populations and akin to a grandiose “calm down,” a politics of respectability. Saz’s father was initially apprehensive of his son’s career choice and

202 even warned him before going to Los Angeles to film “Chai b’LaLa Land” to be aware of how he is perceived. Saz described how:

Maybe he also didn’t want to see me get stuck with the image of the angry Arab.

Before I flew to the United States, he told me to stay away from politics and not

to get into conflicts. No one needs to know whom I vote for and what my political

opinions are. (Izikovich, 2013)

The warning from Saz’s father might be surprising to anyone who was familiar with Saz’s recent career, where he is consistently in support of a politics of coexistence. However, neither Saz nor

Muzi began their careers with the messages of peace and coexistence that define them currently.

Both artists began with different messages, ones more closely aligned with a politics of

Palestinian nationalism or, at least, a politics openly critical of Israeli state practices and of the occupation. Moreover, their early artistic personas performed masculinity in ways that would easily be read or described as “angry.” While both artists recognize these shifts and view them as matters of personal transformation and awakening, not all of their supporters were on board with their new direction. Thus, as the first tradeoff required Saz and Muzi to change the content of their music and the portrayal of their artistic personas, the second tradeoff came through the

(potential) loss of Palestinian fans. Muzi noticed a change in his fans when he became a peace rapper and changed his lyrical messages. As Muzi described to me:

I began to change it...like when I was racist, I became to a peace rapper. Like the lyrics

changed a little bit and most of the Palestinian fans start running away, because I am

getting to be the first peace rapper…Also, I talked in the song [“Conscience”] to the

people who are running away when I became a peace rapper because they don’t believe

in peace, but I believe in peace.

203 Palestinian fans continued to abandon Muzi as he increased his peace messaging and began performing at political events:

I get to the Human Rights Festival, and also other demonstrations, a lot of

demonstrations...After that, all of the people began attacking me on Facebook because I

was singing to Arabs, Jews, and Internationals. They didn’t like how that became, like a

famous rapper who is singing for peace and has a lot of fans.

Saz’s career took a similar path to Muzi’s in terms of his increased participation in Israeli cultural events alongside his altered messaging regarding Israel and the occupation.

However, Saz does not think this has affected his fanbase among Palestinians. When discussing a track Saz released in Hebrew, at that point never done by a Palestinian hip-hop artist, he remained confident that his Palestinian fans adore him, saying that “I am not a sellout. I challenge myself and the audience. Anyone who likes me in Arabic will like me in Hebrew, too”

(Izikovich, 2013). In fact, Saz insists that his success within Israeli society bolsters, rather than diminishes his reception among Palestinians as a successful Palestinian artist in an unaccepting world:

Palestinians love me…I can make it there without selling myself. They’re proud of me

because I did this all myself, saved my own money. They say, ‘See this dude, he’s not

that smart, not that rich, doesn’t have a lot but does have a lot.’ (Steinberg, 2012)

For Saz and Muzi, the tradeoffs that come with increased participation in Israeli cultural events and spaces are mixed, but they collectively gesture to a larger set of tradeoffs faced by many

Palestinians living and working in mixed cities where participation in Israeli spaces and events is more common, from markets and workplaces to schools and public concerts. When participating in such spaces and events, Palestinians feel the pressure of these tradeoffs differently than in

204 Palestinian-organized spaces and events. The pressure to avoid falling into an “angry Arab” stereotype is part of a set of practices that force Palestinians to variously hide, deny, or tokenize the specificity of their Palestinian identity and, consequently, circumvent any conversation about

Palestinian oppression. This individualizing process compliments coexistence narratives that seek an uncritical focus on the future of coexistence, in contrast to the critiques of past and contemporary wrongdoing that get dismissed as the ravings of an anachronistic, angry Arab man.

For Palestinian rappers in Israeli cultural circles, this means that avoiding the angry Arab character is a complement to a larger strategy of marketing in coexistence.

The (a)Politics of Marketing in Coexistence

Marketing in coexistence is not about using the term itself in a positive manner, though the term emerges in interviews with Saz and Muzi and in media framings of their careers.

Beyond using the term itself, marketing in coexistence involves a set of practices, diverse and dependent on the career goals of an individual, including the avoidance of the gendered and racialized characterization of an angry Arab described above. Certainly, participation in Israeli spaces and events, such as concerts and music festivals, is a precondition to mainstream notions of coexistence developed within mixed cities. Put differently, it is difficult to market in coexistence to an Israeli audience while refusing to participate in Israeli cultural events and spaces. Saz and Muzi both meet those criteria, promoting coexistence narratives and participating in numerous Israeli concerts and music festivals. For both artists, whether realized or not, the choice to market in coexistence means a loss of fans. Muzi expanded on that reality in my interviews with him and has been the target of continued criticism from Palestinians, including through social media and interpersonal contact. For Saz, his decision to market in coexistence locates him in relation to an economically disparate set of audiences, a reality not

205 lost on his artistic community. Saz’s mentor on Chai b’LaLa Land, Uri Paster, lamented the restraints Saz faced as an artist, saying “As an Arab rapper in Israel, I don’t see any chance for him...It’s a problem because with a universal message you don’t reach an Arab audience and if you’re not into coexistence you don’t reach the Jewish audience, but in the U.S. they loved him.

They loved his energy and his message” (Steinberg, 2012). Khader Alkalak, an administrator at

Open House who worked with Saz in the program, similarly attested that, “It’s hard for Sameh with his line about coexistence, because not everyone accepts it. In the US they’ll accept him more than here. He’ll do better there” (Steinberg).

Evident in both these testimonies, apart from the consensus that the U.S. would be a better market for coexistence narratives, is the idea that a key practice in marketing in coexistence is messaging. In the case of hip-hop artists, those messages come from multiple places, the lyrics of artists’ songs, what they say in interviews, and the particular framings of events in which they participate. What is evident, when looking through these resources in relation to Muzi and Saz, is that they employ a differential approach to their messaging, attentive to their location, immediate audience, and the potential audience that might come through media coverage of any particular event. As Muzi told me:

I said I am done from politics. Like what I am doing right now, my songs are about

happiness and dance. But if I am invited to a [Palestinian] demonstration, like an event,

my politics are going with the old school songs.

There are reasons that this differential messaging does not seemingly take away from Saz’ and

Muzi’s ability to market in coexistence. On one hand, many Palestinian-organized events develop environments of seclusion, privacy, and trust discussed previously in relation to Haifa and Ramallah, so Palestinian artists can say and do different things at those events with less fear

206 of public or governmental backlash. On the other hand, even Saz and Muzi can have publicly available songs that are openly critical of Israeli state policies or invoke terminology around occupation, the nakba, or even intifada, while still appearing at large, Israeli-organized events.

This is due, in part, to large music events in Israel working directly with controversial artists to pre-plan the content of their performances, agreeing on which songs will and will not be performed. On occasion, this practice does lead to artists being dropped or voluntarily leaving a concert lineup or, as evidenced by Hatari’s participation in Eurovision, it can create an avenue through which artists can resist the sort of censorship that often accompanies coexistence narratives.

Certainly, their ability to market themselves and message their audiences in a differential fashion helps to maintain their popularity among both Israeli and Palestinian audiences, despite the loss of fans Muzi witnessed. However, when looking at their interviews, lyrics, and the events they participate in, we can better understand how marketing and messaging in coexistence work for male Palestinian artists. Three themes emerged across these materials that I argue throughout this section highlight key practices in marketing in coexistence: a self-narrative of personal growth and mindset change, a distancing of oneself from “politics”, and a post-identity framing of cultural practices. Moreover, all of these practices ultimately construct a form of

Palestinian masculinity amenable to and permissible within the Israeli public sphere.

The first practice, the use of a self-narration of personal growth and mindset change is certainly not unique to just Muzi and Saz. Palestinian hip-hop artists who are not openly supportive of coexistence narratives also deploy stories about overcoming obstacles through a change of mindset, as do many hip-hop artists around the world wherein personal struggle equates with authenticity (Shabazz). Such stories are not unique then, to Saz and Muzi, but can

207 function for different purposes. For example, a Palestinian rapper might talk about how they decided to turn away from political violence, seeing it as an inevitable trap, and decided to focus on artistic expression critically directed at the Israeli state or Palestinian authority, such as with

G-Town in Shu’fat (Greenberg, 2009). However, in the case of Saz and Muzi, their understanding of personal growth and mindset change is closely connected to and supportive of coexistence.

For Saz, his early experiences as a youth in Ramle facing discrimination influenced his early attitudes towards Israeli societal and state practices that present few opportunities for young Palestinian men. But as Saz argued, “the cliche says that your biggest enemy is yourself, and that is correct. I don’t want to stop myself any more” (Izikovich, 2013). Saz accounts much of his success to his mindset change, one that is focused on love, unity, peace, and coexistence.

When reflecting on the documentary film that followed his early career, Saz discussed one dimension of that mindset change:

They made the film about me when I was 18 and angry. I came with a heavy load, heavy

feelings against police violence, against the attitude, the way people look down on us. I

had a lot of frustration. But things change. I took myself in hand, I wanted to understand

how I, Sameh Zakout, could achieve results. It’s very easy to get into that label of the

angry, unfortunate Arab. I don’t want labels. (Izikovich, 2013)

The narrative Saz develops is certainly individualistic, associating his bootstraps mentality and present success with his own reflection and change of mindset. That change of mindset was not only personal, however, but also political, one that Saz directs outwards at his audiences.

Journalist David Wainer described Saz as, “not afraid to be introspective and to assign criticism onto his people,” a tendency that comes through in his music:

208 One of his songs Meen Yoom (Since that Day), bemoans what he detects as apathy for

inner social change, ‘We're standing-still, close mouthed and ignoring what's around

us, Instead of blaming ourselves, We blame everybody else.’ (Wainer, 2007)

For Muzi, early experiences with police targeting him as a young rapper certainly concretized his early career, in which Muzi describes his music to me as having been “so racist, like against

Israeli people.” His mindset change, which he narrates as moving from being “racist” to being a peace rapper, accounts for his changing messages over the past decade and his decision to work as a solo artist. Part of that change in messaging is an overt decision to focus on reasons for

Palestinians to be happy and to maintain hope. As he recounted to me:

In 2010, I did this hip-hop song, it was called ‘Beautiful Life.’ It was totally different

between the first and the second [themes of his messaging]. ‘Beautiful Life’ is talking

about, if we still have occupation, we are still smiling, we are still believing in something

inside us. Even if we don’t want to show it to the people.

With both Saz’ and Muzi’s narratives, we can see a relationship between inwards change and outwards desires, specifically desires that are projected onto their audiences. Saz and Muzi both express a feeling that a mindset change among Palestinians is key to any lasting peace and that they have both already achieved that mindset change. This characterization easily meshes with hegemonic framings of angry Arab and Palestinian men as irrational, anachronistic, and the antithesis of (Western) modernity. Here we see that the personal mindset change is intertwined with the second theme or practice in coexistence marketing, expressing a particular (a)politics through a discursive distancing of oneself from “politics.” In other words, both Saz and Muzi associate their own mindset change with stepping away from (mainstream) politics, a stepping away they suggest would benefit other Palestinians. I stress the differential and discursive

209 dimensions of this practice because it exists in stark contrast to the political messages that Saz and Muzi have in some of their songs, messages that are explicitly critical of the occupation. However, as mentioned previously and discussed more later, those messages are likely performed for and consumed by Palestinian audiences in more secluded cultural spaces.

During interviews, we see the efforts both artists go to in order to distance themselves from politics and from those who have not experienced a similar change of mindset. Muzi explained in an interview his decision to be “done with politics” and his feelings that such a decision would benefit other Palestinians:

I told you, I am done from politics, because I want people to take a new step in their

lives. It means, we have a political side, but I don’t want them to take the political side

most of their lives, because the people are like stuck in this moment. They won’t have a

new step in their lives.

Saz similarly links his own personal growth and mindset change to his relationship with politics, highlighting the nuance with which both he and Muzi navigate their own differential messaging.

In an interview with Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Saz explained:

Music is a powerful tool for transmitting opinions but also for connecting, for being a

positive tool. It took me years to discover this, and it’s good that it happened. There is no

lack of protest and there won’t be. I see life in a different way. I am getting married soon

and I want to establish a home and a family. Being a firebrand all the time − I’ve been

there, done that. I don’t want that any more. I used to lack balance. I was totally political

or into fun. (Izikovich, 2013)

In this quotation, Saz’s personal decision to avoid being a “firebrand” or being “political” exists alongside his assertion that “there is no lack of protest.” The implication that one can protest

210 with music while avoiding politics is characteristic of the differential messages Saz and Muzi both project. The outward projection of Saz’s mindset change is best evidenced in an interview with Vice News under the series of “Hip-Hop in the Holy Land” mini-documentaries. Worth quoting at length here, Saz’s desire to see change in the future evidences the continuity between his own (a)politics and the third theme or practice, the elaboration of a post-identity framing of cultural practices:

People are like people, no matter what, and as much as we have a lot of differences, we

still have a lot in common. Like people over here do wanna have a normal

life. Wanna have two kids, a decent job, eat, sleep, just go around, fool around, just

having fun. And that’s what mainly people in Israel and Palestine want. Sadly, we are

trying, of course, to end the occupation, end the occupation not just for the Palestinians,

but also for the Israelis. I am not talking about the physical occupation, but the mental

thing. That’s the stress that we have and that’s what we are trying to get over. I think not

just for the Palestinian cause, but for the human cause. (Vice, 2015)

Saz’s reflection here suggests that the occupation is partially a mental one that affects

Palestinians and Israelis alike, two groups who share a similar desire to survive and be happy.

The message that Saz elaborates across his marketing contrasts politics and anger/the angry Arab with the human cause and happiness, a message that carries across Muzi’s career as well. When

Muzi described himself as being “done with politics” in our interview quoted above, he went on to contrast his frustration that a lack of mindset change keeps Palestinians “stuck in this moment” with an alternative found in his music and mixed events:

They [Palestinians] will only think about the political side and the parts of politics and

stuff, but, for me, in my songs, even if I am talking about suffering and stuff, it is giving a

211 little hope that, when I saw myself singing to the people, there is like Arabs,

internationals, and Jews there together, dancing, without feeling the race. It is really

good, that people are not thinking about the political side, they are only thinking about

happiness. They are trying to show the happy side of this country, and that is what I am

trying to do.

Worth noting at this point is Muzi’s regular deployment of the term” racist” to describe

Palestinians, a term which Saz does not use. It is hard to know if Muzi’s use of the term is meant to be akin to anti-Semitic or anti-Israeli, as he expressed both those meanings in the course of our interviews. However, placed within the context of our conversations, Muzi’s use of the term is obviously enmeshed in his experiences of the hip-hop scene. His early experiences with

Palestinian rappers advocating for violence certainly impacted him. He shared a story with me about a young boy coming to him with a track he had made, excited for Muzi, an established rapper, to listen to it. But Muzi was angry and saddened when he listened to the track and heard lyrics advocating for stabbing attacks. Calls for violence in amateur tracks are not unheard of, but those tracks remain in relative obscurity online and their artists can never break into the public hip-hop scene across Israel-Palestine. But I think that Muzi’s use of the term refers to more than general calls for violence against Israelis in obscure, amateur rap songs. Here I think that the use of the term “racist” is a slippage from the more accurate “racial.” When Muzi celebrates “Arabs, internationals, and Jews there together, dancing, without feeling the race,” his post-racial hopefulness is contrasted with other Palestinians who “only think about the political side.” To be politically focused on race becomes “racism” in this account, begging the question of whether the mere mentioning of race or ethnicity by a Palestinian inherently renders them angry and anachronistic within the prevailing assimilation logics of mixed cities. For Muzi, it

212 would seem that peace or coexistence are necessary preconditions for any modern city, rather than by-products of a decolonial process.

Across their interviews and differential messaging, we can understand how the seemingly disparate topics of Arab stereotypes, mixed cities, cultural practices, and economic constraints connect when examined under the rubric of marketing in coexistence. Neither Saz nor Muzi use the term coexistence at length, preferring to use other terms and concepts to elaborate their

(a)political stances. However, coexistence narratives have always been (a)political, prioritizing a post-identity politics that celebrates vague notions of diversity and unity while abhorring direct criticisms of structural, ethnoreligious oppression. Those coexistence narratives rely on the scapegoating of “political” entities as roadblocks to a quintessentially human cause, entities typically understood as anachronistic, angry, Arab men overly concerned with and beleaguered by open critiques of the occupation or discussions of ethnoreligious oppression. This process ultimately removes cultural practices from the realm of the overtly political, positioning music as a utopian or primordial space within which difference and oppression disappears. Saz, in an

English-subtitled video produced by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, positioned music accordingly, arguing that “Music has no religion or ethnicity, no race or gender, and its great. It doesn’t matter if you are Arab or Jewish, Christian or Muslim. Music is our love and our religion” (“Saz: Arab-Israeli Rapper and Reality TV Star”). It is because of this positioning that cultural practices in mixed cities play an instrumental role in reproducing coexistence narratives while posing as apolitical. Mixed events can promote those narratives to a wide audience, including by featuring Palestinian artists who focus on happiness, hope, and a human cause instead of structural practices that differentiate between different populations, Israeli and

Palestinian.

