The Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, in cooperation with the Washington Post have asked me to write a review of the film Slingshot Hip Hop after I had attended the star-studded Hollywood screening of the film. I have cross-posted. Enjoy:

MEct. [Middle East Ect.] recently hosted the documentary “Slingshot Hip Hop” directed and co-produced by Jackie Reem Salloum. The film is on a world tour – which included Sundance – and Ms. Salloum was in attendance. The documentary explores several young Palestinian rappers both in the 1967 Occupied Territories and those living in Israel [Palestinians whom were not ethnical cleansed in 1948; referred to as “1948 Palestinians”] who use hip hop as a form of resistance to Israeli occupation and discrimination. The audience is first introduced to DAM [Da Arab Mcs], based in Lyd, Israel and the first Palestinian hip hop group. They speak about how American rap music spoke to them – even though they did not know English then – because they saw their town in the music videos of Tu Pac. Arab-Israeli towns – just miles from posh Tel Aviv – are in an appalling state of destitution due to intentional neglect by a state based on ethnic superiority of one people over another. Lyd is surrounded by checkpoints manned not by police, but the Israel Defense Forces. A library at the local school was converted to a police station under the ostensible claim there was simply no other suitable location. Arabs homes are often demolished on the grounds that the builder doesn’t have a permit, but then the same Israeli government refuses to issue a permit to its own citizens and has placed monstrous rocks around the town to prevent construction. All this is meant, of course, to make like so intolerable for Arabs that they simply leave. As one of the rappers from DAM put it, Lyd is akin to “a refugee camp in Israel.” Life there can be very despairing, and drug selling by youth is rampant. Instead of turning to violence, however, DAM turned to rap. Their first song – since then downloaded over 1 million times – is “Min Erhabee?” [Who’s the Terrorist?], and speaks to both the alienation that Arabs within Israel feel and challenges the argument that the Palestinians – as opposed to the occupying Israelis – are the terrorists.

DAM is not the only “1948 Palestinian” group. WE7, for instance, raps about the subjugation of Arabs in the colonial-settler state of Israel. Their hit “Sound of Silence,” for example, is about how Arabs in Israel – despite being 23% of the population – are denied a voice by the Zionist authorities.

But Arabs in Israel live almost in paradise compared to the conditions Israel imposes on their kin in Gaza. It is here where we meet Mohammed al-Farra. Mohammed is part of P.R. [Palestinian Rapperz] and has also chosen art instead of violence as the course of resistance. It is in Gaza that the film is most eloquent. Mohammed was once shot by Israeli occupation soldiers who felt threatened by the pebbles of Palestinian children, and he speaks about how he often is made to feel less than human due to Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians. Gaza then and now is a demoralizing open-air prison. During the second Intifidah, he confines, he was often filled with a rage that could not find a vent for until rap came along.

The film’s strongest point is that it humanizes Palestinians. Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular suffer from dehumanization in American culture. The media portrays Arabs as a monolithic blob who only pray and chant on streets while having the occasional half-hour to engage in “honor killings” and so on and so forth. Ms. Salloum had previously produced a short film titled “Planet of the Arabs” that ridicules Hollywood’s vilification of the people. As Jack Shaheen chronicles in Reel Bad Arabs, in over 1000 films featuring Arabs the people were portrayed negatively in over 900 of them. “Slingshot Hip Hop” is proof – I didn’t need any – that Palestinians are a people akin to all others. If anything they are most inspiring, because in light of all they suffer at the hands of Israeli brutality they still manage to go on leading productive and artful lives. They laugh, fall in love, read poetry [which is central in Arab culture], and have brought to the Arab world a new medium: rap. This is not the first time Palestinians have been pioneers in Arab culture. The showcasing of an Arab-Muslim female rap duo – Arapeyat – debunks the myth of the submissive Arab woman, and their hit “Freedom for My Sisters” is a feminist anthem. The film also does not shy away from powerful – and often hard to watch – images of the occupation that deliver an unmistakable message of the injustice that Israel is upholding and the immorality of a world that has remained silent.

What is interesting about Arab rap is that Palestinian rap is at stage were African-American rap was decades ago before all the “bling”. It is political and speaks to the injustices in society. As Palestinian female rapper – Sabreena Da Witch – stated, the influence from American rap does not come from the contemporary scene, but from the artists of yesteryear.

During the following Q&A – and Sabreena Da Witch was also there – Ms. Salloum discussed the issue of funding. For young filmmakers, I learned that funding is often an ongoing process parallel to actual filmmaking. Ms. Salloum had to rely on institutions and the generosity of individual donors; she also enlisted the cast in voluntary assistance such as translating some of the showcased raps. I asked about how her film was received in the United States where Palestinians often have a mean effort toward getting out their message. All five showings at Sundance sold out and she added that she spoke to an untold number of people whose perception of Palestinian society were revamped as the film challenges what they often see in the media. The audience also learned, unfortunately, that one of the rappers [not al-Farra] from Gaza lost his father and his home in the recent Israeli onslaught against the Stripe. Him and his sister are now alone and sleeping on top of rubble. She kept in contact with Palestinians during the Israeli attack and spoke about how alone they felt and how they were living by the five-minute mark not knowing if they would survive the hour. The alienation that Palestinians feel in Occupied Gaza and the West Bank and as Arabs in a Jewish state is one I share. Not the alienation of being an Arab per se, but the political and cultural alienation one feels living in a country whose sympathies are almost exclusively with Israel. The Q&A session ended with Sabreena singing acapella, a perfect end to the evening.