Introduction
Despite ongoing attempts to fragment and eliminate the Palestinian people, Palestinians persist on their lands and continue to uphold their right to return home. In this article, I argue that an enduring felt attachment between the Palestinian body and the home/landFootnote 1 of Palestine forms an Indigenous claim to the land. I articulate this argument through the concept of affective sovereignty, which I use to describe Palestinian feelings of belonging to and longing for Palestine that constitute forms of Indigenous sovereignty. While Israel attempts to extinguish Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty through ongoing colonisation, this sovereignty with the land persists in the Palestinian body, in part through feeling. I suggest that this affective sovereignty forms the molten core of Palestinian resistance, always holding the potential to erupt into more direct forms of anticolonial dissent. This molten sovereignty burns straight through the ‘iron wall’: the Israeli colonial strategy of deploying overwhelming violence to crush any Palestinian hope for liberation.
In making this argument, I draw particularly on critical Palestinian thought and Indigenous understandings of sovereignty. I understand the struggle over Palestine/Israel as one of Indigenous Palestinian resistance to Israeli settler colonialism. I do not offer a comprehensive justification for employing the settler colonial framing in Palestine/Israel, as such justifications are plentiful, for example in the various journal issues dedicated to the matter.Footnote 2 However, it should be noted that both Palestinian and non-Palestinian scholars have been employing such settler colonial framings for decades.Footnote 3 For example, the logic of settler colonialism – as distinct from extractive colonialism – was articulated concisely by Jamil Hilal in 1976: ‘Zionists strove not to exploit the indigenous Palestinian population but to displace it’.Footnote 4
The Zionist settler colonial project in Palestine is defined by three key features. First, Zionist settler colonialism is a structure, rather than a singular event.Footnote 5 This insight is reflected in, and has long been understood through, the Palestinian notion of the ongoing Nakba (al-nakba al-mustamirra), whereby the effects of the 1948 Nakba (Catastrophe) continue to be felt and the immense dispossession of the Nakba continues to be perpetuated in many different forms.Footnote 6 Second, the central logic of Zionist colonisation is the elimination of the Indigenous Palestinian. Palestinians have recognised the logic of elimination since the early stages of Zionist settlement over a century ago,Footnote 7 and continue to see through this logic of elimination clearly. Israel pursues the elimination of the Palestinian people through a wide range of means, from the outright genocide evident most disturbingly in Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza,Footnote 8 to ethnically cleansing Palestinians by expelling them from their land,Footnote 9 to erasing a Palestinian identity and labelling Palestinians ‘Israel’s Arabs’Footnote 10 (to name only a few). Third, a key way that Zionist settler colonial elimination functions in Palestine is through the logic of fragmentation.Footnote 11 I explore this logic in depth elsewhere, where I describe the fractality of settler colonial fragmentation.Footnote 12 Ultimately, Zionist settler colonialism attempts to fragment Palestinian space, time, and bodies across various scales in order to render Israel coherent across these dimensions.
While settler colonial framings afford crucial insights into power relations in Palestine/Israel, as Rana Barakat argues, such framings can reproduce settler narratives if they do not centre on Indigenous sovereignty.Footnote 13 I theorise such a Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty in detail elsewhere, developing an understanding of this sovereignty as an embodied claim to the land of Palestine.Footnote 14 I draw a clear distinction here between Indigenous conceptions of sovereignty and state-based sovereignty, with these conceptions being in an oppositional relationship to one another. State sovereignty is performatively enacted through violence towards particular bodies.Footnote 15 In the case of settler colonies, the state targets Indigenous bodies in particular, which must be eliminated from the land to make way for the settler. I understand indigeneity here as a political relationship to the structure of settler colonialism, rather than an essentialist identity defined by a certain ‘quantum’ of ‘Indigenous blood’ or requiring the continuation of certain cultural practices (the latter being the ways that indigeneity is typically defined by settler states as part of their attempt to extinguish Indigenous sovereignty).Footnote 16 Directly opposed to settler state sovereignty, Indigenous sovereignty expresses an enduring political claim to Indigenous land. It is ontologically grounded in the land and as such withstands attempts to extinguish it. While its expression in political institutions is often repressed, it continues to be embodied and lived in Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and resisting.Footnote 17 I draw especially here on Indigenous conceptions of sovereignty as embodied.Footnote 18 As the Goenpul scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson demonstrates, ‘as resilient existents, our sovereignties continue ontologically and materially; as humans we are the embodiment of our lands’.Footnote 19 Such Indigenous theorising resonates with Palestinian conceptions of being and resisting.Footnote 20 In a particularly insightful example, Sarah Ihmoud explicitly frames murabata – a Palestinian women’s practice ‘of staying in place and defending sacred space’ in al-Quds (Jerusalem) – as a form of embodied Palestinian sovereignty.Footnote 21 Building on the understanding of Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty as an embodied claim to Palestine, in the current article I explore the felt dimensions of this embodiment. In short, affective sovereignty is the way that a broader Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty is embodied through feeling.Footnote 22
This concept of affective sovereignty finds kin in other Indigenous theorising on emotion. It resonates with Audra Simpson’s idea of ‘feeling citizenship’ that points to ‘the affective sense of being a Mohawk of Kahnawà:ke’, which can sit alongside or in tension with more formal processes of Indigenous recognition.Footnote 23 It also resonates with what Mark Rifkin refers to as ‘an Indigenous structure of feeling’, which denotes the feelings of belonging to land and people that are dismissed by settler institutions, but are powerfully lived through the affective worlds of Native peoples.Footnote 24 The suggestion that this affective sovereignty can form the molten core of Palestinian resistance resonates with J. Kēhaulani Kauanui’s understanding of indigeneity as ‘a fluid source of dynamic power – molten, the very source of Kanaka sovereignty’.Footnote 25 Finally, this molten sovereignty echoes the words of Dian Million, who declares, in reference to Indigenous women facing down colonial violence, ‘a nation is not defeated until the hearts of its women are on the ground. These women’s hearts were just never on the ground.’Footnote 26 These resonances open up space in which to forge and deepen Indigenous–Palestinian solidarities, united in a shared struggle against the global structure of settler colonialism.