213 While Saz and Muzi have both attended myriad events which, I would argue, benefit coexistence narratives, Hip-Hop Sulha was one event explicitly focused on coexistence and reflective of the practices used by artists to market in coexistence. Hip-Hop Sulha is a series of hip-hop shows produced in cities across Israel and in New York City. The events take their name from the Arabic word sulha, a ritual practice used by families and communities to resolve differences and disagreements through the use of a mediator. A sulha is considered a binding and reconciliatory agreement and recently, “the concept has been adopted as both a metaphor and a model for achieving peace in the Middle East” (Gelfand, 2006). Organizations like the Sulha Peace Project have utilized the term as an organizing principle for their work and dozens of smaller, independent sulha events, including Hip-Hop Sulha, have done the same. Hip-

Hop Sulha was initially rolled out through a series of events beginning in 2006, a difficult, but arguably important time for such events since Israel was newly engaged in a war with Lebanon and tensions between Israelis and Palestinians were heightened in public spaces. While Hip-

Hop Sulha events took place in multiple cities, it is useful to look at two events which featured Saz, his reflections on those events, how the events were promoted, and media coverage of the events. Those events took place in New York City in 2006 and Tel Aviv in 2007.

Held on September 13th, 2006, the Hip-Hop Sulha event in New York City’s S.O.B. Club was an official part of the Oyhoo New York Jewish Music and Heritage Festival. The event was primarily organized by DJ Handler, a Jewish DJ and music producer who helped develop multiple Israeli hip-hop artists, including Y-Love, another act at the show. Handler organized the event as a series of individual performances that would end with all the artists on stage performing together, perhaps an intentional metaphor for the goals of the event. In addition to being an event “designed to bring Muslim, Jewish, Israeli and Palestinian rappers together

214 onstage in order to foster unity and understanding...”, Hip-Hop Sulha in New York City also donated its proceeds to “such organizations as Hand in Hand and Givat Haviva, which promote peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians” (Gelfand, 2006). In the lead up to the event, prevailing political tensions manifested through criticisms of the event and its timing, with some members of the Jewish community expressing “reservations over holding the Sulha at this particular time, arguing that ‘it’s time to fight’” (Gelfand). However, Handler, who is portrayed by The Forward as “an intrepid, peace-loving DJ” who is bringing the world its “first hip- hop sulha”, had this to say in his interview with the publication. “I support Israel’s right to self- defense, but there are also people who are involved who are innocent, and that’s who the show is for” (Gelfand). Handler’s optimism was further reflected in the official press release put out ahead of the event:

The goal of Hip-Hop Sulha is to inspire a new generation of Muslims and Jews — in

particular Israelis and Palestinians — to use art and music as a way of interacting with one

another, with hopes of finding understanding and common ground between them. We wish

to see these communities united, and to help these newly-formed relationships extend

beyond our events (Hip-Hop Sulha).

DJ and promoter Y-Love, an Orthodox Jew based in the U.S. who collaborates frequently with

Palestinian artists, was similarly hopeful about the event’s potential impact, saying that “Any interpersonal dialogue between Jews with a connection to Israel, and Muslims with a connection to Palestine, is a positive thing. If a mind can be changed, a life can be saved” (Gelfand, 2006).

True to his messaging as well, Saz was reservedly positive about the event, saying, “Let’s be realistic. It’s not like we’re gonna bring worldwide peace. But I think it shows people that, although there are differences [between us], there is one thing that is in common for us, and this

215 is hip hop. Like we are strangers, but we have one mother, and it’s called hip hop” (Gelfand).

Many felt similar to the artists performing at Hip-Hop Sulha in New York and worked to continue the event series, leading to multiple events featuring some of the same artists, like Saz and Israeli rapper Sagol 59, along with new talent. Given its location in Israel, the next iteration of Hip-Hop Sulha, taking place in Tel Aviv in 2007, was able to feature more local

Israeli and Palestinian artists and proved more controversial in many ways than the New York show.

Hosted in Tel Aviv in July of 2007 and held in a basement nightclub, Levontin 7, the next

Hip-Hop Sulha showcase was the first one to take place in Israel and consequently featured more

Israeli and Palestinian talent, including Saz and DAM, a group headed by Saz’s cousin,

Tamer Nafar, and routinely noted for being in support of the boycott movement and apprehensive about uncritical notions of coexistence. DAM and other Palestinian hip-hop artists had performed multiple times at Levontin 7 before the sulha event, typically to mixed audiences in the venue known for being at the cutting edge of the alternative music scene. In fact, the owner of Levontin 7, Daniel Sarid, defended his repeated hosting of DAM, saying that

Tamer Nafar is “totally committed to coexistence. He almost never turns down a request to perform pro bono at peace rallies” (Goldman, 2007). When questioned specifically about his choice to allow DAM to participate in the sulha, Sarid added that, “I am a musician, and my club is not political. DAM is part of the Israeli music scene, and they are excellent hip-hop artists”

(Goldman). Sarid not only rejects the idea that his club is political, but further erases the specificity of DAM’s Palestinian identity and music by framing them as an Israeli group. David

Wainer (2007) provided one of the most detailed reviews of the show in an article for Israeli-

American media firm Israel21c, then republished in popular Israeli media outlets, YNet and the

216 Jerusalem Post. Wainer described the event as an eclectic and progressive one, noting how, “the crowd consisted of Arabs and Jews; hipsters and techno-junkies; dread-locked hippies and intellectual types peering through thick black-rimmed emo glasses, creating an atmosphere far from homogenous but almost unanimously liberal and conducive to dialogue.”

That dialogue took place both at the event and in media coverage afterwards, including with Wainer’s (2007) piece. Most media outlets that mentioned the event praised its politics, investing in the potential of music to offer a cultural space that is “conducive to dialogue,” while still holding reservations about the real-world impact of such undertakings (Wainer, 2007;

Goldman, 2007; Shalev, 2012; Stein, 2007). While Wainer indicated that “conversations with the rappers reveal restrained realism about the problems facing the region,” he nonetheless concluded that:

The rappers believe their endeavors should be seen as a microcosm for Palestinian-Israeli

coexistence. If Muslims and Jews can abandon exaggerated ethnocentrism and focus on

shared universal values, good things are bound to happen. (Emphasis Added)

Placing Muslim and Jews, Palestinians and Israelis on an even playing field by characterizing both as having “exaggerated ethnocentrism” is a colonial tactic that erases the systemic inequalities between the two groups in Israel. Writing for The Guardian, Alex Stein (2007) portrayed a similar line of logic, arguing that, “The Hip-Hop Sulha is a model for peacemaking: bring people together on the basis of a shared passion that is not dependent on their national identity.” Stein noted that the event was unique within Israel context, suggesting that:

In other contexts, the political divisions between the MCs might have been too much to

handle. But at the sulha everyone was able to come together under the banner of hip-hop,

providing a perfect umbrella for opinions to be aired freely. So, Dam called for a one-

217 state solution while reprimanding Israel for murdering people in Gaza and Saz called for

two-states.

As with the launch event in New York, Saz continued to invest in the potential for the sulha events to precipitate real change in the political landscape of Israel-Palestine. Saz said of the event and of his continued collaboration with Israeli rapper Sagol 59, that:

I'm not here to do ‘Kumbaya, Kumbaya’ with Sagol...But I write music as a minority in

Israel with hope. Sulha is just another way to spread the message out. My music is not

just for Arabs, my music is for the world. I participate in the Hip Hop Sulha because

besides being a Palestinian or a Muslim, I am human. (Wainer, 2007)

The collective message across both events was clear: if Palestinians and Israelis can embrace music, specifically hip-hop, as a utopian space in which fans and artists can dispose of identity- oriented critiques and focus on shared goals, then hip-hop has world-building potential as a mechanism for coexistence. What this means in practical terms, as evidenced in the preceding section, is that dominant coexistence narratives and frameworks do not provide space for discussing the nakba, the occupation, or any topics that center ethno-religious identity as the grounds for historical and ongoing discrimination. This is not to say that Arab identities are erased within such events, rather Arab identities and actual Arabs are required in coexistence narratives. However, they are required to materialize and perform the good-Arab, focused on individual and collective mindset change and critical of other Arabs who have failed to come to their own understanding of a post-identity (a)politics focused on our shared humanity.

Ultimately, coexistence politics lure Palestinian men into propping up Orientalist and

Islamophobic gendered stereotypes of the violent, angry, Arab man, positioning themselves

218 instead as the rational, modern, apolitical, “good” Arab unquestioning of the structural realities of the Israeli occupation.

Alex Stein’s (2007) article is a perfect example of how such events get taken up in broader coexistence narratives. Stein celebrates the democratic nature of open dialogue in Tel

Aviv’s sulha event. Instead of engaging in the important debates around, for example, one- versus two-state solutions, represented at the event by DAM and Saz respectively, Stein posits the mere presence of such differing opinions in the same space as the goal of the event. For

Stein, the potential of such event is contained in the artists abilities to share “a passion not dependent on national identities,” rather than in the event’s (non-)ability to directly address

Palestinian grievances. In fact, Stein’s review of the event has a glaring omission: by focusing more on the messages of coexistence and shared humanity from Saz and the event proper, Stein ignored the considerable contrast between DAM and the other artists at the event. In

Uri Dorchin’s (2012) book Real Time: Hip-Hop in Israel/Israeli Hip-Hop, he recounts when

Tamer Nafar of DAM took the stage and spoke openly about the inherent limitations to the sulha event as planned. As Dorchin writes:

In contrast to the anticipated conciliatory slogans being mumbled by those who

appeared before him, it was evident that Nafar was in no hurry to be part of the

trend and was uncomfortable with reconciliation. The way he stood there gave

him the air of a lecturer standing like a stationary extra before an audience of

listeners. 'To make a real sulha you have to look at reality head-on and take

responsibility for it like men,' Nafar said at the beginning of his condemnatory

speech. 'You [the Jews] have to assume responsibility for the massacre and

219 transfer you did in '48, and for the massacre you are still continuing to perpetrate'

(qtd in Shalev, 2012).

For Dorchin, it was apparent that Nafar’s address was the oustandingly unique part of the event, not the plurality of voices present as Stein suggests. As Dorchin noted of Nafar’s speech, “In view of the vagueness and generalization that typified the comments of his Jewish colleagues, his direct choice of words constituted an unusual phenomenon” (qtd in Shalev, 2012). I would agree with Dorchin’s characterization of coexistence narratives being characterized by

“vagueness and generalization” in contrast to the specificity of critique offered by Nafar and the many Palestinian artists who use their art to promote similar critiques of ethno-religious oppression. I am further intrigued by Nafar’s invocation of masculinity (“take responsibility for it like men”) to question the politics of coexistence that whitewashes history. Unlike Hip-Hop

Sulha and other events in mixed cities, not all mixed hip-hop events engage in the same sort of coexistence politics as have typified much of Muzi’ and Saz’s careers in Jerusalem. Within

Jerusalem, Haifa, Tel-Aviv, and other mixed cities, hip-hop endeavors are taking place that center Palestinians in the conceptualization and organization of events, occasionally involving

Israelis in modes of collaboration that offer an alternative political approach to mixed-cities than that offered by dominant coexistence paradigms.

Mixed Events Centering Palestinians: Corner Prophets and Ha-Mazkeka

There is a small but persistent history of efforts in Jerusalem to have mixed hip-hop events that do not fall into the trap of erasing Palestinian identity. In general, such endeavors could be seen to challenge the mainstream framings of mixed cities as progressive, modern, and equitable sites of individual and collective opportunities. In some cases, such events can even hold decolonial potential through performances of (angry) Arab masculinities and overt

220 challenges to the marginalization of Palestinians under relations of settler colonialism. One early and long-running project was the Corner Prophets initiative co-founded by Sagol 59. When discussing the relationship and collaborations between Sagol 59 and Saz, David Wainer (2007) described the initiative’s goal to, “inspire Israeli and Palestinian children to use music as a channel for finding a common ground. Corner Prophets organizes several hip hop and art-related events in Jerusalem to provide an outlet for the engagement of the city's diverse youth within the realm of performing arts.” Sagol 59 certainly comes from the smaller, more left-wing side of

Israeli hip-hop artists; “He represents the liberal, underground wing of Israeli hip-hop, rapping about internal problems like racism and the wealth gap” (Lynskey). The recurring event series continued from 2005 for a few years, though it is unclear when the initiative officially ended, given that many of its organizers remain active in the hip-hop scene to this day.

Corner Prophets early events regularly featured Saz and Sagol 59 performing, part of a larger network of diverse participants at the events. According to Corner Prophet’s archived website, “At our events, you can find Jews, Muslims, Christians, Israelis, Palestinians, Russians,

Ethiopians and Americans, of secular and religious heritage alike. Our hope is to see these communities united and to help these new-formed relationships carry themselves beyond the confines of our events” (“About Us”). The Corner Prophets events regularly featured Ethiopian-

Israeli rappers, Israeli rappers, and Palestinian rappers, along with DJs, dancers, graffiti artists, and others. Even Tamer and Suhel Nafar of DAM performed at the inaugural event in January,

2005.

While the Corner Prophets initiative no longer exists, the event series began a tradition of mixed events with a progressive, liberal focus. Saz, Muzi, and Muhammad Mughrabi all mentioned Corner Prophets to me as an important fixture for Palestinians in the history of

221 Jerusalem’s rap scene. Looking through archival footage of the early cyphers, a hip-hop term for small, somewhat informal gatherings of people to rap and perform together, the Palestinian artists present did not seem to limit their performance of Arab/Palestinian identity in the ways detailed above, including through lyrical and kin(a)esthetic means. However, the Corner

Prophets initiative focused heavily on diversity and dialogue, investing hopefulness in the idea that the performance of diverse peoples in the same event would pre-figure real world alliances.

Absent from the Corner Prophets own framing and description of their project is an explicit commitment to centering Palestinian identity and experience, especially marginalization, in their understanding of diversity and dialogue. Diversity and dialogue become the end goals in ways that eerily reflect the normalizing discourses of coexistence.

Certainly, the organizers were not unaware of or unsympathetic to Palestinian marginalization. Mobius, the events’ co-founder alongside Sagol 59, explained that, "There may be a lot of Palestinian MCs, but not many can make it across the border. We don't have money so we can't pay for transportation. I still reach out to them and I have a dream of a hip-hop opera where Israelis and Palestinians rap about the situation.” A critical and hopeful outlook certainly, but Mobius continued to say, “But in the current climate, I can understand how both sides are less interested in dialogue" (Fiske, 2006). Further describing Sagol 59’s work with Corner

Prophets, Mumford quotes Sagol 59 as saying, “There’s no hierarchy…If an Arab guy wanted to come and do his thing or an ultra-orthodox girl from a settlement wanted to say her thing, they could.” (Mumford, 2014). Equating an “Arab guy” with an “ultra-orthodox girl from a settlement” is unfair and problematic. Not only does it assume a lot about what an “Arab guy” might want to rap about, but it normalizes the permitting of harmful ideologies and views in hip-

222 hop spaces for the sake of diversity and dialogue, which gets us no closer to a truly decolonial, mixed, hip-hop event.

One standout example in the Jerusalem scene is the recurring Monolingua music night hosted at Ha-Mazkeka. Monolingua takes place every few months, typically hosted by

DJ Ramzy Spinoza, and attracting around or upwards of one-hundred attendees at each event.

Ha-Mazkeka is a fixture in Jerusalem’s alternative music scene. It is a semi-underground space, similar to Kabareet in Haifa. The main entrance and lounge are at street level, but the performance space is set below in an arching, cave-like space that once served as the basement foundation of the building above it, but is now used, like many similar spaces, for retail or other businesses. Mazkeka also features a café and bar, along with a recording studio. According to their website:

Since 2014, it [Mazkeka] provides a stage for innovative artists working in fields which

include music, new media, film and performing arts. Mazkeka serves as a lab and

creation space for new works with versatile performance opportunities…as part of a local

center for artistic collaborations and original productions. The organization identifies,

supports, and presents emerging and under-recognized artists who are making significant

contributions to their respective fields, as well as established artists who wish to stretch

their creative boundaries in a safe environment. (Mazkeka)

This description is, arguably, not explicitly connected to Palestinian cultural practices, and feels similarly focused on diversity, framed as a “lab and creation space” for “artistic collaborations”, that does not specifically name the identities imagined in these collaborations. However, Ha-

Mazkeka, an Israeli-owned venue, hosts a large range of events in any given month, with Monolingua being a standout, Palestinian-organized, mixed audience, hip-hop focused

223 event. Monolingua, meaning one tongue or one language, is a hip-hop and electronic music event featuring Arab artists, predominantly Palestinian ones, though sometimes including artists from other Arab countries. The title Monolingua references the one language that the event will take place in, Arabic, although artists sometimes use English too in their songs or when speaking to the audience. The event audience is consistently made up of Palestinians and Israelis, despite the fact that a large majority of Israelis do not understand or speak Arabic (Evri,

2016). Monolingua used the same framing language across all their events, with all the event pages stating:

Playing the best fresh current music from the Arabic world! The contemporary music

culture and Arabic culture are almost completely transparent in our local culture sphere.

