Rock in a Hard Place by Orlando Crowcroft

Author:Orlando Crowcroft
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: National Book Network International
Published: 2017-06-15T04:30:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

ISRAEL AND PALESTINE

Tamer Nafar never really understood hip hop until he heard Tupac Shakur. As a teenager, he’d heard rap as part of other songs – Michael Jackson’s 1991 hit ‘Jam’ or ‘Informer’ by Snow – but he’d never really got it until he managed to get a copy of Tupac’s ‘White Man’z World’. The lyrics, which document Tupac’s violent life on the streets of Los Angeles, couldn’t help but chime with a 16-year-old from Lod, known as Israel’s Murder City. “I was like: ‘Wow, this is fucking different,’” he said. “I was stunned.”

Even in the 1990s, before the violence of the Second Intifada and the wars in Gaza, Lod was a crime-ridden city where drive-by shootings and fights between rival gangs were a daily occurrence. Once a thriving trade stop on the road between Jaffa and Jerusalem, Lod – then called Lydda and still known today as Lyd by the Palestinians – had witnessed some of the worst excesses of the Zionist militias in 1948 as they fought to carve an Israeli state from the British Mandate of Palestine. Fifty years later, Arabs were a minority in Lod, living in run-down neighbourhoods where sewage ran in the streets and Palestinian families were packed into ramshackle houses on the bad side of town. Palestinian gangs fought amongst themselves for control of the drugs trade as the Israeli police force turned a blind eye. To get to the Palestinian part of town from the train station, residents had to walk across the sleepers. The Arab neighbourhood of Lod was quite literally on the wrong side of the tracks.

The band that Tamer formed in the late 1990s, DAM, became legendary across the Middle East and eventually the world, sharing stages with everyone from Wu-Tang Clan to Dead Prez and Talib Kweli. As the first Palestinian group to rap in Arabic, DAM would inspire a generation of Arab rappers living in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, as well as from Egypt, Syria and everywhere in between. But it all began in Lod, with a teenage Tamer sat on his bed, listening to Tupac, and flipping through his Arabic–English dictionary in an effort to understand every line. “I became obsessed,” he said. In the days before the internet, Tamer would frequently stumble over the gritty American slang of Tupac’s lyrics. He resorted to approaching the only black people he ever saw in Israel, Ethiopian Jews, to ask if they understood words like ‘homie’ and ‘Gs’. On reflection, he said, it was racist. But he was fascinated. He had to know.

It was not long before Tamer corralled his brother, Suheil, into working with him, and in 1998 the pair recorded their first single, ‘Stop Selling Drugs’. They held a launch party in the garden of his house where a friend introduced Tamer to Mahmoud Jreri, who lived nearby and shared a love of Tupac. The trio began rapping in English and then in Hebrew, a language in which they were all fluent, and started performing in Tel Aviv as part of a growing Israeli hip hop scene.

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