In theorising the felt dimensions of Indigenous sovereignty in this paper, I draw on work in emotion and affect studies to understand affect as relational and performative. Put simply, affects are things that we do in relation with the world. A relational understanding of affect can be contrasted with regarding affects as inner feeling states, taking them to be neither internal to bodies nor static objects.Footnote 27 Rather than objective things located inside us, affects can be understood as emerging out of our relations with people, places, and things.Footnote 28 They are situational expressions of our relations with the world.Footnote 29 Dovetailing with this relational understanding, affects can be understood as performative: they are things that we do, not things that we have. Rather than expressing, reflecting, or revealing some internal emotional essence, the performance of feeling is what constitutes feeling. In this formulation, affects are not reactions to the world, but actions in the world.Footnote 30 Affects emerge from their doing; they ‘exist in their unfolding’.Footnote 31 Or, as Sara Ahmed puts it, the feeling ‘becomes “real” as an effect’ of its performance.Footnote 32 The repeated performance of feeling creates the effect of stable emotions that are contained within us or within others.Footnote 33
In this article, I develop the concept of affective sovereignty through analyses of Palestinian graffiti and hip-hop music. These are important sites for analysis as they are relatively accessible aesthetic practices with long histories in relation to Palestinian resistance. Palestinian graffiti has historical roots in centuries-old traditions of Arabic calligraphy and inscribing messages on public walls, such as those welcoming back neighbours from the pilgrimage to Mecca.Footnote 34 As part of a general increase in Palestinian resistance after the Naksa (Setback) of 1967, the practice of graffitiing shi’ārāt (slogans) on public walls spread in Palestine throughout the 1970s and 1980s.Footnote 35 During the First Intifada, these slogans were used as a means of affirming community and resistance, communicating political messages such as times and locations for protests, and as a site for Palestinian political factions to stage debates.Footnote 36 Palestinian factions still use graffiti today as a form of political communication; however, the practice of factionally unaffiliated Palestinian graffiti has since proliferated. The graffiti I analyse in this article is drawn from two sources: an archive of over 2,000 photos of graffiti that I took during a 2019 return to Palestine, across nineteen different localities in the West Bank, including all the major cities, as well as several refugee camps and villages; and photos taken by an employed research assistant in 2021, across Haifa, Nazareth, and al-Quds. The specific graffiti I analyse in this article reflect major themes across these two sources.
Likewise, music has long been an aesthetic practice used by and for Palestinian resistance. Forming a part of wider Levantine and Arabic musical traditions, Palestinian music has come to reflect the shifting political context in Palestine and the diaspora. As Joseph Massad details, Palestinian musical style has mirrored the Palestinian struggle against colonisation, with songs serving ‘to record the feelings and aspirations of a dispossessed people’.Footnote 37 Moreover, as evidenced in the First Intifada, beyond simply reflecting Palestinian political sentiments, music has generated these sentiments, serving as a crucial means of subverting dominant power.Footnote 38 Palestinian hip-hop emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when artists like DAM in ’;48 PalestineFootnote 39 and Ramallah Underground in the West Bank formed part of what Rayya El Zein terms the ‘first wave’ of Palestinian hip-hop.Footnote 40 My choice of artists and songs to analyse is based on their popularity, while ensuring a diversity of artists from across the geographic fragments of Palestine.
In analysing Palestinian graffiti and hip-hop, I do not aim to pronounce judgements on the texts I engage with. Instead, I analyse them as sites of Palestinian theorising. That is, rather than seeking to make claims about what these practices might themselves do, I struggle over the emotional politics that are articulated in and through these sites. In short, I theorise from these sites, not about them. This approach is distinct from analysing graffiti and hip-hop music as practices of resistance, of which there are many examples.Footnote 41
I carry out this analysis from my particular standpoint in relation to the research. Inspired primarily by Indigenous methodologies, articulating this standpoint challenges the notion that academic research ought to be an ‘impartial’, disembodied exercise – an idea that has long reinforced colonialism by equating impartiality with whiteness.Footnote 42 In this colonial epistemology, Indigenous and racialised peoples are reduced to ‘data’ for the researcher to extract from and theorise about. When afforded room to speak, these peoples are regarded as ‘biased’ or not ‘objective’. Therefore, in refusing to accept scholarly claims to ‘objectivity’ and insisting instead that scholars locate themselves politically and ethically in relation to their research, critical Indigenous studies challenges Western structures of knowledge that continue to uphold colonial and racial hierarchies.Footnote 43 At the centre of this challenge is the recognition that all knowledge is embodied, against the privileging of a disembodied ‘objectivity’ in dominant, positivist epistemologies.Footnote 44
I write as a diaspora Palestinian living as a settler on the lands of the Jagera and Turrbal peoples, in the colony of Australia. Having been raised on produce grown on stolen lands, my body is quite literally constituted by colonialism. Living as a settler on these lands, I continue to reap the benefits of its colonisation, even if these benefits are tempered by a refusal to perform whiteness in the white supremacist society of Australia. This affords me a position of privilege in relation to other groups of Palestinians, as I have not experienced the most brutal effects of Israeli settler colonialism. I have never been beaten, shot, or imprisoned by Israeli soldiers. None of my immediate family have been killed. I have not been forced to endure the daily humiliations and frustrations of life under military occupation. I have the security of citizenship – something many Palestinian refugees are still without. My own experience of Israeli settler colonialism has been one of intergenerational dispersal and fragmentation; the loss of connection to home/land, family, and all that this entails. This article is also then, for me, part of a journey of returning to Palestine – not only a physical return but, as Edward Said described, return as the process of restoring ourselves to ourselves.Footnote 45
Having laid the conceptual foundations for the notion of affective sovereignty in this introduction, in the remaining four sections of the article I develop this concept through analyses of Palestinian hip-hop music and graffiti. Each section focuses on an interrelated form of feeling, which together make up what I describe as affective sovereignty. In the first section, I focus on expressions of Palestinian belonging to the land of Palestine, such as through connections to particular forms of flora that grow on the land, reconstituting the connection to land that Israeli settler colonialism attempts to sever. Second, I move on to analyse expressions of unity across the social, political, geographic, and temporal fragments of Palestine, drawing together a fragmented body and land. In the third section, I analyse expressions of Palestinian longing for Palestine from the condition of exile, which draw together the exiled Palestinian body with the land from which they were dispossessed. Fourth, and finally, I explore ways that these forms of belonging and longing are drawn into more explicitly resistant expressions of Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty, suggesting that affective sovereignty forms the molten core of Palestinian resistance.