But there is an amazing array of talent and creativity bursting underneath the surface.

As always this night will be completely devoted to Arabic music and language.

Thick Hookah smoke will fill the air. (Monolingua)

Before the event, the promotional materials make explicit the Arab and Palestinian center of the event. On Facebook, the venue’s main platform for event invitations, the description of the event is in Arabic, English, and Hebrew. The event poster (Fig. 1) features a background with an old photo of Arab men, likely from the early 20th century, standing together in a line, smiling and clapping, adorned in Arabic clothing, including a keffiyeh and ‘iqal on their heads. The name of the event is featured in the center of the poster largest in Arabic, smaller in English, and smaller still in Hebrew. On top of the sin letter in the Arabic name is a small image of the Al-

Aqsa mosque. The name of the venue is also written in Arabic and English.

A second promotional poster featured the same background image, cropped differently to show one man in front of the line dancing. The second poster (Fig. 2) featured the same titles and

224 image of the Al-Aqsa mosque. Additionally, it listed the artists for the event: DJs Atar Miner,

Muhammad Amash, and Ramzy Al Spinoza, with MCs Muhammad JABID Mughrabi, Raed

Bassam (also under the JABID title), Muzi Raps (who sometimes collaborates under JABID), and Saz. Before the event, Muzi, Muhammad Mughrabi, and Raed Bassam all posted about new songs they would be dropping at the event, “Yalla” for Muzi and “Action” for Muhammad and

Raed. I read these promotional materials and event description as constituting space-making practices that define the event and expectations ahead of time. Similar to queer and feminist hip- hop spaces in Haifa and Ramallah, these effort help cultivate an atmosphere that is in line with Ha-Mazkeka’s desire to support “artists who wish to stretch their creative boundaries in a safe space” (Mazkeka, emphasis added). Much as space-makers design events relative to queer and female-identified participants’ spatial needs and interests, I would argue that Monolingua at

Ha-Mazkeka does the same for Palestinians in general. Ultimately, these space-making efforts before the show affect how Palestinian masculinities can be expressed or performed at the show.

Fig. 1: Monolingua Promotional Poster

225 Fig. 2: Monolingua Promotional Poster

Like Kabareet and Scene bar in Haifa, Ha-Mazkeka is constructed in a way that facilitates the shifts in visibility and mobility dynamics that accompany secluded publics. The dance floor is hardly visible from the street, as you need to first go through a large lobby where they sell tickets and drinks before descending stairs into the cavern like performance space. The space is not very wide, no more than twenty feet, but stretches back from the staircase about

226 forty-five feet to the stage (Fig. 3). This creates a very tightly packed dance floor at popular events like Monolingua, with Israeli and Palestinian attendees close together, bumping into each other as everyone dances to the music. During the opening DJ sets, most of the audience danced in small groups with friends, less frequently looking up at the stage. But during the rappers’ performances, most attendees were turned forward towards the stage, dancing and pumping their arms to the encouragement of the artists. The performance space was low-lit, mostly with red lights that highlighted the rappers, but kept the dance floor really dim. Smoke filled the air throughout the performances, which combined with the tightly filled dance floor and low lighting mediated the experience of closeness and privacy.

Fig. 3: Ha-Mazkeka Venue

227 Many people would circulate outside for air and maybe a cigarette, but returning inside marked the stark contrast in the affectivity of the outside and inside spaces. Inside the venue, on the dance floor, the constant touching of bodies, the synchronization of dancing across different groups of people, the thickness in the air, all exist inside, not outside. It is an inter-affective experience that, when shared, elides representation, but I might say leaves attendees with the sensation that they shared in something unique and important. Perhaps, this is similar to Muzi’ and Saz’s descriptions of a shared love of musical experiences as the primary focus of their performances. I believe that shared experience and closeness can be an important one for preceding political mobilization towards decoloniality. Put differently, I do believe that actual mixing of Palestinians and Israelis is a necessary pre-condition for any meaningful notion of coexistence. However, as I have contended, it is not closeness in a shared space alone that holds decolonial promise, that would fall into the same diversity and dialogue trap of so many mixed events. We must, therefore, look beyond that closeness to see how Arab and Palestinian identity are deployed in mixed events.

There are stark contrasts between the set of tradeoffs Muzi and Saz succumb to and their performances of Palestinian masculinity at the Monolingua show. What this tells us then is that not all mixed events force the same tradeoffs. Rather, the tradeoffs artists face emerge in explicit and implicit negotiations between artists, audiences, and event organizers. The efforts of

Ha-Mazkeka’s event organizers to center Arab identity, culture, and language in their promotional materials and descriptions of the event are markedly different from many other mixed events that prefer to center diversity, dialogue, or coexistence. The event planning, combined with the spatial design that produces a secluded public, inform the ensuing performances, which we can look to for further evidence of the decolonial potential of

228 the Monolingua show. Chief among my concerns over the forced tradeoffs of marketing in coexistence was the affective regulation of the “angry Arab”, a form of regulation that limited masculine expression via lyrical content, dress style, and communication style. Moreover, I connected that set of regulations to settler colonialism, specifically framing them as a mechanism to render Palestinian men in mixed cities who are critical of social, economic, or political life, as anachronistic threats to the modernity of mixed city life. Muzi and Saz both expressed reservations about appearing angry, simultaneously associating anger with other Arabs and disassociating themselves from that same anger. However, based on their performances that night, neither Muzi nor Saz expressed any reservation about centering their Palestinian masculinities and their anger in their performances.

Before Muzi or Saz came on stage, Muhammad Mughrabi and Raed Bassam held a short set. Both men produce music under the JABID umbrella; neither a concrete crew nor a record label, JABID is more of a collective that multiple artists perform under, chiefly

Muhammad and Raed, but also Muzi on occasion, including for Muzi and Raed’s 2019 song,

“Monsta”, and Muzi’s track “Yalla”, produced by Muhammad and premiered at the same Monolingua show. JABID are known for their unique sound that blends house music, hip- hop percussion, and Arabic melodies into all of their songs. During their set, Muzi was behind them, dancing with the DJ, and hyping up the audience. But Muzi stood out prominently on the stage, even behind his friends and fellow rappers, since he had come to the show with the same keffiyeh and ‘iqal that the men on the event poster wore. Today, wearing a keffiyeh and ‘iqal is increasingly uncommon, especially for young, urban men around Muzi’s age. Complicating that picture is the common association of the keffiyeh with Palestinian solidarity, despite the increasing co-optation of the keffiyeh as a fashion accessory. Kibum Kim (2007) explained in

229 The New York Times how, “The kaffiyeh rose in prominence again in the 1960s when the

Palestinian resistance movement started and Arafat famously adopted it…[now] the younger generation in the Middle East may wear it expressly to show support of the Palestinian cause.”

Completing Muzi’s image was a long chain hanging from his neck with a custom, silver “MUZI

RAPS” pendant hanging from it. The combination of the old and the new, the Palestinian clothing tradition with the hip-hop tradition, had a strong impression on me. Looking through footage of Muzi at other mixed events, I could not find him wearing the same keffiyeh and

‘iqal that he wore to Monolingua. I did not have a chance to ask him if he did it because of the event poster or to send any particular message. The song he released at the event, “Yalla,” received the most excitement from the audience and it was my favorite song of his set. Yalla is a very popular word in Palestine, meaning “hurry up”, “come on”, or simply “hurry.” However, it is also one of the most commonly used Arabic words among Israelis, earning a spot on Haaretz’ and The Jerusalem Post’s lists of popular slang words in Israel (Kordova, 2014; Nocky, 2015).

Muzi’s release of the song at the event might have been a timely coincidence, but the song, almost entirely in Arabic with some English lines, combined with Muzi’s aesthetic, unabashedly laid claim to the term yalla as uniquely Arabic. This effect, whether intentional or not, is particularly powerful in a context when Palestinian cultural traditions, like language or the keffiyeh, are often claimed by Israelis as their own.

Saz came on stage after Muzi, the final rapper of the night. Saz was in classic Saz form. I am always impressed by how suave he seems, never seeming to turn off his public persona. He exudes celebrity and confidence, not surprising from someone who is seeking to be a sex symbol for the Arab world. Walking on stage, Saz wore tight jeans and a black shirt with a red, velvet sport coat on. He had a keffiyeh hanging from his front pocket down his leg.

230 After his opening song, he turned to the audience on the microphone and said in English, so most people in the venue could understand:

Wait a second bro. Mazkeka! I came all the way from Jaffa, Ramle, and Lyd. If you think

I am coming to play your games, you messed with the wrong fucking Arab mother fucker

in the game! So, I wanna see everybody come over here and we are gonna shake some

asses!

As soon as he finished saying that, his next track came on, the audience filed forward, and started dancing as Saz waved his arm and thrusted his hips. Throughout his songs, Saz waved and jumped up and down to encourage his audience to dance, to which they responded enthusiastically. As he was getting hot in the densely packed venue, Saz took his coat off during a break between two songs, and audience members cheered and whistled. During his third song, Saz removed his keffiyeh from his pocket and swung it around while jumping and skipping on stage, referencing the Palestinian dabke dance tradition (Bindler & Ahuvia, 2016). At the same time, he kept yelling “yalla” in keeping with the rhythm of the music and his dancing. He then placed the keffiyeh over his shoulders before exiting the stage past the congratulatory audience.

Both Muzi and Saz displayed Palestinian aesthetics in their performances, aesthetics which I have already argued could associate them with the “angry Arab” characterization at other mixed events. In fact, in many places in Jerusalem simply wearing a keffiyeh can be cause for harassment (Laing, 2011). Saz’s call to the audience boasting of himself as “the wrong fucking

Arab mother fucker” was just one part of his performance of anger. Him and Muzi both rapped in their normally low voices, moved in quick ways and with arm movements and facial expressions that conveyed anger and masculinity in overlap. At the same time, they both directed

231 their mixed audiences in concert with their songs, getting the audience to dance, wave their arms, and cheer in unison. I do not want to be overly optimistic about the Monolingua performance, but I do feel there is a stark contrast between it and the Hip-Hop Sulha event, and other similar events that center diversity and dialogue as the end goals of coexistence. I believe the performances of Muzi and Saz are testaments to the differences between what was permissible, private, and protected in Monolingua, versus what is discouraged at many larger, more public events in Jerusalem and other mixed cities.

While the event did not explicitly use the language of colonialism in their promotional materials, I believe that the decolonial potential of the event exists in a few key ways beyond the loosening of restrictions on masculine expression for artists like Muzi and Saz. First, through their centering of Arabic language as the “Monolingua”, the only language of the event, Israeli participants were able to experience the feelings of being left out that many Palestinians in mixed cities experience. Israelis can typically expect Hebrew to be the language of choice in most public places across Israel, but Arabic speakers do not see their language represented in the same way. I think that the experience of being de-centered from the linguistic norms of a space can help with developing decolonial sensibilities in Israeli hip-hop fans, especially when enmeshed in intimate and enjoyable environments. Second, Muzi’ and Saz’s performances laid claim to cultural traditions that face co-optation, including words in the Arabic language and clothing like the keffiyeh which is increasingly worn by Israelis as a depoliticized fashion choice. Part of the colonizing logic of mixed cities and mixed events is in the desire to include Palestinian traditions while erasing their very definition and history as Palestinian. Reclaiming and naming those traditions as Arab and as Palestinian is a decolonial act when done in mixed spaces like Ha-

Mazkeka.

232 IV. Conclusion

How do we begin to make sense of the apparent contradiction between mainstream coexistence narratives and related portrayals of mixed cities that frame them as bastions of individual and collective opportunity on one hand and the extensive critiques levied by scholars and activists against the processes of disenfranchisement and marginalization that Palestinian men still face in those cities on the other? Who are the winners and losers that emerge from the different types of mixing taking place? What sacrifices are required to make coexistence work and what benefits come with it? These questions are difficult and come with high stakes: If mixed cities are envisioned as the laboratories for a future, peaceful society, what does it mean to abandon hope in those cities and their coexistence logics? Alternatively, how can we envision saving them? It is my belief that Muzi’ and Saz’s testimonies and lived experiences as rappers reflect practices that many Palestinians engage when living in mixed cities. More specifically, as this concluding section argues, Saz and Muzi can be viewed as responding to and against the prevailing discourses and practices of mixed cities which drive the affective and discursive limiting of

Palestinian masculinities. Artists like Saz and Muzi have developed coping strategies, including through performances in Palestinian majority cities and events like Monolingua, in which they are not burdened by the same restrictive practices. As demonstrated here, if hip-hop practices can help mixed cities generate a transformative, intersectional, and decolonial approach to coexistence, it will require the (re)centering of Palestinians in the organization and democratization of cultural practices and spaces as a means, not an ends.

It is important to remember the necessity of Palestinians to mixed cities and coexistence logics: they are needed as a demographic to qualify in a quantitative sense as mixed cities and they are present in ways, however curtailed, in political and cultural practices in those cities.

233 Their necessity, however, does not equate with power and representation as the scholarship reviewed earlier in this chapter attests. Palestinians are routinely denied equitable access to and representation within political and economic structures that confer power at multiple scales.

Sustained critiques abound that reject portrayals of mixed cities as metaphorical cities upon a hill. It is not unfair in that context to suggest that the presence of Palestinians in mainstream political and cultural practices in mixed cities takes on a performative aspect that functions in the service of the Israeli state. Boaz Izraeli (2020) recently remarked on the performative aspects of

“democracy” as understood in and essential to modern Israeli political life. Discussing social justice protests that took place in Israel in 2011, Boaz commented:

A spirit of change hovered in the air. Everyone seemed supportive. The prime minister

and his cabinet, teachers and tilers, clerks and editors, even businesspeople and bank

owners. They all supported the right of these young people to launch a colorful protest in

public – thereby illustrating and reminding us of the fact that we live in a free and

democratic regime, that this is not North Korea…And now, after we’ve received

reinforcement of the belief that we are a free, democratic society, we can put that

Woodstock in storage and continue without any change. That seems to have been the

protest movement’s only importance.

Much the same criticism could be levied at the supposed democratization of cultural practices in mixed cities. The presence of Palestinians in those spaces, however curtailed, becomes evidence of the freedom of dialogue and competing ideas in mixed cities, testified to in countless media articles that celebrate the Hip-Hop Sulha concerts and similarly styled events. The presence of

Palestinians in such an event becomes an end in itself, reinforcing a belief in democratic representation in mixed cities, despite evidence to the contrary.

234 So, while Palestinians are required in a demographic sense to prop up and materialize coexistence narratives, the question, particularly for mixed cities, is what sorts of Palestinians are needed to limit the decolonial potential of coexistence and mixing, while at the same time upholding the image of mixed cities as diverse and democratic. As has been shown here and in the chapter on Haifa, Palestinian women and queer Palestinians can be tactically absorbed into coexistence logics, often described as a form whitewashing or pinkwashing, in which they become evidence of Israel’s preferability and thus its superior claim to modernity. Palestinian men, however, do not absorb so easily into coexistence logics. My belief is that whitewashing and pinkwashing narratives require a marginalized identity (e.g. female, LGBTQ) that the Israeli state can claim to protect. This creates a point of contrast between Israel and Palestine that Israel can exploit to justify the occupation and its expansion, a contrast that other countries can also exploit to justify giving military aid to Israel. However, for Palestinian men, their masculinity is privileged in Palestinian social relations, making it difficult for Israel to develop a unique claim to its protection. Thus, the characterization of Palestinian men as abhorrent, violent, and anachronistic remains in operation, yet ironically comes into conflict with the coexistence logic of mixed cities that require the presence of Palestinian men. As I have demonstrated here, that contradiction is resolved through the trade-offs that Palestinian men make in the public sphere of cities like Jerusalem.

Returning to the hip-hop practices of Muzi and Saz in Jerusalem, we can better learn about what happens when Palestinians move from being portrayed as passive recipients of Israeli modernity in mixed cities to being portrayed as active cultural practitioners contributing to the very mixed events framed as proof of a functioning coexistence. For both artists, as this chapter attests, their ability to market to mixed crowds using coexistence logics requires a series of

235 forced trade-offs that I understand as discursive, affective, and tied to race and gender. While my analysis was grounded specifically in Muzi’ and Saz’s careers, interviews, and performances, what that analysis revealed compliments existing literature on Palestinian masculinities broadly and within Jerusalem specifically. Thus, those trade-offs could be seen as extending beyond hip- hop practices and into other practices that Palestinian men participate in within mixed cities. On the level of discourse, Palestinians in mixed cities face notably different (not to imply better or worse) restraints on what constitutes free speech than in Palestinian majority cities in Israel or in

Gaza and the West Bank. Muzi and Saz, not to mention many other artists I interviewed in

Jerusalem, can recount instances where their music has got them in trouble with the Israeli police or military because of the content of their lyrics.

Throughout interviews, Muzi and Saz both attested to how they have intentionally avoided being identified as “angry” or as an “angry Arab” in their performances in Jerusalem and beyond. For both of them, it is framed as simultaneously natural and also an overt career decision. On one hand, they both provide narratives of personal transformation and mindset change that correspond with their move away from anger, a sort of natural transition over time.

On the other hand, both implicitly frame their avoidance of such stereotypes as a necessary move to get booked in mixed events. While anger is an emotion that registers heavily in hip-hop music,

Palestinian rappers in mixed cities ironically face pressure to not appear too angry. We can easily understand this discursively as meaning that rappers cannot freely engage in criticisms of Israeli political, economic, or cultural practices, but the affective dimensions of this restriction are more nuanced. On a sonic level, tone of voice (too low) and musical editing (too hard/fast) come into play to avoid producing an angry affect, especially when a portion of the audience does not understand Arabic. Appearance and bodily comportment, what I discussed as kin(a)esthetics in

236 chapter one, factor in as well, with risk factors indicating that simply appearing too Palestinian, such as by sporting a keffiyeh or wearing a shirt with a Palestinian flag, can register as anger to an Israeli audience.

One interpretation of the affective horizons presented to Palestinians in mixed cities relates back to the contradiction between the need for actual Palestinians in mixed cities on one hand and the desire to maintain relations of settler colonialism on the other. That interpretation, however troubling, is that the Palestinian participation in mixed cities involves forms of labor that stabilize and circulate affects useful to the maintenance of a vulnerable, subservient, and content Palestinian minority. Put differently, since affective horizons direct affect at individual and collective levels, if we can prevent Palestinians from appearing or feeling angry, then it becomes difficult to make the case there is anything to be angry about. The reverse logic is often posed to Palestinians in mixed cities who do express anger and get met with, “What is there to be angry about?” or with a comparative “Look how good we have it here compared to that other place” read implicitly as Palestinian majority cities. This silencing of anger and the production and circulation of non-angry affects in mixed cities also establishes a relational affective geography wherein anger gets assigned to Palestinians in Palestinian places while it gets erased from mixed cities.

The implicit logic, that the benefits of life in mixed cities for Palestinians are due to the presence of Israelis there unlike in Palestinian majority cities, has two main effects worth reiterating. First, it implies that anger belongs in Palestinian majority places because of the failures of Palestinians to create a sustainable and prosperous society for themselves. In contrast, this logic asserts that Palestinians should have good feelings when in mixed cities through their enjoyment of a more prosperous, Israeli society. We can reflect back on Muzi and Saz and their

237 investment in particular affects which they represent through the language of commonality, happiness, dance, and love of music in ways that connect to their post-identity politics. Second and related to the first point, this logic erases Israel’s central role in the destruction of Palestinian society and infrastructure historically and contemporarily through the maintenance of a two- tiered economic system. A more realistic relational affective geography would identify the same systemic processes of marginalization and disenfranchisement at work in both mixed and

Palestinian majority cities in Israel-Palestine and, consequently, identify affective arrangements that bind, rather that separate, Palestinians across space. However, as we can see, mixed cities and coexistence narratives play a key role in broader geopolitics by maintaining an economic, cultural, political, and affective separation between the Palestinians within and outside the city or within and outside Israel. While many have asserted mixed cities are an idealistic laboratory for a collective, emancipatory, future politics, this analysis forces us to reframe them as a laboratory for the production of the (economic, political, cultural, affective) relations needed to maintain and mask ongoing settler colonialism.

A glance back at preceding chapters in this dissertation provides some key insights that can (in)form a radical approach to coexistence in mixed cities. Queer space-making efforts in

Haifa and feminist space-making efforts in Ramallah both gesture to the salience of space as a key mechanism for exercising power and self-determination. This applies not only to the broad- scale question of land and territory, but also to the local level where relations of ownership and organizational control over cultural spaces can (de)limit the decolonial potential of cultural practices. The ability for those space-makers in Haifa and Ramallah to develop queer, feminist, and/or decolonial politics out of hip-hop practices was directly linked to organizational control over spaces and the ability to develop relations of intimacy, privacy, and trust. While ownership

238 and organizational control of cultural spaces by Palestinians does not, in and of itself, guarantee the effectiveness of hip-hop and other cultural practices to extend a decolonial and differential approach to coexistence, but it represents a proven and critical shift in the material relations that currently undergird and depoliticize cultural practices in mixed cities. Put differently, it is hard to imagine a mixed city in which coexistence has ushered in equitable relations between and among

Israelis and Palestinians and yet where economic ownership and organizational control of cultural spaces remains dominantly in the hands of Israelis. This is especially true given that economic well-being is a key measure of equity and a key site of continued critique of mixed cities.

While the preceding chapters have provided guidelines and suggestions for rethinking space in relation to hip-hop practices, decolonial politics, and differential belonging, this chapter explores different cultural spaces that Israelis and Palestinians co-populate. Thus, while ownership and organizational control of cultural spaces by Palestinians is an important and necessary shift, it does not provide a complete template for thinking through the specifics of coexistence, its narrative and its logics. Regev Nathanson (2017), in his dissertation work on the

Hadar neighborhood of Haifa, focused on the development of what he termed “reflexive coexistence.” While grounded in a different city, his research provides insight into the successes and failures of coexistence in Haifa, the city that is arguably most-noted as the place where coexistence has seen its greatest successes, an association that certainly felt true for me in my years spent doing research. Nathanson defines reflexive coexistence as the “various practices they [residents] used to bridge the gap between their experience of living in a mixing social environment and the increasing discourse of separation in Israel” (p. xii).

239 Nathanson examined how spatiality, ownership, and organizational control of cultural practices relate in attempts at reflexive coexistence. In one project meant to be an Israeli and

Palestinian collaboration to feature local artists’ work in shops across the hip Masada Street,

Nathanson explained how a lack of Palestinian leadership from the very inception of the planning group led to its eventual inability to fundamentally challenge the discourse of separation. As Nathanson wrote:

The artists group used practices of reflexivity, if only in a limited manner, as a critical

tool, which was meant to assist them in presenting an alternative discourse to the

discourse of separation, which did not reflect their experiences of living in a mixing

neighborhood. Reflexivity, however, did not grant its practitioners a better understanding

of their failure to push for a more collaborative project. Although it assisted the group in

identifying the faults in the hegemonic discourse of separation, and expressing them in

writing, it did not lead them to a better understanding of their own failures in creating a

more shared project. Nonetheless, group members were reflexive enough to acknowledge

their failure and to define it as a deadlock (p. 281-2).

Nathanson’s (2017) work teaches us that even in the mixed city of Haifa, lauded as the city where coexistence has been the most successful, and even with more reflexive and intersectional approaches to coexistence, neither discourses nor practices of coexistence have dramatically altered the unequal relations between Palestinians and Israelis. While fond of Nathanson’s detailed empirical and analytic work, I think that his initial framing of the contradiction was flawed by contrasting the realities of living in a mixed/mixing city with the “discourse of separation in Israel” (p. xii). This framing, while perhaps relevant to many Israelis, poses a discourse of separation as problematic, without assigning clear, context-specific positions to

240 the two sides of the separation. However, for most Palestinians, it is not a discourse of separation, but material practices of segregation, dispossession, and disenfranchisement that conflict with the humanizing joviality of mixing in a mixed city. The difference here between separation (passive, de facto, non-hierarchical) and segregation (active, de jure, hierarchical) should not be overlooked. It is the root of the failures of coexistence discourses and practices and the charges that the very term itself is devoid of meaning for many Palestinians.

There is also a temporality to mainstream coexistence discourses and practices, one that mitigates against learning from the past and focuses on the future, as though the past can be ignored and a new, blank slate created. This temporality is affective, rendering the angry Arab as an anachronistic holdout, a thinly veiled Orientalist trope that denies the angry Arab any real place in the modern, mixing city. Nathanson’s phrasing “discourses of separation” externalizes separation from the individuals who benefit from it and render the moment of separation (the present) as the starting point from which to begin transformative work. Whereas, “practices of segregation” more accurately names the beneficiaries and victims of separation and identifies the past as the real starting point of decolonial work that carries into the present and future. Thus, while I am hesitant to dispose of the term “reflexive coexistence” due to my own investment in and methodological practice of reflexivity, Nathanson’s (2017) work indicates that reflexivity in practice cannot work without a fundamental, shared understanding of the colonization of

Palestine and the resulting two-tiered, hierarchical, unequal society.

Instead, I am interested in other modes of coexistence, practiced currently, but not always named, that do invest in those shared historical understandings and commitment, from the offset, to decolonial work. We might name such practices as reparative coexistence or restorative coexistence, as both reparation and restoration harken to modes of justice that tend to the

241 continuities between historic and contemporary wrongs. Mainstream approaches to coexistence are, at worst, discursive and practical extensions of a settler colonial society. At best, they represent a hopefulness that mixing will inevitably usher in a more equitable world, a hopefulness that has not been validated by a preponderance of actual research on or testimony by

Palestinians. Only by insisting on decolonization as a necessary framework for approaching coexistence, necessary alongside the queer, feminist, and myriad other frameworks highlighted in previous chapters, can Palestinians invest hope in coexistence, not as a vague signifier, but as a mechanism for transformative justice. As mechanisms for non-traditional identification and radical politics, hip-hop practices might have an influential role to play in a decolonial, reparative, and restorative approach to coexistence in mixed cities like Jerusalem.

242 CONCLUSION:

From Practices to Arrangements: Affectivity and Identity in Palestinian Hip-Hop Spaces

This dissertation presented a grounded theorization of certain elements that exist within

Palestine’s hip-hop scenes. Those elements are extensive, encompassing spaces like cities, streets, and venues, people like audiences, artists, producers, and event organizers, musical elements like rhythms, beats, melodies, and instrumentation, materials like clothing and event posters, behaviors like dancing or kissing, expressions of identity, and political and cultural discourses. Framing cultures not as static entities with fixed codes, but as involving shifting sets of practices, this work looked at the intersections of a range of hip-hop practices: space-making practices, queer practices, feminist practices, and decolonial practices. Diverse spaces and space- making practices were central in my analysis, addressing how identity formation can be understood through a focus on hip-hop practices that take place in and relate to different spaces, like venues and cities. Critically within that focus, I took an affective approach to identity formation, mapping the emergence of affinities between people through an analysis of the inter- affectivity of human and non-human, material and discursive elements: people, ideas, sounds, and spaces. While I believe that framing hip-hop culture in terms of practice(s) is a suitable approach for a dissertation that highlights how hip-hop is practiced, how those practices can change and with them the meanings and affects of hip-hop, and how, despite that openness to change, hip-hop practices can also become regularized in ways that facilitate the feeling of affective stability among hip-hop practitioners.

Nonetheless, to more effectively and transparently frame the significance of affect to cultural studies in and on Palestine both within and beyond the context of this dissertation, I place the preceding chapters in conversation again with affect theory, specifically the concept of

243 “affective arrangements” that I discussed in my opening. My introductory justification of the term “hip-hop practices” was defined mercurially as “shifting practices, engaged in different spaces, and by shifting groups of participants.” Slaby et al. (2019) locate affective arrangements in relation to notions of practice and concepts found in practice theory. They concede, for example, that, “Concepts from practice theory—for example, agency, practice, performativity, normativity, field, habitus, etcetera—are helpful to approach affective arrangements and chart their salient characteristics” (p. 8). I believe that this dissertation has accomplished that mission of charting the “salient characteristics” of Palestinian hip-hop in different spaces. However,

Slaby et al. continue to caution that, “given this potential strangeness of the compositions in question, theorists must reckon with limitations in the potency of these concepts, as they might incline one to expect more in the way of structure, meaning, strategy, or rationality than is actually there. While useful, these concepts should be employed with caution to prevent local specificities and antics from being blocked from view” (p. 8).

If the move from practices to affective arrangements can capture the same constitutive, inter-affecting elements, but at the same time render unstable that which is artificially made to appear structured, meaningful, strategic, or rational, what can the move to affective arrangements tell us about what is both visible and “blocked from view”? Using Slaby et al.’s (2019) concept, I use this concluding essay to reflect on the salient elements, both visible and invisible, in the purview of this study of Palestinian hip-hop. In so doing, I hope to provide useful suggestions for

Palestinian cultural studies as a scholarly field. In particular, I focus on a few key lessons. First, I look at the relationality between public space and prevailing political geographies on one hand and secluded public on the other to stress the importance of the latter. More broadly, I conclude that for a field so focused on political geography, a greater attention to the particular places and

244 built environments of cultural practices could prove beneficial. Second, I look at the role of bodies in the preceding chapters and revisit the concepts of entrainment and the imbrication of artist and audience to explore how Palestine studies can take up affective arrangements beyond

Palestinian hip-hop, not only in other studies of music, but in the study of more overtly political practices like protests. Third, I engage with Lauren Berlant’s (2011) notion of cruel optimism to explore what is overlooked in this study, namely the ways in which participation in Palestinian hip-hop arrangements can feel good, but cause invisible harms to participants. This reality, I suggest, should motivate us to reinvest in the important of intersectional decoloniality in the field. Finally, I look towards the transnational/global dimensions of this work to stress the limits of affective arrangements, as conceived by Slaby et al., to the field of Palestinian cultural studies.

Specifically, I ask how we can expand the concept beyond shared places and frame affective arrangements that can bridge space across Israel-Palestine in an increasingly global moment.

I. Shared Space: Public Space Versus Secluded Publics

A key element in the study of affective arrangements is the role of materials, primarily built environments and specific places, an element central to this dissertation. Reflecting on the preceding chapters, a dynamic emerges in the relationality between public spaces, specific streets or an entire cityscape, and secluded publics, namely hip-hop venues. Certainly, secluded publics are still critically publics, (relatively) freely entered places where one can see and be seen, but the differences between them have been better articulated through a focus on mobility and visibility regimes. Mobility and visibility regimes involve the same key elements as affective arrangements, like spaces, people, and discourses, and one might argue that they constitute affective arrangements themselves. The preceding chapters have articulated different shifts between inside and outside venues in affective terms and as involving shifts in mobility and

245 visibility regimes. Slaby et al. (2019) write, “It is the ongoing, ‘live’ affective relations within the arrangement that constitute zones of higher relative intensity compared to what is outside” (p.

6), and I have argued similarly that the move from inside to outside the venue materially and symbolically constitute a movement into a new mobility and visibility regime or in their terms, a new affective arrangement. Moreover, I have reframed notions of free and safe space by highlighting the roles of music, dance, language, clothing, behavior, built environments, and other elements in the cultivation, change, and disruption of free and safe spaces.

Framing shared spaces as inter-affective, part of the “material-discursive formation” we call affective arrangements (Slaby et al., 2019, p. 5), means that they are not inert when devoid of people. Hip-hop venues affect and are affected by the people who populate them:

A workplace, a public site, or a ritualistic space are not just there and then get somehow

filled up with affective interactions between people. The concrete nature of established

affective dynamics—be they relatively spontaneous (such as in public spaces), partially

orchestrated (such as in corporate offices), or passed on by traditions (such as in

rituals)—is instead an essential aspect of these arrangements. (Slaby et al, 5, emphasis

added)

I add emphasis in this quote not only because, in some literal cases, hip-hop venues are constructed from concrete, but because it is easy to render the concrete, immobile spaces of

Palestinian hip-hop distinct from the affective intensity or tone of an event. As this work has demonstrated, the materiality of venues are essential to the hip-hop practices and feelings of affinity and belonging cultivated at shows. For example, the differences between Hip-

Hop Sulha and Monolingua are myriad, but one key difference is in the spatial design of Levontin 7 when compared to Ha-Mazkeka. If Israel-Palestine has fractured geographies

246 defined by policies of separation and segregation, nonetheless affective arrangements develop that constitute people in relation to that geography and its spaces. A change of space or of geography means a change in the affective arrangement. It is in that vein that I find the relation between public spaces and secluded publics so important. The shift in the construction of that material space shifts the affective arrangement and relationality between people, but it does so in ways that maintain distinct elements of affective arrangements in other public spaces, including inter-personal behaviors. In other words, the dynamic between public spaces experienced as oppressive and secluded publics experienced as freeing, is driven by their many similarities as much as their differences. Crucial to this are visibility and mobility as key axes of power in

Israel-Palestine. Thus, we could say secluded public are (not-so-)different than other public spaces because of one’s ability to move and be seen as in public, but without the same feelings of judgment, surveillance, or marginalization that emerge from affective arrangements involving other public spaces.