In focussing on these particular forms of Palestinian belonging and longing, I do not purport to provide an exhaustive account of the ways that a Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty might be felt. Moreover, I am not claiming that these are totalising forms of feeling. For a Palestinian to fail to feel a sense of belonging to or longing for Palestine is in no way to cede their sovereignty with the land. After all, the condition of exile that in many ways defines Palestinian life is often characterised more by feelings of alienation than belonging. What I describe are simply some forms of feeling through which a Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty can be embodied.
Moreover, the forms of feeling, symbols, and practices that I analyse could, of course, be understood through lenses other than that of affective sovereignty; the most obvious being nationalism. There are many excellent works on Palestinian nationalism.Footnote 46 However, I do not view affective sovereignty (or Indigenous sovereignty more broadly) as a competing concept to that of nationalism. Rather, each concept has fundamentally different purposes: the latter is explanatory, while the former is emancipatory. In other words, I do not offer the concept of affective sovereignty as an explanation for the texts that I analyse. Instead, as detailed above, I theorise from these texts, exploring what theoretical and practical possibilities they can open up in relation to decolonisation.
Analysing these texts as articulations of affective sovereignty, rather than as simply nationalistic fervour, also guards against an inherent risk of the article: that it might feed colonial discourses that deem Palestinian resistance particularly emotional in order to dismiss or distort it. Palestinian resistance is often constructed in Western-international discourse as ‘overly emotional’, embodying the ‘wrong’ or ‘base’ emotions, and as therefore ‘irrational’, ‘infantile’ and, ultimately, dismissible. Within these orientalising discourses, Palestinian resistance is often characterised as being driven by an irrational rage or hatred, feeding into the notion that this resistance is mere ‘terrorism’ and can only be pacified with overwhelming violence. These discourses entail a racialised and gendered denigration of the Palestinian people as emotionally ‘backwards’, while at once denigrating emotion itself by equating it with irrationality. Through such discourses, Palestinian political claims to their land are dismissed. For example, in a memorandum following the 1917 Balfour Declaration – an act foundational for the colonisation of Palestine – the British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour writes: ‘for in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country …. The four great powers are committed to Zionism … [which is] of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices [my emphasis] of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.’Footnote 47 Through emphasising the apparently irrational desires of Palestinians, their existing sovereignty with the land is dismissed.
Against such orientalising discourses, the concept of affective sovereignty gives Palestinian feelings of belonging and longing their due respect as political claims to land. In other words, it presents a decolonising politics of emotion in Palestine. The purpose of this analysis is not to ‘prove’ the legitimacy of a Palestinian claim to the land of Palestine (anyone still searching for such proof should turn their gaze inwards). Instead, the purpose is to reclaim Palestinian desire for the ends of decolonisation. Recognising that decolonisation is not a metaphor,Footnote 48 this means contributing, however modestly, to the material decolonisation of Palestinian land and thus to putting an end to the overwhelming colonial violence that continues to engulf Palestinian lives. Just as I draw significantly on Indigenous theorising from elsewhere, so I believe the concept of affective sovereignty will resonate with Indigenous struggles beyond Palestine. More broadly, the decolonising analysis of Palestinian emotion charts a path for further research within and beyond international relations that seeks to harness the power of affect for decolonisation.
Land
In this section I explore affective sovereignty as it takes the form of an emotional connection to the land of Palestine. This connection is articulated in a range of ways in both Palestinian graffiti and hip-hop music, from claims to the native flora that grow on this land, to invoking the land as the source of Palestinian life and resistance. Palestinian life itself emerges from the land, making the loss of land for Palestinians far more than simply a loss of property. This sentiment is expressed in the line ‘On this land is what makes life worth living’, which appears in graffiti across Palestine, such as that pictured in Figure 1 on the Apartheid WallFootnote 49 in Qalqilya. This line is the refrain of a famous poem by Mahmoud Darwish, ‘On This Land’.Footnote 50 In the poem, Darwish finds what makes life worth living on the land and in Palestinian community: from the smallest, most intricate of wonders, like ‘the moss on a stone’, to the forms of clouds and the transitions of seasons, it is the land itself and the community on it that gives life its affective force.
‘On this land is what makes life worth living’, Qalqilya, Palestine. Photo taken by author.
Figure 1 Long description
The image shows graffiti on a concrete wall with text in multiple languages. On the left, in white spray paint, the Norwegian text reads 'AUF i Vest-Agder vil rive muren #free,' which translates to 'AUF in Vest-Agder wants to tear down the wall.' In the center, green Arabic script states 'على هذه الأرض ما يستحق الحياة,' meaning 'On this land is what makes life worth living.' On the right, white text reads 'FLEKKERØ + PALESTINA = LOVE ♥.' The graffiti is spray-painted, with the Arabic text centered and the Norwegian/English text on the left and right. The tone is activist and political, emphasizing solidarity with Palestine and opposition to the wall.
We also see the penultimate lines of this poem – ‘She was called Palestine. Her name later became / Palestine’ – graffitied in a mural in Nazareth (Figure 2). The piece is written in a contemporary calligraphic form, alongside the image of a person clutching a Palestinian flag in one hand while holding out two fingers for victory and/or peace with the other. As Haneen Kinani explains, this mural was painted during the 2021 Unity Intifada by a group of young Palestinian activists from the Palestinian Nazarene Movement, whose ‘principal struggle is to reclaim ownership over their city’. They named the piece ‘al-karāma’ (Dignity). This was the first mural they painted in the area around Mary’s Well, in the Nazareth city centre, ‘to resist and reclaim the city’ and ‘create a communal space for the youth to gather and express their lived experiences of generational struggle’.Footnote 51 The day after this piece was painted it was defaced, but the young activists quickly returned to repaint it. It was repeatedly defaced, with each effort to repaint it drawing more and more people to help out. In this case, the struggle over naming the land ‘Palestine’ is reflected in both the lines of poetry and the practice of painting them in graffiti – that is, in both the representation and the embodied experience of creating it. The poetry asserts that the land was called Palestine historically and that it still is, despite any attempt to rename it. In their graffiti practice, not only do the activists assert the land as Palestine, but when Israelis attempt to erase it, they repeatedly reinscribe the name of the land on the walls of Nazareth, with a body of Palestinian activists growing around this act of re-inscription.
‘She was called Palestine. Her name later became / Palestine’, Nazareth, Palestine. Photo sent to author by anonymous source and reproduced with permission.
Figure 2 Long description
The mural is painted on a wall in Nazareth, featuring a person wearing a head covering and holding a Palestinian flag in one hand while making a peace sign with the other. The artwork includes calligraphic text in a contemporary style, with sections colored in red and green. The mural is situated next to a staircase, with trees and a building visible in the background. The scene is illuminated by artificial lighting, creating a contrast between the mural and its surroundings.
Alongside the land more broadly, Palestinian artists invoke in their work a range of native flora that grow on this land to express a Palestinian belonging. The track ‘Jasadik-hom’ (Your Body of Theirs), by Palestinian hip-hop group DAM, performed by singer and group member Maysa Daw, expresses sovereignty with a number of Palestinian flora.Footnote 52 While the founding members of DAM are from the city of al-Lidd, Daw was born and grew up in Haifa. Both cities are in ’;48 Palestine and have significant Palestinian populations. On this track, Daw performs a spoken-word poetry piece; a reflection on what it means to live in a feminine Palestinian body.
The minimalist beat on ‘Jasadik-hom’ leaves plenty of room for Daw’s powerful voice to fill the track. The mijwiz-inspired synth that opens the song quickly gives way to a simple layering of drum machine and tabla (hand drum), with rogue synth sounds and a single strings chord accompanying intermittently. The only other element of the composition is a subtle but firm vocal ‘eh!’, affirming Daw’s words from the background. The lack of perceptible reverb or other effects on Daw’s voice lend it a resounding clarity.
The song’s music video, directed by queer Palestinian pop singer and visual artist Bashar Murad, reflects the track’s minimalist composition. It is a single shot with Daw at its centre, only her shoulders and face visible. Either side of Daw, fellow DAM members Tamer Nafar and Mahmood Jrere stand in the background. Expressionless throughout, they only open their mouths to sing the affirmational ‘eh!’. The lighting reveals only one side of each artist’s face, invoking visually the duality of the body as both yours and theirs, illuminated and hidden. The visual simplicity of the video, as with the music, serves to draw attention to Daw’s voice and words.
The lyrics of the song track the process of Daw reclaiming her feminine Palestinian body – a body that is both ‘yours’ and ‘theirs’ (‘Jasadik-hom’). She makes clear that it is both Palestinian and Zionist patriarchy which she resists, recognising the ways that patriarchal domination and Zionist colonisation reinforce one another in Palestine.Footnote 53 This is most evident in the following lines, addressed to Palestinian men: ‘idhā inta bitqāwim bitmis fīṣahyūniyithum/idhā anā baqāwim bamis kamān bithikūriyithum’ (If you resist you hurt their Zionism/If I resist I also hurt their masculinity). After several stanzas of poetically exploring life in a feminine Palestinian body, the energy of the song builds as Daw demands:
Long description
Arabic transliteration on the left, English translation on the right. The poem discusses themes of body autonomy and self-acceptance. Key lines include: 'Don't stare, these breasts are mine', 'Don't touch, these hips are mine', 'Don't comment, this arm hair and armpit hair is only mine'. The poem emphasizes personal ownership of physical features and emotions, with a bold line stating, 'But this olive oil, this za'tar and 'akkūb are mine'. The poem concludes with a reflection on self-perception: 'For the first time I'm seeing my eyes through my eyes'. The layout is two columns, with the Arabic transliteration on the left and the English translation on the right, highlighting the personal and cultural significance of the text.