This dynamic has already existed in literature on Palestinian space, though in other terms. Mokarram Abbas and Bas Van Heur’s (2014) analysis of public spaces, specifically spatial audience, spatial opportunities, and spatial organization suggest that not only prevailing discourses about gender, but also the design and materiality of certain spaces can impact women’s comfort and use of those spaces. Al-Bishawi, Ghadban, and Jorgensen (2017) similarly identified the important role of privacy (read here akin to “secluded”, rather than privacy in the sense of a private sphere) for women who use public spaces. Walaa Alqaisiya (2018) contends that the spatial design of the Jerusalem-based non-profit alQaws is instrumental to its potential as a queer, decolonial movement builder. Enter the Void’s work in Palestine existed largely as an attempt to co-opt existing and build new spaces for alternative music and art, but contrasts those

247 alternative spaces with a larger geography of public space defined by “gentrification and intolerance” (Enter the Zine, 2017, p. 6). All of the spaces these scholars and organizers have addressed still involve people in relations of seeing and being seen, or socializing more broadly, rather than being calls for total isolation. In fact, it is one’s ability to slip into a hip-hop show

(un)noticed that, I would argue, maintains the radical potential of hip-hop space-making and the openness of affective arrangements to new persons.

For the larger field of Palestinian cultural studies, the affective dynamic between public spaces in general, and secluded publics specifically, suggests the need to study geography, especially human and cultural geography, from a relational perspective. In Haifa, the need to pass as and pass through public streets en route to a show contrasts with the how one might express queer identity in the venue. In Ramallah, feminist space-makers design secluded publics to manifest relations of trust and safety in contrast with experiences of street harassment. In

Jerusalem, the trade-offs required of Palestinian rappers to perform in large, public, mixed events contrasts with their performances of Arab and Palestinian identity in the secluded public of Ha-

Mazkeka. We could thus understand secluded publics as responsive, recuperative, or reparative, in addition to previous discussions of them as safe spaces or free spaces. Palestinian cultural studies has a strong history of focusing on spatiality and oppression. Space, especially public space, has been well framed as the material terrain upon which practices of oppression and settler colonialism play out. However, equal attention should be paid to the relation between different types of public space, public spaces defined by dominant mobility and visibility regimes on one hand, and secluded publics, cultivated by and recuperative for Palestinians.

For example, feminist research on Palestine has focused considerably on women’s entrance into the public sphere, including through political activism and use of public spaces.

248 Sophie Richter-Devroe's (2012) research on Palestinian women’s political activism focuses on

Ramallah in particular, along with other West Bank cities, and how women organized public protests after the Second Intifada. Richter-Devroe locates women’s political activism in the city in relation to prevailing gendered mobility and visibility regimes, though not using those exact terms. She focuses on the gendered nature of protest and the ways “women invade political spaces traditionally defined as male and masculine” (p. 195). Her account of mobility and visibility restrictions on women in the East Bank pays attention to the major institutions I centered in chapter two: “Israeli occupation policies and military reprisals in combination with the PA’s patriarchal and hierarchical nature have fostered social conservatism and internal fragmentation, thus raising barriers to female public political action. Within this context, women’s bodies and their behaviour have increasingly become battlefields upon which political rivalries are played out” (p. 191). Conversely, other studies have focused on more secluded publics in which women gather and organize. Articles on women’s cafes in Ramallah (Tobin,

2016; Gedalyahu, 2012) or on domesticity and women’s organizing in homes (Harker, Sayyad,

& Reema, 2019) have accomplished some of that work. However, as women’s movements in

Palestine move towards increasing publicity, formality, and organization (Richter-Devroe, 2012), then a study of the relationality of different public spaces (i.e. streets of protest versus homes or cafes for planning/organizing) might help us frame women’s protests beyond the discursive elements found at protests. In other words, as was the case in my study in Ramallah, women’s use of secluded publics responds to prevailing mobility and visibility regimes in other public spaces.

The same insights could be said about countless other topics in Palestine studies. Ritchie and Wagner’s studies of Palestinian queer social life in Israel, for example, focus on prevailing

249 restrictions on visibility and mobility in Israel, and in chapter one I related those prevailing regimes with those produced in hip-hop secluded publics. From the perspective of both this study and of research on affective arrangements, the specific built environments and concrete materiality of secluded publics should be seen as an essential element in more studies of

Palestinian identity-formation. This suggestion might be taken with a grain of salt by other scholars in the field of Palestine studies, as processes of settler colonialism have forced

Palestinians out of the public sphere and out of public spaces across Israel-Palestine. It would be easy to argue, then, that secluded publics are what Palestinians have been reduced to and that we need to look at and focus on large-scale geopolitical concerns. However, I remain committed to framing secluded publics as potentially radical sites of affecting and being affected that can precede and sustain political mobilization in the more traditionally-framed public spaces. To dismiss of secluded publics, moreover, is to dismiss of the spaces in which queer and feminist

Palestinians experience safety and belonging, a dismissal that curtails the intersectional efficacy of decolonial movement building.

II. Bodies in Motion: Affective Relationality

The analyses of secluded publics found in this dissertation and their varied role in affective arrangements corresponds with my discussions of bodies, motion, dance, sound, and music. In chapter one, my use of entrainment to explain how music, especially beats and rhythms, are an important element in affective arrangements that I described as identity-forming, queer, and erotic. In chapter two, I explored the connection between the elements of artist and audience in the cultivation of feelings of trust, privacy, and safety. In chapter three, I contrast mainstream mixed hip-hop events with the more secluded and Arab-organized public of Monolingua at Ha-Mazkeka, where I addressed the relationship of artist and audience in terms

250 of entrainment and in relation to the expression of Arab identity and anger. Secluded publics are a central element, then, in what Slaby et al. (2019) describe as “affective relationality.” The concept involves, “both an understanding of the entities that coalesce locally to engender relational affect, and also the overall “feel,” affective tonality or atmosphere that prevails in such a locale” (p. 4). Thus, as Slaby et al. further conclude, affective arrangements as a concept “does neither pertain to sociomaterial settings nor to affective relationality alone—but to both in their mutually formative combination” (p. 5). My specific analyses focus intently on secluded publics and other hip-hop spaces that I connect here to affective relationality among hip-hop practitioners, but the notion of affective relationality and affective arrangements more broadly can apply beyond a study of secluded publics and hip-hop music. Thus, I reflect here again on the role of entrainment and the imbrication of artist and audience in relation to Palestinian cultural studies.

Entrainment refers to the synchronization of internal and external beat patterns, or put differently, the synchronization of individuals and groups with each other and the prevailing sounds. If (semi-)stable affective arrangements help with affective relationality by stabilizing the feel of a hip-hop event, then the stabilization of some elements in that arrangement is needed to produce or stabilize feelings of closeness and belonging key to identity formation. I would argue that music itself is a key element. Beyond the lyrics themselves, beats and rhythms are an element that, though changing over a song or set, co-stabilize with another element at work, human behaviors, specifically through entrainment. When audiences dance together, a practice enabled by the presence of a beat, it shifts the affective arrangement in ways that, I would argue, are conducive to affective relationality as they involve different modes of participation than passive listenership. Entrainment and dance as active forms of listenership produce feelings of

251 having participated together, actively, in something beyond the individual listener. For example, the experience of sitting in an assigned seat to watch a musical performance feels different than dancing to a musical performance with other people, even if we assumed the same artist is performing in both instances. Whether it be through the intimate grinding in Haifa or the synchronized clapping and jumping at Ha-Mazkeka in Jerusalem, modes of entrainment and dance are essential elements in these affective arrangements, stabilizing affective relationality as binding phenomenon that produces felt connections tied to identity.

While music and built environments are essential elements, we should also be careful not to lump all participants into the same category when looking at hip-hop events or practices. In different chapters and in different ways, I reflected on the relationship between artist and audience as central to the overall feel of an event. Slaby et al. (2019) describe another essential element in affective arrangements, namely “The mutual balancing of (asymmetric) ‘affective roles,’ filling differential ‘affective niches’ in a team” (p. 7). They further explain how, “the perspective of affective arrangements suggests that the contouring of these affective roles within the interactions of a concrete team is the result of subtle forms of a reciprocal affective interplay”

(p. 7). This language speaks to the dynamics of hip-hop events, especially the dynamic between artist and audience. Artistic practices range from a call and response of lyrics with the audience to the use of language and gestures to get an audience to jump, clap, or otherwise move in some way, the latter getting more attention in this dissertation. Framing these practices as elements with affective arrangements can recognize how different affective roles meet the needs of the arrangement as a whole, helping to stabilize it. This approach is also non-hierarchical, instead suggesting the crucial inter-affectivity of artist and audience. The affective arrangement would

252 shift, as would my analysis, if I analyzed artists performing without audiences or audiences listening to pre-recorded music without an artist performing.

How can we understand entrainment and artist-audience imbrication outside the realm of hip-hop in an effort to speak to a larger field of Palestinian cultural studies? If we seek to understand how different affective arrangements stabilize affective relationality across Israel-

Palestine, then can we think of entrainment and audience-artist imbrication in terms of identity formation in other musical and non-musical contexts? First, entrainment and audience-artist imbrication are both useful concepts to engage when engaging in analyses of other musical practices or events in Israel-Palestine. Critical musicology, sound studies, discourse analysis, and other scholarly perspectives have spoken to Palestinian music and dance, though entrainment has never been used to frame either, nor has audience-artist imbrication received particular attention.

As I have previously mentioned, the tendency to focus on lyrical analysis when studying lyrical music has meant the sidelining of audience-oriented practices, ones which I have argued render visible modes of identity formation that include gender and sexual identity.

For example, Mauro Van Aken’s (2006) study of dabke dance rituals in the Jordan Valley is an excellent piece of scholarship that, while not using the term entrainment specifically, addresses how entrainment works during the dance and the relationship between dance dynamics and identity. Van Aken describes dabke as a fundamentally group endeavor, “form of controlled tension toward a collective dance, a collective body, a common feeling, a form of ritual group activity...Dabkeh has become a place of fun and ostentation while the elderly will sit, discuss, observe, comment, contest and only occasionally participate” (p. 210). Van Aken further addresses the role of the lawih, the lead dancer who signals other dancers through their moves to set the patterns and norms of that particular performance: “he will indicate through signs of the

253 fingers of the hand, he will ‘order’ the kind of rhythm to play to the tabl’e players, and at the same time he will tell the group of dancers the next step to perform” (p. 210). The role of lawih is often reserved for someone male, and Van Aken describes the gendered dimensions of this tendency:

Being a good dancer means acting as a strong dancer - an exhibition of masculinity. It is

interesting to notice how strength, ability and knowledge are fundamental to the role

of lawih, and that the lack of these prerequisites will entail removal from the leading

role...The social intensity of dance is well condensed in the figure of the lawih; as with

the dancers and audience, he embodies a gendered identity connected to cultural forms of

belonging that are ‘put in place’ and put in motion (p. 211).

Van Aken’s (2006) analysis of dabke, movement, synchronization, embodiment, and gender demonstrates the importance of analyzing entrainment and audience-artist imbrication.

The modes of entrainment different people engage can tell us something about prevailing gender and sexual norms in a practice often understood as male, or at least male-led. If we only looked at the lawih in isolation, we could say very little about the gendered significance of dabke to women.

Second, the same concept of entrainment and audience-artist interaction could be applied beyond the scope of explicitly musical events or practices. In particular, public protests and demonstrations often produce soundscapes that would not be characterized as musical, but involve participants in entrainment through chants. If we widen audience-artist to more broadly map affective roles, we might then look to a protest leader and other protest participants as filling particular affective roles. Often, protest leaders initiate chants to be repeated or responded to by all the other participants, similar to a hip-hop artist’s call and response. The protest leader

254 initiating the chants and the response from the audience are both essential elements in an affective arrangement that lends a protest its overall feel. Lost in a crowd of protesters, the constant call and response helps participants feel a connection with others there who, though not visible other than from a bird’s eye view, are nonetheless audible. Given that protest leaders are often men and that women face different constrictions of public space (Richter-Devroe, 2012), studying protests with a focus on entrainment and leader-participant imbrication helps to render visible those gendered dynamics in real time. In late-2019, a series of women-led protests erupted across Israel-Palestine directed at femicide and honor killings that had recently taken place. Many major news outlets covered these protests (Bakria & Khoury, 2019; Sverdlov, 2019;

Hammad, 2019), but no coverage of the event dealt with the affective dimensions of the protests themselves, their overall tone, or their being uniquely led and populated largely by women. This discussion of protests is only an initial gesture towards what affective arrangements, entrainment, and audience-artist/participant-leader imbrication could tell us about musical and non-musical practices in Israel-Palestine. However, by rigorously mapping elements in affective arrangements that are typically left out of Palestinian cultural studies, we can better understand how identity formation unfolds continuously producing feelings of belonging and affinity.

III. Cruel Optimisms versus Intersectional Decoloniality

This dissertation has remained invested in hip-hop practices in relation to identity- formation, including the relationship between identity formation and the systems of oppression that take up those identities. Homophobia, sexism, racism, Islamophobia, and settler colonialism are the key systems of oppression that reflect my varying focuses on sexuality, gender, ethnicity, religion, and nationality. Hip-hop practices, with their focus on the role of human behavior and their appearance of regularity, can easily be idealized as utopic, including in my analysis of

255 space-making practices that render the venue and event free or safe space. More broadly, this dissertation paints Palestinian hip-hop practices in a positive light, suggesting that hip-hop practices are often intersectional and decolonial. However, the shift from cultural practices to affective arrangements helps better frame, seek out, and combat the instances where Palestinian hip-hop practices further homophobia, sexism, racism, Islamophobia, and settler colonialism.

Slaby at al. (2019) warn against how affective arrangements can mask “instances of identity-constituting attachments to arrangements whose operations can over time be quite detrimental to the well-being or flourishing of the individuals that engage in them, even given substantial reflexive insight into these matters” (p. 9). Drawing form Lauren Berlant’s (2011) concept of cruel optimism, which she defines as when “something you desire is actually an obstacle to you flourishing” (p. 1), Slaby et al. suggest that “individuals attach [to affective arrangements] in all sorts of ways, including in ways that seem to bring more pain than pleasure”

(p. 9). If affective arrangements allow us to frame Palestinian hip-hop practices with more nuance and less focus on human intentionality, it therefore allows us to seek out cruel optimisms among hip-hop practitioners. Put differently, the concept of affective arrangements suggests people can derive feelings of pleasure from an arrangement that harms them, not realizing how that contradiction “makes living bearable, but also compromised” (Coleman, 2015, on Berlant).

When does Palestinian hip-hop involve practitioners optimistically in arrangements that harm them? Alternatively, what arrangements produce optimism or hope without a false promise?

Drawing from the preceding chapters, I would answer these questions by a revisiting intersectional, decolonial hip-hop practices in contrast to the cruel optimism developed in some spaces of hip-hop across Israel-Palestine.

256 These questions are important in a Palestinian context since the unbearable conditions of settler colonialism force Palestinians to seek out means to make life “bearable, but compromised.” Social gatherings, in my opinion, are one important means of making life more bearable. Social gatherings are an instrumental part of cultural practices in Palestine, and the act of gathering seems all the more radical in the face of separation and segregation. Parties are fun.

Weddings are fun. Concerts are fun. But does the experience of fun, cultivated through the stability of different elements in the affective arrangements of hip-hop, mask our own complicity in systems of oppression that bring us harm. Throughout this dissertation, I have focused as much as possible on the decolonial, feminist, and queer potential of Palestinian hip-hop, but found across the chapters are examples of cruel optimisms, complicities, and curtailed potentials.

The best example is from chapter three, on the mixed city of Jerusalem. We could understand

Muzi and Saz’ choice to perform in Israeli-organized, mixed events, however pressured that choice might feel, as a form of cruel optimism. Undoubtedly, performing at big events to the cheers of a large, mixed audience feels good for Muzi and Saz. They both express feelings of enjoyment and happiness from the experience of mixed events. Similarly, on some level, they both understand their participation in those events as progressive and even radical, an intervention into an otherwise Israeli-only space. However, the foregrounding of the politics of mixed cities opens room in which to rethink their choice from the perspective of settler colonialism and to frame their participation as a necessary pre-condition for a politics of coexistence that maintains settler colonialism. In their avoidance of an “angry Arab” characterization, they cede discursive ground to Israel that not only harms larger movements for

Palestinian liberation by limiting the options for protest. Moreover, it is cruelly optimistic for

Muzi and Saz themselves, because should they fail to maintain their disposition at mixed events,

257 they can easily be removed at a moment’s notice from an event or even blacklisted entirely from big music festivals.

I contrasted the big events, like Hip-Hop Sulha, with the smaller Monolingua event, identifying the second event as more radical, less constricted by artistic tradeoffs, and more expressive of Arab anger. My approach to the event reflects on an affective arrangement approach, looking at clothing, dance, entrainment, bodies, discourses, and space and place.

While I am confident in the event’s openness to expressions of Arab identity, I cannot say it would be true for all attendees. In one instance at the Monolingua show, there was a moment when I felt that the overall good vibe of the event mediated or actualized a form of cruel optimism among many participants. In between two of his songs, Saz stopped to speak to the audience, in English, so as to be understandable to most of the attendees. Previewing his next track, Saz said:

Just one second. Just one question. This is for the boys. How many times have you liked

a girl, and she didn’t give a fuck about you? You bought her a fucking gift? You bought

her roses and shit? And she put you in the friendzone?...When I am hitting on you, I don’t

need a fucking friend. I wanna chill, smoke my shit, and have fun. So this one, I dedicate

to the girl next door, all the time disrespecting me. Fuck you girl next door.