In this stanza, Daw seizes ownership over her body from those who wish to control it. She inverts the surveillance and discipline exercised over her feminine Palestinian body to make claims against the eyes, hands, and words of those who seek to observe, touch, and shape her body. Amidst this reclaiming of her body against the patriarchal gaze, her line, ‘But this olive oil, this za’tar and ‘akkūb are mine’ effectively claims these native flora as parts of her body. While Daw refuses to allow her feminine Palestinian body to be relegated to the kitchen (‘This kitchen is not only mine’), she makes a firm, embodied claim to these ingredients found in the Palestinian kitchen. Olive oil is a fundamental part of Palestinian cuisine, identity, and agricultural practice; as one Arabic proverb states, ‘al-zayt ‘imād al-bayt’ (olive oil is the backbone of the home). Similarly, za’tar (wild thyme) and ‘akkūb (gundelia) are wild plants native to Palestine that hold a prominent place in Palestinian culture. Foraging for these plants (among others) is an age-old Indigenous Palestinian practice. However, as Rabea Eghbariah demonstrates, Israel has worked to disassociate Palestinians from these practices – and in turn from the land itself – making the picking of these wild plants illegal under Israeli law. Israel justified the ban as a measure to conserve the plants, despite there being no legitimate environmental justification for this claim, making clear that its primary purpose is to sever Palestinians from their land. At the same time, these foods, along with the Palestinian knowledges that surround them, have been appropriated by Israelis, then commercially produced and marketed as Israeli products.Footnote 54 In this context, Daw’s embodied claim to za’tar and ‘akkūb constitutes a sovereign claim to Indigenous Palestinian foods, practices, and land. She explains to me:
It wasn’t endangered, it’s not endangered, and there’s no practical reason for it to be forbidden to take. So basically, it was systematically trying to uproot Palestinians from their food, their sources, their land, their culture. And, at the same time, it’s harassment as well. It’s very racist, because, with all of the research, there was no practical reason for all of this. So… [it is a] form of reclaiming that this is ours and that the rules – and it doesn’t stop only with the rules of the ‘akkūb and za‘tar, it’s all the racist rules, all the things that you can’t do with the land… – it’s reclaiming and saying that, even with all the rules they try to put, it’s still ours. Even if it’s ‘illegal’ in a way, it’s still ours. So this ‘akkūb is mine even if you forbid me to take it. And this za‘tar is mine even if you try and forbid me to take it. We still take it. We still live by it. This is our tradition. This is our food. This is our land.Footnote 55
In the context of the settler colonial elimination of Palestinian Indigenous food practices, Daw’s lyrics form a powerful claim to sovereignty over these foods and the land on which they grow. This sovereignty is embodied: spoken amidst features of her body, Daw claims olive oil, za’tar, and ‘akkūb as physical parts of her being. Expressing an enduring belonging with the land, she claims the produce of the land as constituting her body, and the land as indisputably Palestinian.
Unity
I turn now to explore affective sovereignty as constituted by expressions of Palestinian unity that articulate belonging across the fragments of Palestine. In both Palestinian graffiti and hip-hop, connections are drawn across the colonial borders that divide Palestinian communities from one another. As well as tracking this unity in the practices of graffiti and hip-hop, I seek to enact this unity in the archive of graffiti and songs I bring together for analysis. I do so by working to include in this section, and in this article more broadly, hip-hop music and graffiti from across the colonial borders that fragment Palestinian communities, as well as by exploring active transgressions of these borders.
The practice of creating and performing music in Palestine can itself work to break down and transgress colonial borders. This dynamic is evident in the 2018 documentary Palestine Underground, produced by the UK-based music broadcasting platform Boiler Room, which follows various Palestinian hip-hop and techno artists.Footnote 56 The documentary opens with a shot of Palestinian DJ ODDZFootnote 57 scaling the eight-metre-high Apartheid Wall to get from Ramallah (in the West Bank) to Yafa (in ’48 Palestine) to play a set there in a Palestinian venue. Given that he holds a West Bank identity document and is unable to obtain a permit, ODDZ cannot pass through the Wall at a military checkpoint, so he must go over it. Climbing the Wall is incredibly dangerous, not only due to the inherent danger of scaling something of such height, but also for the risk of being arrested or shot by the Israeli military that patrol the Wall. This scene in the documentary is overlaid with ODDZ speaking in an interview: ‘You can’t just build a wall and say you can’t go and do this. It’s music. It’s a right for everyone.’ As ODDZ explains in more detail later:
I’m in Ramallah – stuck in Ramallah. We don’t have a right to move at all. We are in a small prison. In Ramallah there’s a lot of problems happening, places close, there’s no venues. I just wanted to go and play a full set, once. Like play in a proper party, you know. I have a gig at Anna Loulou – this is the only place I play in Yafa because it’s the only Palestinian venue. It’s really special for me to play in Yafa, because it’s my hometown – my family were kicked out in 1948 and they are refugees to Ramallah. I smuggle into occupied Palestine … I don’t care, nothing will stop me, I will do my thing.Footnote 58
ODDZ is driven to perform in Yafa not only by the desire to play a set there and connect with ’48 Palestinians,Footnote 59 but by the affective power of return to his hometown, from where his family were ethnically cleansed. He will continue to do his thing because he knows full well that he belongs in Yafa.
This act of transgressing the Israeli-imposed border between Palestinian communities is not only powerful for ODDZ himself, but for the Palestinians in Yafa for whom he performs. As Marwan Hawash, the owner of Anna Loulou,Footnote 60 explains, ‘the moment you see a DJ from Ramallah here in Yafa, it rings a bell for people here. It makes them feel like we can break borders.’ Filling them with the affective power to shatter the borders that divide them, such transgressions by Palestinian artists can break down the boundaries formed between fragmented Palestinian communities.
Musical collaborations across colonial borders also enact this transgressive Palestinian unity. In recent years, musicians from Ramallah and Haifa have forged a strong link between their respective music scenes. Palestinian producer/rapper Muqata’a explains this collaboration as a response to Israeli attempts to fragment Palestinians across the ’48 territories and the ’67 territories (Gaza and the West Bank): ‘Israel is trying to divide us – with the Wall, with checkpoints, with the Israeli state being built on eighty per cent of Palestinian land’. In this context, coming together to make and perform music provides a way of reconstituting the Palestinian collective, as Muqata’a details further: ‘We are the same people in the end, you know. We’re all Palestinians, we all have the same culture, you know. It’s only natural that we eventually meet again and make music together and throw parties together.’ Affirming this, the Ramallah-based Palestinian rapper Makimakkuk explains,
there was a huge cut between the different Palestinian cities for a long time, between the scenes. Especially with ‘48, with Occupied Haifa. In 2009 a sudden connection happened. When we met with Jazar and everyone else in ‘48 it was really, really important for us to get together. Because they live a different life from what we do. They grew up speaking Hebrew. Having them around us made us understand even more what is going on, and for them as well to reconnect to here.Footnote 61
As Israel has worked to ‘cut’ Palestinians from one another – to sever connections between them – coming together across these divisions through music has been momentous for both communities in Ramallah and Haifa. It has helped them both to better understand the overall situation in Palestine, and to reconnect as Palestinians in a shared feeling of sovereignty with the home/land. Attesting to this from the other side of the division, Ayed, from the Haifa-based music collective Jazar Crew, notes, ‘we’ve been divided for so long. We’ve been divided for decades. We are not any more strangers, as they shaped us.’ Ayed goes on to affirm the significance of this practice for a sense of Palestinian belonging: ‘Playing together, not only for the cause of partying, but to make the connection strong with the people in the West Bank. It’s re-birthing the Palestinian community again.’Footnote 62 For the hip-hop and electronic artists of Ramallah and Haifa, musical collaborations not only celebrate a Palestinian collective, but reconstitute it.
Such unification through belonging finds visual articulation in Palestinian graffiti. One distinct form of this unification is the assertion of a sovereign claim to one site in Palestine from another site across colonial divisions. An example of this is shown in Figure 3, on the streets of Bethlehem, where we see a flag planted in an orange, with the text on the flag reading: ‘My flag in the port of Yafa’. This piece stakes a claim of sovereignty extending from the location of the graffiti in Bethlehem, in the West Bank, across the colonial border to Yafa, in ‘48 Palestine. The flag is weathered, perhaps from the decades spent in exile, separated from the coastal city.
‘My flag in the port of Yafa’, Bethlehem, Palestine. Photo taken by author.
Figure 3 Long description
A long wall is shown from an angled view along a sidewalk. The wall is covered with graffiti. One section shows a single fruit with a stem and leaves. Large Arabic writing is painted across the wall. A large curved shape with a spiral detail and a wide striped pattern fills much of the right side of the mural. A chain link fence runs along the top of the wall, with trees and parts of buildings behind it. The sidewalk and curb run beside the wall, with small patches of plants near the base.
The graffito’s text are lyrics from the song ‘Yafa’, performed by Lebanese singer Joseph ‘Azar and written by prominent Lebanese composers the Rahbani brothers – who, as Joseph Massad details, played a crucial role in articulating a militant longing for Palestine in their many songs dedicated to the cause, particularly those sung by Fairuz. Indeed, upon the death of ‘Assi Rahbani (one of the two brothers), the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (quoted by Massad) declared, “the Palestinians showed off their aesthetic identity through the Arab songs of the Rahbanis … so much so that [these songs] became the reference point for our hearts; they became the restored homeland, and the motivation for us to march forward on the long caravan road.”Footnote 63 The song “Yafa” expresses a deep yearning for the city, describing days of fishing from the port of Yafa, before being lost at sea to a great storm, and struggling to return home. The line of the song that is reproduced in the graffito, “shira’ī fī mīnā” yāfa’, translates to ‘my sail in the port of Yafa’, as ‘shira’ can mean both ‘flag’ and ‘sail’. In its inscription on a flag in the graffito, the meaning of the word is transformed from ‘sail’ to ‘flag’. In turn, it becomes an even more direct statement of sovereignty in the city. Demonstrating the interconnectedness of the forms of belonging and longing I describe across the sections of this article, the song closes with the repeated declaration, addressed to the city of Yafa itself: ‘wa sanarja‘ narja‘ yā yāfa’ (And we will return, we return oh Yafa).
The orange in which the flag is planted in the graffito adds further dimensions to its claim of Indigenous sovereignty. Prior to Zionist colonisation, Palestinians under the Ottoman Empire had cultivated a unique variety of orange: the Yafa/Jaffa orange, which became a key export from Palestine throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Footnote 64 Since Zionist colonisation, the Yafa/Jaffa orange has been appropriated by Israel, symbolically and materially. During the Nakba of 1948, Yafa was a key site of Israeli ethnic cleansing. The properties of expelled Yafa Palestinians were appropriated by the fledgling Israeli state, including their extensive orange groves.Footnote 65 The ‘Jaffa’ orange was then sold and marketed internationally as an Israeli product. In an ironic encapsulation of colonial hubris, even as Zionist agriculturalists dismissed Palestinian methods of orange cultivation as ‘primitive’, a Zionist study found that the pre-existing Palestinian methods were far more cost-efficient than the ‘modern’ Zionist-European methods that replaced them.Footnote 66 At the same time as they appropriated the Yafa/Jaffa orange materially, Israelis appropriated it symbolically, as it became a key Israeli national symbol through the mid-twentieth century.Footnote 67 In this context, the flag being planted in the orange in this graffito represents a Palestinian sovereign claim not only to the city of Yafa, but to the orange that Yafa Palestinians once grew there, as it remains an important symbol of Palestinian belonging.
Longing
Affective sovereignty is expressed not only through forms of belonging with Palestine, but through forms of longing for Palestine. Such longing is often the only way that the exiled Palestinian body can make contact with the land. When I speak of the condition of exile here, I refer not only to those Palestinians in the diaspora (outside of Palestine), but also those who have been exiled ‘internally’ within Palestine. Moreover, exile could be considered the general condition for all Palestinians, as even those who remain on their land are alienated from it in various ways by Israeli settler colonialism. In this context, a longing for Palestine can disrupt both the attempted extinguishment of a Palestinian right to return and broader attempts to fragment Palestinian land, time, and memory.