His quote bothered me at the time, and I held back from letting out an audible gasp or groan.

Immediately apparent to me was the gendered nature of the audience’s response. Young men throughout the venue cheered at Saz’ words, identifying with the troubling and sexist notion of a friendzone and with men’s entitlement to women’s bodies. Many women looked confused or angry, and others looked at their male friends cheers with disappointment. Some women cheered too, and although there was no audible pushback, it is likely that those who were angered by Saz’

258 comment did not want to disturb the overall vibe and flow of the event. Framing hip-hop events and practices in terms of affective arrangements allows us to think about how the good feelings of being involved in an arrangement can sustain one’s participation, even if that arrangement does some harm to them. Thinking back to my introduction to the chapter on Haifa, the U.S. songs that were played in the queer-friendly hip-hop show could be said to have sexist lyrics in them. I argued that in that specific instance their uptake by queer and female-identified people was a progressive practice that countered prevailing sexual and gender norms. However, in other cases, when hip-hop events are not defined by explicitly queer or feminist practices, the presence of sexist language in hip-hop, not only in songs, but used between fans, is problematic.

What this collectively tells us about cruel optimism in the context of Palestine is that only through an attention to intersectional decoloniality can hip-hop practices move towards radical collectivity without marginalizing participants while they remain cruelly optimistic. In other words, mainstream LGBTQ and feminist politics in Israel-Palestine especially through their connection to whitewashing and pinkwashing, maintain relations of settler colonialism.

Similarly, mainstream decolonial politics in Israel-Palestine often support heteronormative, sexist, and masculinist nationalisms. In the Monolingua event, the focus on cultivating a decolonial, Arab/Palestinian-centered event did not unfold intersectionally, leaving some of the female participants sidelined and sending the message that decolonial politics are a male enterprise. Notably, all of the artists at the event were male, though other Monolingua events since have featured female rappers, like Safaa Hathot from Acre. While Palestine studies has a long history of focusing on and theorizing decolonial movement building, less present in the literature is an attention to intersectional decoloniality in which Palestinian identity, and even

Palestinian national identity, is thought in terms of sex, gender, and sexual identity, among other

259 identities. Women have played a strong, vocal, and consistent role in Palestinian decolonial movement building, but their comparative absence from analysis of Palestinian nationalism begs us to ask who is imagined as the subject of Palestinian national futurity. Without a commitment to intersectional decoloniality in our work, that subject will always be male and heterosexual.

IV. Transnational Hip-Hop Arrangements Beyond Shared Places

Many of the above themes and topics relate to my grounded study located in specific cities and specific locations: secluded publics, entrainment, and audience-artist imbrication.

However, as this dissertation asserts, particularly in chapter two on Ramallah, Palestinian hip- hop is a glocal concern, expressing the salience of local traditions and belonging, while responding to and through global hip-hop norms. Transnational hip-hop circuits allow local music ambassadors in Israel-Palestine to co-opt global hip-hop practices in local form, while also transmitting Palestinian hip-hop around the globe, including to diasporic Palestinians. Given

Slaby et al.’s (2019) and my own privileging of physical space and specific places, how do we adapt our understanding of affective arrangements to accommodate glocal, transnational, digitally transmitted hip-hop practices in an effort to highlight and promote a radical, intersectional, decolonial praxis? How can we think through affective relationality in an increasingly technologized world where in-person contact is a competing mode of social interaction alongside digital ones? If, as Khalil Rinnawi (2011) asserts, discourses circulated through corporate television reproduce nationalist belonging across the diaspora, how might the internet and social media offer opportunities for cultivating more intersectional modes of belonging?

The answers to these questions lie largely outside of this project, but the pursuit of their answers should be important to Palestinian cultural studies, especially for scholars focused on the

260 diaspora. Diasporic studies have begun to tackle the emergent role of digital communication technologies, though not made them central in attempts to understand Palestinian identity formation. Writing in 2005, before the advent of many of the social media and music sharing platforms that artists and fans use, Sari Hanafi suggested that:

If the process of construction and reconstruction of Palestinian identity can be largely

effected by dispersed people with a fragile centre of gravity (the Palestinian Territories)

to which almost none of the dispersed refugee communities can have access, the new

media can be a very important tool for connecting these communities to each other

without having to go through the centre. (p. 596)

The de-centering function of new media in this case shifts the relationship between host and homeland. Priya Kumar’s (2018) study of Tamil and Palestinian diaspora networks demonstrated how, “online ‘diasporic’ exchanges transcend territorial boundaries and invite comparatively expressive forms of political engagement that are simultaneously both deeply local and digitally global” (p. 15-16). The decentering of homeland (or for Hanafi, 2005, the Palestinian Territories specifically) is accomplished in part due to the democratic potential of the internet, specifically as it shifts relations of ownership and knowledge production from corporations to individuals.

This affords diasporic Palestinian more agency in shaping how identity formation unfolds for them, instead of through the narrow purview of corporate media. As Kumar explains, “diaspora identity politics are actively constructed through online strategies, hyperlinking, and digitized tactics, in which knowledge (the ability to shape, control, and use information) becomes a form of power in itself” (p. 3). The study of digital spaces and communication helps scholars move

“beyond descriptive theorizations of (ethnically, nationally, religiously) bound diasporas as

‘things’ that exist between the host and homeland” and towards a “more precise consideration of

261 identity-based activities and shared political interests that are transnationally mobilized and constructed online in the name of a particular diaspora” (Kumar, p. 15).

Palestinian hip-hop, again, is a global issue, with artists and fans across the world, not only in Israel-Palestine. Palestinian diasporic artists like Shadia Mansour are listened to in

Palestine, artists from Israel-Palestine like DAM tour across the world, platforms like

Soundcloud and YouTube allow artists anywhere to publish music to a global audience, and projects like ETV circulate ideas about organizing and organizers themselves between Palestine and the diaspora. Palestinian cultural studies should take seriously these shifts in communication technology and highlight their impact on identity formation, moving us away from many of the analytics used to address the diaspora, namely the trend where “much of our conceptual understandings continue to unravel around core ‘triadic relations,’ between the host country, the homeland, and the diaspora itself, and remain confined to this essentialist paradigm” (Kumar,

2018, p. 2). If, as Hanafi asserts, Palestine is no longer the center of the diaspora, how do we map the nodes of activity in a more networked understanding of the diaspora?

First, we must attend to the growing relevance of cities like Berlin in which large

Palestinian populations reproduce the types of places they or their families found in

Palestine. Sonnenallee in Berlin is one example of a node in a global diasporic network that should be studied more at length. The creation of those places in Sonnenallee, Palestinian galleries, markets, cafes, and restaurants, could be framed in a conventional understanding of diasporic identity formation as partially satisfying a longing for a homeland. However, they are more accurately part of a larger set of processes that have ushered in the changes Kumar and

Hanafi outlined, namely the decreased relevance of homeland as the center from which diasporic identity springs. The larger set of processes includes the growth of digital communication

262 technology, through which diasporic Palestinians do not just consume messages about national belonging from the center, but actively create new meanings of Palestinian identity that can be circulated back to Palestine. I am optimistic about this decentralization and democratization of the internet and its relevance for Palestinians in the diaspora. As mentioned in chapter two, approaches to glocalization that seek to support local cultural traditions typically fail to map notions of local and global in relation to diasporic peoples. In most cases, it would be easy to locate the local in a non-Western, specified context, and to map the global onto a Western, Euro-

American cultural sphere. However, to do so would miss the many cultural practices taking place outside of the center/homeland/local, including in the West, that reassert local music traditions despite not being in Israel-Palestine. Thus, while young Palestinians in Israel-Palestine are communicating with diasporic Palestinians about everything from music to ideas about gender and sexuality, Palestinian cultural studies have not caught up yet to the significance of that in an increasingly digital and global social world.

Second, we need to really take seriously the structure and norms of digital spaces and their relevance to identity formation. In part, this means challenging the investment of affect theory into the materiality of specific places and built environment at the sake of virtual and digital spaces. I still assert that studies of Palestinian hip-hop should attend to the specific built environments in which hip-hop is performed and consumed. However, given the importance of digital spaces evidenced above, our approach to affective arrangements should consider digital spaces as affective and stable, often defined by certain structures and norms. Work in this area has begun in the field, though not expressed in affective terms. For example, Miriyam Aouragh (2013) explains how the internet is a digital space that can be recuperative in comparison to physical places, writing that, “As a result of the 'real' disruption of

263 their lives, an increasing number of Palestinians compensate their loss of freedom by 'virtual' mobility on the Internet” (p. 42). Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2011) connects this further to mobility and visibility regimes and women’s lives, arguing that, “Because Palestinians living in

Jerusalem are spatially bound to security and surveillance strategies and policies, the realm of cyberspace can provide them with a new space for movement. The study claims that cyberspace can support women, enhance their knowledge, expand their networks, and assist them in their efforts to deal with spatial confinement” (p. 181). While I have detailed how intersectional, feminist, queer, decolonial work is taking place in hip-hop spaces across Israel-Palestine, the above sentiment suggests that the decentralized and democratized internet might be a useful terrain for expanding that work among Palestinians across the globe. Moreover, these interventions demonstrate what critical geographers have described as the imbrication of virtual and physical spaces, the virtual/material binary, or the materiality of virtual and digital spaces

(Fayard, 2012; Shelton & Zook, 2012). This dissertation work was originally going to focus a chapter on digital spaces, including the Soundcloud music sharing platform and social media sites like Facebook, as sites that could be interpreted vis-a-vis affect and identity formation.

Scholarship on Palestinian hip-hop should look to fill those gaps by studying the structure and norms of platforms like Soundcloud and Facebook as elements in larger affective arrangements.

264

References Abbas, M., & Van Heur, B. (2014). Thinking Arab women's spatiality: the case of `mutanazahat' in Nablus, Palestine. Gender Place and Culture, 21(10), 1214-1229. Abou Jalal, R. (2017, Mar. 22). Women dare to dance in Gaza. Al-Monitor. https://www.al- monitor.com/pulse/originals/2017/03/gaza-women-dance-weddings- unemployment.html. Abu-Baker, K. (2016). Gender policy in family and society among Palestinian citizens of Israel: Outside and inside influences. Handbook of Israel: Major Debates. Ed. Ben-Rafael, E. De Gruyter. 453-473. Abunimah, A. (2014). The battle for justice in Palestine. Haymarket Books. Abunimah, A. (2019, May 20). Don’t praise Iceland’s Hatari for violating Eurovision boycott. The Electronic Intifada. https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/dont- praise-icelands-hatari-violating-eurovision-boycott. Adams, T. M., & Fuller, D. B. (2006). The words have changed but the ideology remains the same: Misogynistic lyrics in rap music. Journal of Black Studies, 36(6), 938-957. Akesson, B. (2015). Trees, flowers, prisons, flags: Frustration and hope shaping national identity for Palestinian families. Global Studies of Childhood. 5(1), 33-46. Al-Bishami, M., Ghaban, S., & Jorgensen, K. (2017). Women’s behavior in public places and the influence of privacy as a cultural value: The case of Nablus, Palestine. Urban Studies, 54(7), 1559-1577. Alattar, J.M., Kouhy, R., & Innes, J. (2009). Management accounting information in micro enterprises in Gaza. Journal of Accounting & Organizational Change. 5(1), 81-107. Aldaqqaq, I. (2014). Palestinian women's movements and their relations with the Palestinian nationalist movement: A history of partnership and a future of challenging cooperation. [Doctoral dissertation, Colombia University]. Alkhatib, S. (2012). Social death: A grounded theory study of the emotional and social effects of honour killing on victims' family members: a Palestinian family perspective. [Doctoral dissertation, The University of Manchester]. Alkousaa, R. (2018, June 1). On Berlin’s ‘Arab street’, two worlds collide. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-migrants-street-insight/on-berlins-arab- street-two-worlds-collide-idUSKCN1IX48I. Alqaisiya, W. (2018). Decolonial queering: The politics of being queer in Palestine. Journal of Palestine Studies. 47(3), 29-44. Amer, M.M. (2012). The discourse of homeland: The construction of Palestinian national identity in Palestinian secularist and Islamist discourses. Critical Discourse Studies. 9(2), 117-131. Aoragh, M. (2013). Cyber intifada and Palestinian identity. Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World Newsletter. 12, 41-43. Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. University of Minnesota Press. Arnd-Linder, S., Harel-Shalev, A., & Daphna-Tekoah, S. (2018). The political is personal - Everyday lives of women in Israel/Palestine. Women's Studies International Forum. 69, 76-84. Azaryahu, M. & Golan, A. (2001). (Re)naming the landscape: The formation of the Hebrew map of Israel 1949-1960. Journal of Historical Geography. 27(2), 178-195.

265 Bachmann-Medick, D., & Tygstrup, F.(2015). Structures of feeling: Affectivity and the study of culture. De Gruyter. Bakria, Y. & Khoury, J. (2019, Sept. 27). Free homeland, free women. Haaretz. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-free-homeland-free-women-palestinians- take-to-the-streets-to-protest-femicide-1.7914855. Bannourah, A. (2016, 18 Jan.). Confession of a Christian Palestinian girl. ProgressMe. progressmemag.com/2016/01/18/confessions-of-a-palestinian-christian-girl/. Barghouti, M. (2017, Dec. 30). How mainstream media gets Palestine wrong.” Al Jazeera. https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/mainstream-media-palestine-wrong- 171230101955202.html. Basit, M.I. (2017). The Israeli curriculum and Palestinian national identity in Jerusalem. Palestine-Israel Journal of Politics, Economics, and Culture. 23(4). 74-82. Ben Zion, I. (2019, Apr. 19). christian pilgrims fuel holy land tourism boom. Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/e1b58738-61ed-11e9-b285-3acd5d43599e. Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Duke University Press. Berlant, L., & Warner, M. (1998). Sex in Public. Critical Inquiry. 24(2). 547-566. Bernhagen, L. (2013). Sounding subjectivity: Music, gender, and intimacy. [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. Billo, E. & Hiemstra, N. (2013). Mediating messiness: Expanding ideas of flexibility, reflexivity, and embodiment in fieldwork. Gender, Place & Culture. 20(3). 313-328. Bindler, N. & Ahuvia, H. (2016). Archiving occupation, identity, and resistance. Thinking Dance. https://thinkingdance.net/articles/2016/03/10/Archiving-Occupation-Identity-and- Resistance. Birenbaum-Carmeli, D. & Inhorn, M.C. (2009). Masculinity and marginality: Palestinian men's struggles with infertility in Israel and Lebanon. Journal of Middle East Women's Studies. 5(2). 23-52. Bishara, H. (2018, Oct. 10). Israel’s culture minister pushes bill to freeze funds for arts organizations highlighting Palestinian narratives. Hyperallergic. https://hyperallergic.com/464763/israels-culture-minister-pushes-bill-to-freeze-funds-for- arts-organizations-highlighting-palestinian-narratives/. Black, I. (2018, Apr. 19). ‘Haifa is essentially segregated’: Cracks appear in Israel’s capital of coexistence. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/apr/19/haifa-is- essentially-segregated-cracks-appear-in-israels-capital-of-coexistence. Blatman-Thomas, N. (2017). commuting for rights: Circular mobilities and regional identities of Palestinians in a Jewish-Israeli town. Geoforum. 78. 22-32. Bloustein, G. & Peters, M. (2003). Playing for life: New approaches to researching youth and their music practices. Youth Studies Australia. 22(2). pp. 32-39. Borschel-Dan, A. (2016, Spet. 1). 25 years later, Russian speakers still the ‘other’ in Israel. The Times of Israel. https://www.timesofisrael.com/25-years-later-russian-speakers-still-the- other-in-israel-says-mk/. Bronski, M. (2001). From Vistorian parlour to physique pictorial: The male nude and homosexual identity. Passing: Identity and Interpretation in Sexuality, Race, and Religion. Eds Sanchez, M.C. & Schlossberg, L. NYU Press. Butler, J. (1999). Gender trouble. Routledge. Camacho, A. (2008). Migrant imaginaries: Latino cultural politics in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. New York University Press.

266 Charmaz, K. (2006). Constructing grounded theory: a practical guide through qualitative analysis. Sage Publications. Chevrette, R. & Braverman, L.C. (2013). Brothers, fathers, terrorists: Masculine assemblages in Glenn Beck's rhetoric of Us—Israel unity post-9/11. Feminist Formations. 25(2). 81-106. Choshen, M. (2013). ’Mixed cities’ in Israel. Jerusalem Institute for Foreign Policy Research. https://jerusaleminstitute.org.il/en/blog/mixed-cities-in-israel/. Coleman, R. (2015). Cruel optimism Lauren Berlant. Feminist Theory. 16(1). 109-111. Collin, M. (1997). Altered state: The story of ecstasy culture and acid house. Profile Books. Collins, J. (2011). Global Palestine. Columbia University Press. Coloumbe, A. (2018) Burakku metaru: Japanese black metal music and the ‘glocalization’ of a transgressive sub-culture. [Master’s thesis, University of Arizona]. Connell, R. W. Gender and power: Society, the person and sexual politics. Stanford University Press. Connell, R. W., and Messerschmidt, J.W.(2005). Hegemonic masculinity?: Rethinking the concept. Gender & Society. 19(4). 809-828. Constantine, Z. (2008, May 22). Palestinians seek eurovision entry. The National. https://www.thenational.ae/world/mena/palestinians-seek-eurovision-entry-1.228432. Cooke, R. (2005, Jan. 15). Emails from the edge. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/jan/16/biography.features2. Corner Prophets (Archived 23 Oct. 2014). About us. Corner Prophets. https://web.archive.org/web/20161023154924/http://cornerprophets.com/about-us/. Coston, B.M. & Kimmel, M. (2012). Seeing privilege where it isn't: Marginalized masculinities and the intersectionality of privilege. Journal of Social Issues. 68(1). 97-111. Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum. 1(8). 138-167. Crenshaw, K. (2017, June. 8). Kimberlé Crenshaw on intersectionality, more than two decades later. Columbia Law School. https://www.law.columbia.edu/news/archive/kimberle- crenshaw-intersectionality-more-two-decades-later. Culton, K. & Holtzman, B. (2010). The growth and disruption of a "free space": Examining a suburban do it yourself (diy) punk scene. Space and Culture. 13(3). 270-284. Dababnah, S. (2018). Providers’ perspectives on autism service access in the West Bank: An application of the three delays model. Global Social Welfare. 5(1). 1-10. Davis, K. (2008). Intersectionality as buzzword: A sociology of science perspective on what makes a feminist theory successful. Feminist Theory. 9(1). 67-86. Dawson, L. (2015). Passing and policing: Controlling compassion, bodies, and boundaries in Boys Don’t Cry and Unveiled/Fremde Haut.” Studies in European Cinema. 12(3). 205- 228. De Landa, M. (2006). A new philosophy of society: Assemblage theory and social complexity. Continuum. De Landa, M. (2011). Intensive science and virtual philosophy. Continuum. De Losrios, D. (2014) The strategic use of the face of apartheid: Examining Mondoweiss blog activists’ claims-making and protest activities over the Scarlett Johansson and Sodastream controversy. [Doctoral dissertation, Iowa State University].

267 Debre, I. (2019, June 6). Jerusalem gay pride parade draws revelers, police. ABC News. https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/jerusalem-pride-draws-thousands-gay- revelers-police-63531983. Devitt, R. (2013). ’Keep the best of you, do the rest of you’: Passing, ambivalence, and keeping queer time in gender performative negotiations of popular music. Popular Music. 32(3). 427-449. Dorchin, U. Real time: Hip-Hop in Israel/Israeli hip-hop. Riesling. Duncan, N. (1996). Bodyspace: Destabilizing geographies of gender and sexuality. Psychology Press. Elgindy, K. (2018, Apr. 12). How the peace process killed the two-state solution. Brookings. https://www.brookings.edu/research/how-the-peace-process-killed-the-two-state- solution/. Estrin, D. (2018, Jan. 6) Israel accused of revoking thousands of Jerusalem residency permits from Palestinians. NPR. https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2018/01/06/574678148/israel-accused-of- revoking-thousands-of-jerusalem-residency-permits-from-palesti. Falah, G., Hoy, M. & Sarker. R. (2000). Co-existence in selected mixed Arab-Jewish cities in Israel: By choice or by default? Urban Studies. 374. 775-796. Farsakh, L., Kanaaneh, R., & Seikaly, S. (2018). Special issue Queering Palestine: Introduction. Journal of Palestine Studies. 47(3). 7-12. Ferguson, R.A. (2004) Aberrations in black: Toward a queer of color critique. University of Minnesota Press. Fiekntscher, K. (2000). “You better work!”: Underground dance music in New York City. University Press of New England. Fisher, M. (2017, Dec. 9). The Jerusalem issue explained. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/09/world/middleeast/jerusalem-trump-capital.html. Fiske, G. (2006, Feb. 2). Rapper’s delight. The Jerusalem Post. https://www.jpost.com/Local- Israel/In-Jerusalem/Rappers-delight. Fox, T. (2018, Sept. 26). For Palestinians, Jewish holidays mean uncertainty, closed roads and lost income. The Middle East Eye. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/palestinians- jewish-holidays-mean-uncertainty-closed-roads-and-lost-income. Fraser, N. (1990). Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. Social Text. 25/26. 56-80. Fuller, C., Chang, D. & Rubin, L. (2009). Sliding under the radar: Passing and power among sexual minorities. Journal of LGBTQ Issues in Counseling. 3(2). 128-151. Fuller, M. (2009). Beat blasted planet: An interview with Steve Goodman on ‘Sonic Warfare’. Datacide Magazine. https://datacide-magazine.com/beat-blasted-planet-an-interview- with-steve-goodman-on-%E2%80%9Csonic-warfare%E2%80%9D/. Futrell, R., Simi, P., & Gottschalk, S. (2006). understanding music in movements: The white power music scene. The Sociological Quarterly. 47(2). 275-304. Gallagher, A., Cox, A., Arber, A., Bousso, R. S., Baliza, M. F., Padilha, K. G.,... Haas, M. (2015). Negotiated reorienting: A grounded theory of nurses' end-of-life decision-making in the intensive care unit. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 52,(4). 794-803. Ganim, C. (2015, Apr. 20). The insider’s cultural guide to Ramallah: A misunderstood cosmopolitan bubble. The Guardian.

268 https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/apr/20/insiders-guide-ramallah-misunderstood- cosmopolitan-bubble. Garcia, L-M. (2016). Beats, flesh, and grain: Sonic tactility and affect in electronic dance music.” Sounds Studies. 1(1). 59-76. Gedalyahu, T. (2015, June 5). Ramallah women’s lib revolt: Men barred form café. Arutz Sheva. http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/156555. Gelfand, A. (2006, Sept. 8). Hip hop as conflict resolution. The Forward. https://forward.com/culture/2421/music-3/. Giovannetti, M. (2019, Feb. 15). Palestinians furious and fed up with corruption of Abaas’ ‘Mafia’ PA. The Middle East Eye. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/palestinians- furious-and-fed-corruption-abbass-mafia-pa. Glaser, B.G., and Strauss, A.L. (1967). The discovery of grounded theory: Strategies for qualitative research. Aldine Pub. Co. Glausiusz, J. (2016, Apr. 19). Wil clashing visions end the harmony in Haifa, Israel? Hakai Magazine. https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/will-clashing-visions-end-harmony- haifa-israel/. Glick, E., Garber, L., Holland, S., Balderston, D. & Quiroga, J. (2003). New directions in multiethnic, racial, and global queer studies. GLQ New York. 10(3). 123-138. GlobalVision. @WatchGlobalVision. GlobalVision. https://www.watchglobalvision.com/. Goldenburg, T. (2010, Jan. 16). Report: israeli home demolitions in East Jerusalem spiked. Associated Press. https://apnews.com/ec279382902b88062136c4e46cee71a5. Goldman, L. (2007, Nov. 6). Who’s the terrorist? Tablet Magazine. https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/music/1138/whos-the-terrorist. Goodman, S. (2009). Sonic warfare: Sound, affect, and the ecology of fear. MIT Press. Goren, T. (2004). The Judaization of Haifa at the time of the Arab revolt. Middle Eastern Studies. 40(4). 135-152. Gorman-Murray, A., Pini,B., & Bryant, L. (2013). Sexuality, rurality, and geography. Lexington Books. Gould, D.B. (2009). Moving politics: Emotion and Act Up's fight against aids. University of Chicago Press. Greenberg, E. (2009). 'The king of the streets': Hip hop and the reclaiming of masculinity in Jerusalem's Shu'afat refugee camp."Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication. 2(2). 231-250. Gregg, M. & Seigworth, G.J. (2010). The affect theory reader. Duke University Press. Gregory, D., Johnston, R., Pratt, G., Watts, M., & Whatmore, S. (2009). The Dictionary of Human Geography. Wiley. Habashi, J. (2008). Palestinian children crafting national identity. Childhood. 15(1). 12-29. Hackl, A. (2017). Occupied labor: The treadmill of Palestinian work in Israel. The New Humanitarian. https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/investigations/2017/08/02/occupied- labour-treadmill-palestinian-work-israel. Hadid, D. (2016, Jan. 3). In Israeli city of Haifa, a liberal Arab culture blossoms. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/04/world/middleeast/in-israeli-city-of-haifa-a- liberal-palestinian-culture-blossoms.html. Hagen, E. & Bryant, G. (2003). Music and dance as coalition signaling system. Human Nature, 14(1). 21-51.

269 Halimi, T.A., D’Souza, C., & Sullivan-Mort, G. (2017). Examining the role of empathy on third-country nationals’ foreign product purchase behaviour."International Marketing Review. 34(6). 760-786. Hammack, P.L. (2010). Narrating hyphenated selves: Intergroup contact and configurations of identity among young Palestinian citizens of Israel. International Journal of Intercultural Relations. 34(4). 368-385. Hammad, S. (2019, Sept. 27). Palestinian women marching against domestic violence assaulted by Israeli police.” The Middle East Eye. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israeli- forces-attack-women-gathered-anti-domestic-violence-protest. Hanafi, S. (2005). Reshaping geography: Palestinian community networks in Europe and the new media. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. 31(3). 581-598. Hanna, Bo. (2019, Aug. 14). Boycott, divestment, and sadomasochism: The collaboration Eurovision didn’t want you to hear. The Document Journal. https://www.documentjournal.com/2019/08/boycott-divestment-and-sadomasochism-the- collaboration-eurovision-didnt-want-you-to-hear/. Harker, C., Sayyad, D., & Shebeitah, R. (2019). The gender of debt and space: Notes from Ramallah-Al Bireh, Palestine." Geoforum. 98. 277-285. Hart, J. (2008). Dislocated masculinity: Adolescence and the Palestinian nation-in-exile. Journal of Refugee Studies. 21(1). 64-81. Hasan, M. (2019). Palestine's absent cities: Gender, memoricide and the silencing of urban Palestinian memory." Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies. 18(1). 1-20. Hassassian, M. (2002). Historical dynamics shaping Palestinian national identity. Palestine- Israel Journal of Politics, Economics and Culture. 8(4). 50-57. Hasso, F.S. (1998). The "Women's Front": Nationalism, feminism, and modernity in Palestine. Gender & Society. 12(4). 441-465. Heartbeat. Israeli-Palestinian programs. Heartbeat. http://heartbeat.fm/programs/israeli- palestinian/. Hebert, D.G. and Rykowski, M. (2018). Music glocalization: Heritage and innovation in a digital age. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Heller, J. (2019, June 2). Ultra-nationalist Jews visit stokes Palestinian anger and Jerusalem holy site. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-israel-palestinians-jerusalem-day/ultra- nationalist-jews-visit-stokes-palestinian-anger-at-jerusalem-holy-site- idUSKCN1T30G8. Herzog, H. (2009). Choice as everyday politics: Female Palestinian citizens of Israel in mixed cities. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society. 22(1). 5-21. Hochberg, Gil. (2010) Introduction: Israelis, Palestinians, queers: Points of departure. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. 16(4). 493-516. Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T.W. (1972). Dialectic of Enlightenment. Herder and Herder. Hovsepian, N. (2008). Palestinian state formation: Education and the construction of national identity. Cambridge Scholars. Humphries, I. (2009) ’Coexistence’ and ‘mixed cities’: A microcosm of Israeli apartheid.” The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. https://www.wrmea.org/009-january- february/coexistence-and-mixed-cities-a-microcosm-of-israeli-apartheid.html. Huntington, C. (2007). Hip-Hop dance: Meanings and messages. McFarland.

270 Izikovich, G. (2013, Jan. 25). Lesson of coexistence, from a Muslim rapper in an L.A. villa.” Haaretz. https://www.haaretz.com/.premium-muslim-rapper-in-la-teaches-about- tolerance-1.5226314. Izraeli, B. (2020, Jan. 28). fascism just isn’t fun enough for Israelis. Haaretz. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-fascism-just-isn-t-fun-enough-for- israelis-1.8408068. Jackson, P. (2004). Inside clubbing: Sensual experiments in the art of being human. Berg. Jankovic, C., & Awad, N. (2012). Queer/Palestinian cinema: A critical conversation on Palestinian queer and women's filmmaking. Camera Obscura. 27(2). 135-143. Jaradat, A. (2019, Feb. 20). Palestinian protest restores access to Al-Aqsa. International Middle East Media Center. https://imemc.org/article/palestinian-protest-restores-access-to-al- aqsa/. Johnson, G.T. (2013). Spaces of conflict, sounds of solidarity: Music, race, and spatial entitlement in Los Angeles. University of California Press. Johnston, L. & Longhurst, R. (2010). Space, place, and sex: Geographies of sexualities. Rowman & Littlefield. Joseph, M. (2002). against the romance of community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kamin, D. (2015, Dec. 4). New Kooz Queer Festival breaks down barriers. Variety. https://variety.com/2015/film/global/palestinian-kooz-queer-festival-opens-new-borders- 1201652356/. Kanaaneh, R.A. (2005). Boys or men? duped or made?: Palestinian soldiers in the Israeli military. American Ethnologist. 32(2). 260-275. Kanan, H.M. (2005). assessing the roles and training needs of educational superintendents in Palestine. Journal of Educational Administration. 43(2). 154-169. Kaplan, T. (2019, Apr. 20). Coexistence in a ‘danger’ zone: An inside look at Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Fox News. https://www.foxnews.com/world/coexistence-in-a-danger- zone-samaria-west-bank. Karin, H. (2011). Beats not bombs: Hip-hop to create peace in the israeli-Palestinian conflict. Nota Bene: Canadian Undergraduate Journal of Musicology. 4(2). 19-32. Karni, Gil. Saz: The Palestinian Rapper for Change. Choices Inc., 9 Sept. 2008. Khalidi, R. (1997). Palestinian identity: The construction of modern national consciousness. Columbia University Press. Khoury, L., Da'Na,S., & Abu-Saad, I. (2013). The dynamics of negation: Identity formation among Palestinian Arab college students inside the green line. Social Identities. 19(1). 32-50. Khoury, L., Da’Na, S., & Falah, G-W. (2013). ’Palestine as a woman’: Feminizing resistance and popular literature. Arab World Geographer. 16(2). 147-176. Kim, K. (2007, Feb. 11). Where some see fashion, others see politics. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/11/fashion/shows/11KAFFIYEH.html. Kim, P. H. & Shin, H. The birth of "rok": Cultural imperialism, nationalism, and the glocalization of rock music in South Korea, 1964-1975. Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique. 18(1). 199-230. Kruse, A.J. (2018). Hip-hop authenticity and music education: Confronting the concept of keeping it real. Journal of Popular Music Education. 2(1). 149-164.

271 Kumar, P. (2018). Rerouting the narrative: Mapping the online identity politics of the Tamil and Palestinian diaspora. Social Media and Society. 4(1). Kuribayashi, T. & Tharp, J.A. (1998). Creating safe space: Violence and women's writing. State University of New York Press. Laing, T. (2011, May 22). Wearing a keffiyeh in West Jerusalem. https://northernsong.wordpress.com/2011/05/22/wearing-a-keffiyeh-in-west-jerusalem/. Levy, G. (2019). One state, two solutions. Palestine Israel Journal of Politics, Economics, and Culture. 24(1). https://www.pij.org/articles/1906/one-state-two-nations. Lieber, D. & Tress, L. (2016, May 17). At Israel’s most infamous crossing, even a good day can be bad. The Times of Israel. https://www.timesofisrael.com/at-israels-most-infamous- crossing-even-a-good-day-can-be-bad/. Lingel, J. (2009). Adjusting the borders: Bisexual passing and queer theory. Journal of Bisexuality. 9. 381-405. Lorimer, H. (2005). Cultural geography: The busyness of being 'more-than- representational'. Progress in Human Geography. 29(1). 83-94. Lorimer, H. (2008). Cultural geography: Non-representational conditions and concerns. Progress in Human Geography, 32(4). 551-559. Lughod, I. (200). Palestinian higher education: National identity, liberation, and globalization." Boundary 2. 27(1). 75-95. Luongo, M. (2010, June 3). Ramallah attracts a cosmopolitan crowd. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/travel/06next-1.html. Lynskey, D. (2005, Mar. 10). The great divide. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2005/mar/11/popandrock. MacKenzie, M. & Foster, A. (2017). Masculinity nostalgia: How war and occupation inspire a yearning for gender order. Security Dialogue. 48(3). 206-223. Magid, Ja. (2019, Oct. 12). PA premier vows to block IDF from entering West Bank’s Area A ‘with our bodies’. The Times of Israel. https://www.timesofisrael.com/pa-premier-vows- to-block-idf-from-entering-west-banks-area-a-with-our-bodies/. Maikey, H., Hochberg, G., and Saraya, S. (2010). No pride in occupation: A roundtable discussion. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. 16(4). 599-610. Maira, S. & Shihade, M. (2012). Hip hop from '48 Palestine’. Social Text. 30(3). 1-26. Maltz, J. (2018, Feb. 2019). An Israeli city just hosted MidEast’s first-ever queer history festival (and no, it's not Tel Aviv). Haaretz.. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium- israeli-city-hosts-mideast-s-first-ever-queer-history-festival-1.5828299. Marshall, D.J. (2015). ‘We have a place to play, but someone else controls it’: Girls’ mobility and access to space in a Palestinian refugee camp. Global Studies of Childhood. 5(2). 191-205. Masalha, N. (2012). The Palestine nakba: Decolonising history, narrating the subaltern, reclaiming memory. Zed Books. Massad, J.A. (2009). Conceiving the masculine: Gender and Palestinian nationalism. Politics of the Modern Arab World: Critical Issues in Modern Politics. 3. 31-50. Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation. Duke University Press. Matar, H. (2018, July 27). Mixed city holds Israel’s first ever Jewish-Arab pride event. +972 Magazine. https://www.972mag.com/mixed-city-holds-israels-first-ever-jewish-arab- pride-event/.