The Palestinian rapper and singer Walaa Sbait – who was born and raised in Haifa, but is originally from the village of Iqrit – enacts such longing for return in the 2019 BBC documentary Raving in Palestine.Footnote 68 In the documentary, we watch Sbait return to Iqrit, which was ethnically cleansed and destroyed during the 1948 Nakba. As he explains, ‘I grew up always with the idea of I must return back to Iqrit, to my destroyed and displaced village, of my grandparents’. As Sbait drives to Iqrit, we hear his song ‘Oh Kufiye Man’ playing, the lyrics of which resonate with the return he enacts:
In these words, the land is brought into the collective Palestinian body, pumping through the heart, filling the space between the body and land. Later in Sbait’s return in the documentary, we hear more of the song’s lyrics:
Long description
Arabic Transliteration: uḥruth hal-arḍ ughrushā izra’ahā, anā maḥṣūd ḥaḍdart bi’idaynā nuḥyi hal-arḍ, bisān al-naṣra isdūd wa ‘akkā ṭanṭūra wa ṭamra, iqrit ḥayfa kullnā ‘alā darb al-‘awda. English Translation: Plough the land, cultivate it and plant the seeds, I harvest the crop, with our hands we revive the land, From Bissan to Nazareth, Esdoud to Akka, Tantoura to Tamrah, Iqrit to Haifa, all of us on the path of return69.
These lines bring together each form of belonging and longing explored in this article: the description of working the land expresses a connection to land; by invoking paths between them, fragmented Palestinian cities are drawn together in unity; and the invocation of return expresses a longing for Palestine. It is no coincidence that all three constellations of feeling appear together in these few lines, as within what I call affective sovereignty, they are in fact inseparable.
After Sbait arrives in Iqrit and greets his cousins there, he explains how, while Iqrit Palestinians have only been allowed to return to be buried in the cemetery there, the younger generation seek to return while alive, to give life to the village and themselves:
We are allowed only to return back to the cemetery, where all our loved ones are buried. So, the only way for an Iqrit person to return to Iqrit is actually in a coffin, to return dead. But we as a young generation we changed that equation, and we actually decided to live here before we die here. And that’s why we still come here and we still plant tomatoes, we still try to do masses here, and pray in this church. So, we’re still alive, you know.Footnote 70
For Sbait and other Iqrit Palestinians, connecting physically and emotionally to their home village in life, not only in death, is vital. It keeps the collective body of Iqrit alive. By forming attachment with the home/land, the Palestinian body consolidates and lives on.
In the documentary, we then see Sbait and his cousins singing and dancing in their village. Through finding such joy in return, such practices of return also constitute forms of refusal to Israeli settler colonialism. By giving life to the Palestinian body, they refuse the attempt to eliminate this body and sever its connections with the home/land. Indeed, as Sbait states unequivocally, ‘we are under Apartheid. How can I accept that as a native, as Indigenous? Impossible.’ As Sbait and his cousins sing and dance in Iqrit, in the background we see the character Handala graffitied on a building.
Handala is a cartoon character created by Palestinian artist Naji al-Ali in the early 1970s, featuring centrally in his political cartoons throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s. Even now, some five decades after al-Ali first penned Handala, graffiti depictions of the character are ubiquitous across Palestine. They range from simple amateur scrawlings to more detailed renderings to full-blown comic strips.
Al-Ali was born in the Palestinian village of al-Shajara, in Northern Galilee. Along with his family, he was expelled from Palestine as a child during the Nakba of 1948, arriving in the refugee camp of Ain al-Hilweh in Lebanon, where he would grow up. Handala represents al-Ali’s inner child and conscience. He is always depicted barefoot and dressed in tattered clothes, the way that al-Ali arrived in Ain al-Hilweh. As al-Ali himself described, ‘I was a child of ten when we came to Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp. We were hungry, dazed and barefoot. Life in the camp was unbearable, full of daily humiliations, ruled by poverty and despair.’Footnote 71 This experience of exile would fundamentally shape al-Ali. As his son Khaled explains, ‘I think the Nakba, or catastrophe, was imprinted on my father. He could never forget what happened to them – the experience of having to leave your land, your house, your village, your community, and suddenly be stranded in a different country, in a tent, no job, no money, no land – that left a scar on my father and his generation.’Footnote 72
Handala forever remains ten years old – al-Ali’s age when he was expelled from Palestine. As Khaled al-Ali describes, ‘Handala is a ten-year-old child. He never grew. Time stopped for Handala when he left Palestine.’Footnote 73 This freezing of time speaks to the Palestinian understanding of the Nakba as ongoing. The 1948 Nakba is not a past event for Palestinians, but continuously lived in the present, through both its ongoing effects and the ongoing attempts by Israel to eliminate the Palestinian people. Refusing to age in exile, Handala keeps present not only the Nakba, but the Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty that was fundamentally ignored in the establishment of the state of Israel.
Handala also maintains the same orientation, always depicted facing away from the viewer. He is turned towards Palestine, his eyes firmly set on the home to which he longs to return. Handala as a symbol of such longing is clearly expressed in a graffito painted onto the Apartheid Wall in Abu Dis (Figure 4). In this piece, Handala stands at the entrance of a tent, like those that once filled the Palestinian refugee camps, having long since been replaced by concrete structures. The words on the tent read: ‘No matter how many homes a boy lives in, his longing is always for the first’. In continuously longing for their Indigenous home in Palestine, exiled Palestinians maintain the promise of return, which persists across time and multiple displacements.