272 Mazkeka (20 Mar. 2020). Monolingua. Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/events/773430849527644. Mazkeka (20, Mar. 2020). Home Page. Mazkeka. https://www.mazkeka.com/. McCormack, D. (2006). For the love of pipes and cables: A response to Deborah Thien. Area- Institute of British Geographers, 38(1). 330-332. McCune, J.Q. (2014). Sexual discretion: Black masculinity and the politics of passing. University of Chicago Press. McDonald, D.A. (2010). Geographies of the body: Music, violence and manhood in Palestine. Ethnomusicology Forum. 19(2). 191-214. McDonald, D.A. (2013). My voice is my weapon: Music, nationalism, and the poetics of palestinian resistance. Duke University Press. Mikdashi, M. & Puar, J.K. (2016). Queer theory and permanent war. GLQ. 22(2). 215-222. Miller, A.L. (2018, Feb. 2). She started #notyourhabibti to shine a light on sexual harassment in the Palestinian Territories. Public Radio International. https://www.pri.org/stories/2018- 02-02/she-started-notyourhabibti-shine-light-sexual-harassment-palestinian-territories. Mitchell, D. (2003). The right to the city: Social justice and the fight for public space. Guilford Press. Morgan, M. & Bennett,D. (2011). Hip-hop & the global imprint of a Black cultural form." Daedalus. 140(2). 176-196. Morgensen, S.L. (2011). Spaces between us: Queer settler colonialism and indigenous decolonization. University of Minnesota Press. Morgensen, S.L. (2012). Queer settler colonialism in Canada and Israel: Articulating Two-Spirit and Palestinian queer critiques." Settler Colonial Studies. 2(2). 167-190. Muhanna, A. (2013). Agency and gender in Gaza: Masculinity, femininity and family during the second intifada. Ashgate. Mukerji, J. (2004, July 6). Culture for all. The Electronic Intifada. https://electronicintifada.net/content/culture-all/5139. Mumford, G. (2014, Dec. 12). Israeli hip-hop, a political tool for a divided country. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/dec/12/israel-hip-hop-system-ali- kafe-shahor-hazak. Muñoz, J. (2009). Cruising utopia: The then and there of queer futurity. New York University Press. Naber, N., Atshan, S., Awad, N., Mikdashi, M., Merabet, S., Abusalim, D., & Elia, N. (2018). On Palestinian studies and queer theory. Journal of Palestine Studies. 47(3). 62-71. Nash, J. C. (2013). Practicing love: Black feminism, love-politics, and post- intersectionality. Meridians. 11(2). 1-24. Nash, J. C. (2019). Black feminism reimagined. After intersectionality. Duke University Press. Nathanson, R. (2017). Living in a mixing neighborhood: Reflexive coexistence and the discourse of separation. [Doctoral dissertation, The University of Michigan]. Norton, B. (2016, Jan. 9). Palestinian says New York Times edited and censored his quotes to shine positively on Israel. Salon. https://www.salon.com/2016/01/09/palestinian_says_new_york_times_edited_and_censo red_his_quotes_to_shine_positively_on_israel/. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) (10 Aug. 2016). 300,000 West Bank Palestinians allowed into Jerusalem for Ramadan prayers. United Nations.

273 https://www.ochaopt.org/content/300000-west-bank-palestinians-allowed-east-jerusalem- ramadan-prayers. Palestinian Cultural Foundation (8 Apr. 2018). From Chile to Berlin: How Palestinians proudly take their culture with them. Palestinian Cultural Foundation. http://palestinefoundation.org.uk/palestinians-chile-berlin-diaspora/. Palestinian Federation of Businessmen Associations (2014). Palestinian diaspora: Germany. Palestinian Federation of Businessmen Associations. https://www.pba.ps/files/Palestinian%20Diaspora-Germany%20(2).pdf. Palestinian Queer Activists in Haifa (22 June, 2018). Palestinian queer activists in Haifa call to boycott the pride events in the city. Wordpress. https://freehaifa.wordpress.com/2018/06/22/palestinian-queer-activists-in-haifa-call-to- boycott-the-pride-events-in-the-city/. Papantonopoulou, S. (2014). ’Even a freak like you would be safe in Tel Aviv’: Transgender subjects, wounded attachments, and the zionist economy of gratitude. Women’s Studies Quarterly. 42(1-2). 280-295. Patel, A., Iversen, J., Bregman, M., & Schulz, I. (2009). Experiemental evidence for synchronization to a musical beat in a nonhuman animal. Current Biology. 19(1). 827- 830. Pearce, H. (2015, Mar. 20). ’Little Palestine’ in Berlin: Home of hummus, hipsters, and solidarity. Egyption Streets. https://egyptianstreets.com/2015/03/20/little-palestine-in- berlin-home-of-hummus-hipsters-and-solidarity/. Peteet, J. (1994). Male gender and rituals of resistance in the Palestinian intifada: A cultural politics of violence. American Ethnologist. 21(1). 31-49. Phillips-Silver, J.C., Aktipis, A., & Bryant, G. (2010). The ecology of entrainment: Foundations of coordinated rhythmic movement. Music Perception, 28(1). 3-14. Prier, D.D. (2013). Cultivating the spatial politics of community-based literacy practices in hip- hop. Multicultural Learning and Teaching. 8(2). 95-110. Procter, J. (2004). Stuart Hall. Routledge. Puar, J.K. (2013). ‘I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess’: Becoming-intersectional in assemblage theory. PhiloSOPHIA. 2(1). 49-66. Puar, J.K. (2017). Terrorist assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times. Duke University Press. Puar, J.K. & Mikdashi, M. (2012, Aug. 9). Pinkwatching and pinkwashing: Interpenetration and its discontents. Jadaliyya. http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/6774/pinkwatching- andpinkwashing_interpenetration-and-. Qato, D.M. & Nagra, R. Environmental and public health effects of polluting industries in Tulkarm, West Bank, Occupied Palestinian Territory: An ethnographic study. The Lancet: Supplement. 382(4). 29. Ralph, N., Birks, M., & Chapman, Y. (2015). The methodological dynamism of grounded theory. International Journal of Qualitative Methods. 14(4). 1-6. Rebollo-Gil, G. & Moras, A. Black women and Black men in hip-hop music: Misogyny, violence, and the negotiation of (white-owned) space.” The Journal of Popular Culture. 45(1). 118-132. Reddy, C. (2011). Freedom with violence: Race, sexuality, and the U.S. state. Duke University Press.

274 Regan, R. (2018, Oct. 3). Protesters march in Ramallah against street harassment. Palestine Monitor. http://www.palestinemonitor.org/details.php?id=e9g3isa17492y1ol8430hk. Richter-Devroe, S. (2012). Defending their land, protecting their men: Palestinian women's popular resistance after the second intifada. International Feminist Journal of Politics. 14(2). 181-201. Ritchie, J. (2010). How do you say "come out of the closet" in arabic?: Queer activism and the politics of visibility in Israel-Palestine. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. 16(4). 557-576. Ritchie, J. (2015). Pinkwashing, homonationalism, and Israel-Palestine: The conceits of queer theory and the politics of the ordinary. Antipode. 47(3). 616-634. Roberts, R. (2013). Dancing with ghosts: performing embodiments, analyzing critically. Transforming Anthropology, 21(1). 4-14. Robertson, R. (1995). Glocalization: Time-space and homogeneity- heterogeneity. Global Modernities. Eds. Featherstone, M., Lash, S., & Robertson, R. Sage. 25-44. Rotbard, S. (2014). White city, black city: Architecture and war in Tel Aviv and Jaffa. Pluto Press. Roudometof, V. (2016). Glocalization: A critical introduction. Routledge. Ruvalcaba, H.D. (2016). Translating the Queer: Body Politics and Transnational Conversations. Zed Books. Ryberg, I. (2012). Imagining safe space: The politics of queer, feminist and lesbian pornography. University of Stockholm. Said, E.W. (1994). Orientalism. Vintage Books. Sardar, Z. & Van, L.B. (2010). Introducing cultural studies. Icon. Schaeffer, M. (2014, May 28). Jerusalem by the numbers: Poverty, segregation, and discrimination. +972 Magazine. https://www.972mag.com/jerusalem-by-the-numbers- poverty-segregation-and-discrimination/. Schotten, C H. (2018). To exist is to resist: Palestine and the question of queer theory. Journal of Palestine Studies. 47(3). 13-28. Seago, A. (2004). The ‘Kraftwerk-Effekt’: Transatlantic circulation, global networks and contemporary pop music. Atlantic Studies. 1(1). 85-106. Sedgwick, E.K. (2008). Epistemology of the Closet. University of California Press. Shabazz, R. (2014). Masculinity and the mic: Confronting the uneven geography of hip- hop. Gender, Place & Culture. 21(3). 370-386. Shafir, G. (1996). Land, labor, and the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 1882-1914. University of California Press. Shalev, B. (2012, Dec. 7). Its more than a hip-hop and jump to the moon for this Arab-Israeli band. https://www.haaretz.com/.premium-arab-israeli-hip-hop-band-shoots-for-the- moon-1.5300170. Shalhoub-Kevorkian, N. (2009). Militarization and violence against women in conflict zones in the Middle East: A Palestine Case-Study. Cambridge University Press. Shalhoub-Kevorkian, N. (2011). E-Resistance among Palestinian women: Coping in conflict- ridden areas. Social Service Review. 85(2). 179-204. Shapiro, A. (2018, Oct. 24). Lod: Shared society in Israel’s ‘murder city’. The Times of Israel. https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/lod-shared-society-in-israels-murder-city/.

275 Shor, E. (2008). Contested masculinities: The new Jew and the construction of Black and Palestinian athletes in Israeli media. Journal of Sport & Social Issues. 32(3). 255-277. Shor, N. (2016, Jan. 22). The Israeli city where coexistence is alive and kicking. Haaretz. . Sinno, N.A. (2013). Family sagas and checkpoint dramas: Tragedy, humor, and family dynamics in Suad Amiry's Sharon and My Mother-in-Law: Ramallah Diaries. Journal of Middle East Women's Studies. 9(1). 30-53. Skinner, M (Director). (2015, Dec. 22). Hip-Hop in the holy land (film). Vice. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8bWDcW6kYw. Slaby, J., Mühlhoff, R., & Wüschner, P. (2019). Affective arrangements. Emotion Review. 11(1). 3-12. Smith, A. (2010). Queer theory and Native studies: The heteronormativity of settler colonialism. GLQ. 16(1-2). 41-68. Snelling, S. (2019). The ‘gayification’ of Tel Aviv: Investigating Israel’s pro-gay brand. Queer Cats Journal of LGBTQ Studies. 3(1). 27-55. Spielberg, W., Dajani, J.K., and Abdallah, T. No-man’s-land: Hearing the voices of Palestinian young men residing in East Jerusalem. Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology. 22(3). 272-281. Steger, M.B. (2013). Globalization: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press. Stein, A. (2007, July 13). Hip-Hop connection. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/jul/13/hiphopconnection. Stein, R.L. & Swedenburg, T. (2005). Palestine, Israel, and the politics of popular culture. Duke University Press. Steinberg, J. (2012, Nov. 11). An Arab rapper in la la land. The Times of Israel. https://www.timesofisrael.com/rapper-in-la-la-land/. Stephan, R. (2013). Creating solidarity in cyberspace: The case of arab women’s solidarity association united. Journal of Middle East Women's Studies. 9(1). 81-109. Sverdlov, L. (2019, Nov. 4). From Haifa to Ramallah – Palestinian women protest patriarchy. The Jerusalem Post. https://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/From-Haifa-to- Ramallah-Palestinian-women-protest-patriarchy-603191. Tapponi, R. (2019, Dec. 5). BLTNM are the Palestinian record label breaking down barriers. Vice. https://i-d.vice.com/en_uk/article/ywaadj/bltnm-palestinian-record-label- interview. Taraki, L. (2006). Living Palestine: Family survival, resistance, and mobility under occupation. Syracuse Univ. Press. Tawil-Souri, H. (2011). Where is the political in cultural studies? In Palestine. International Journal of Cultural Studies. 14(5). 467-482 The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs (18 June, 2013). Saz: Arab-Israeli rapper and reality tv star. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3toy5a4y3UE. The Roestone Collective. (2014). Safe space: Towards a reconceptualization. Antipode. 46(5). 1346-1365. Thien, D. (2005). After or beyond feeling? A consideration of affect and emotion in geography. Area. 37(4). 450-454. Thompson, M.& Biddle, I. (2013). Sound, music, affect: Theorizing sonic experience. Bloomsbury Academic.

276 Thrift, N. J. (1996). Spatial formation. Sage. Thrift, N. J. (2008). Non-representational theory: Space, politics, affect. Routledge. Tlalim, T. (2017) The sound system of the state: Sonic strategies for political critique at the borders of Palestine-Israel. [Doctoral dissertation, Goldsmith University]. Tobin, A. (2016, Oct. 22). How one popular Palestinian café puts women first – and men in the corner. The Jerusalem Post. https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Culture/How-one- popular-Palestinian-cafe-puts-women-first-and-men-in-the-corner-470675. Tolia-Kelly, D. P. (2006). Affect – an ethnocentric encounter?: Exploring the 'universalist' imperative of emotional/affectual geographies. Area. 38(2). 213-217. Tzfadia, E. (2011). Mixed cities in Israel: Localities of contentions. Israel Studies Review. 26(1). 153-165. United Nations (8 Dec. 2017). United Nations position on Jerusalem unchanged, special coordinator stresses, as Security Council debates United States recognition of city. https://www.un.org/press/en/2017/sc13111.doc.htm. Van Aken, M. (2006). Dancing belonging: Contesting dabkeh in the Jordan Valley, Jordan. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. 32(2). 203-222. Voegelin, S. (2014). Sonic possible worlds: Hearing the continuum of sound. Bloomsbury. Wagner, R. (2013). On (not) choosing between mobility and visibility: Crossing sexual and national borders in Israel/Palestine. Borderlands. 12(2). 1-32. Wainer, D. (2007, Feb. 8). Jewish, Arab rappers find common ground. YNet News. https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3432943,00.html. Waren, W. (2012). Theories of the singing revolution: An historical analysis of the role of music in the Estonian independence movement. International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music. 43(2). 439-451. Warner, M. (2002). Publics and Counterpublics. Public Culture. 14(1). 49-90. Weitzer, R. & Kubrin, C. (2009). Misogyny in rap music: A content analysis of prevalence and meanings. Men and Masculinities. 12(1). 3-29. Whitehead, S. (2002). Men and masculinities: Key themes and new directions. Blackwell Publishers. Wiles, R. (2016, Feb. 23). Palestinian teachers march demanding salary increases. Al Jazeera. https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/inpictures/2016/02/photos-palestinian-teachers- march-salary-increases-160223174715150.html. Yacobi, H. & Pullan, W. (2014). The geopolitics of neighborhood: Jerusalem’s colonial space revisited. Geopolitics. 19(3). 514-539. Yemini, M. & Bronshtein, Y. (2016).The global-local negotiation: Between the official and the implemented history curriculum in Israeli classrooms. Globalisation, Societies and Education. 14(3). 345-357. Yuval, E. (2016, Feb. 19). Why Israel’s Jews do not know Arabic. Haaretz. https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-why-israels-jews-do-not-know-arabic- 1.5406555. Zawawi, Z., Corijn, E., & Van Heur, B. (2013). Public spaces in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Geojournal. 78(4). 743-758. Zimet, A. (2019, May 10). Palestinians dare to dream: Rejecting the ‘prettier face’ of apartheid. Common Dreams. https://www.commondreams.org/further/2019/05/10/palestinians-dare- dream-rejecting-prettier-face-apartheid.

277