‘No matter how many homes a boy lives in, his longing is always for the first’, Abu Dis, Palestine. Photo taken by author.
Figure 4 Long description
Graffiti on a concrete wall shows a tent with a figure having spiky hair standing at its entrance. The tent is outlined in black and there is text in both Arabic and English. The English text reads, 'No matter how many homes you live in, your first home is always the best.' The Arabic text is written in a similar style, with additional decorative elements around the tent. The wall is covered with various other graffiti and markings in different colors.
The final defining feature of Handala is that he almost always holds his hands crossed behind his back. In one reading, this represents Handala’s refusal to accept any of the ‘deals’ offered to Palestinians, whereby they are asked to sign off on their own colonisation. It is also a rejection of those deals made by the apparent allies of Palestinians and by Palestinian leaders themselves, particularly in normalising relations with Israel. In a second, related reading, his hands are held as if scrutinising, alluding to Handala’s position as a witness – a witness to the violence, injustice, and betrayals of the Palestinian cause. He not only faces Palestine, then, but also faces the truth. With this in mind, the ubiquitous reproduction of Handala in graffiti across Palestine takes on further significance. Spray-painted onto walls throughout the land, Handala stands, ever-present, bearing witness to ongoing colonisation.
This form of truth is evident in Figure 5, depicting one of several meticulous reproductions of al-Ali cartoons in Dheisheh camp. In the lower section of the image, reading from right to left, Handala’s father first writes ‘Palestine is our homeland’. Then, his hands are tied behind his back, so instead he calls out the same phrase. Then, his mouth is sewn shut, but he guards the phrase in his thoughts. Finally, he is shot dead, but his children – the Palestinian refugee girl and boy (Handala) – take up the mantle and write the phrase themselves. The work’s message is clear: despite the attempts to violently suppress a Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty, this sovereignty persists and is passed down intergenerationally. To the left of this scene, the map of Palestine is painted, coloured in with both the Palestinian flag and the kuffiyya, affirming the message of the phrase that Handala and his sister inherit. At the top of the wall, Handala is depicted lying dead, having been hit by an arrow in his bare foot. Next to him reads, ‘From our blood to our blood is the border of the land’. Another firm claim to Indigenous sovereignty on the land, here Palestine is reclaimed in its entirety, against attempts to fragment it into distinct territories. Palestine as extending ‘from our blood to our blood’ has two salient readings: Palestine extends from where the Palestinian family has lived and continues to live; and Palestine is the land that Palestinians have sacrificed and died for, including Handala in this mural. Even in death, Handala still faces the land, and with it, the truth of an enduring Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty.
‘From our blood to our blood is the border of the land / Palestine is our homeland’, Dheisheh camp, Palestine. Photo taken by author.
Figure 5 Long description
A photograph of a mural painted on an outdoor concrete wall and a set of metal gates, taken in daylight with shadows cast across the surface. Bare vines and a metal trellis structure are visible above the wall. The mural spans the full width of the wall and gates. On the upper section of the wall, two figures are painted. One figure is kneeling and one figure is lying horizontally with an arrow in their leg. Between these two figures, Arabic text reads: from right to left, the phrase is written as the text painted in two lines. The upper line reads in Arabic script and the lower line continues the phrase. The full Arabic text visible on the wall reads: left parenthesis from right to left right parenthesis the phrase which translates as the text on the wall reads the Arabic script: the first portion reads as a line beginning with the word 'min' and the second line contains the word 'hudud'. The full Arabic text visible reads: the upper portion contains the line starting with. On the gate panels, starting from the left section, a large flag outline is painted with a triangular wedge shape and horizontal bands. To the right of the flag, four standing figures are painted in sequence from right to left. Each figure is in a different posture: one is upright with an arm raised, one stands with arms behind the back, one stands with markings around the mouth area, and one is on the ground with small figures nearby. Above each standing figure, the Arabic text is repeated. Beneath the standing figures, the same phrase appears again in two additional lines. The mural depicts figures in postures associated with restraint, injury, and death. The overall visual content is somber in character, depicting scenes of physical harm and suppression alongside repeated written slogans.
Naji al-Ali was assassinated in London in 1987, having never been able to return to Palestine. Despite receiving an increasing number of threats on his life, al-Ali refused to stop producing his cartoons or to compromise on their content. As his son Khaled states, ‘they tried to scare him off. They tried then to basically banish him somewhere else [London]. This did not stop him. It did not scare him off. They thought it [assassinating him] is the only way they could silence him. They were wrong in a way, because, as he predicted, he has passed away thirty years ago but his works do live until now.’Footnote 74 Indeed, through Handala’s omnipresent reproduction across Palestine, including but by no means limited to graffiti, Naji al-Ali does finally return to the land that he longed for. He returns as the child he was when he was expelled.
Molten sovereignty
In this section I argue that a Palestinian affective sovereignty forms the molten core of Palestinian resistance. That is, feelings of belonging with and longing for the home/land of Palestine can form the very heart of Palestinian struggle, always holding the potential to erupt into more direct forms of anticolonial dissent. The metaphor of the volcano is invoked by Palestinians in both graffiti and hip-hop music to symbolise the resistant Palestinian body. I suggest that the constellations of feeling I have described as affective sovereignty constitute the molten core of this resistant volcano, fuelling an unrelenting Palestinian resistance.
This molten sovereignty burns through the iron wall – the Israeli strategy for furthering its settler colonial project by way of crushing the Palestinian will to resist. This strategy was defined in 1923 by Ze’ev (then Vladimir) Jabotinsky, a Russian Zionist leader who played a key role in the colonisation of Palestine. Jabotinsky writes:
Every indigenous people will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of foreign settlement.
That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of ‘Palestine’ into the ‘Land of Israel’. …
Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population – an iron wall which the native population cannot break through.Footnote 75
This iron wall strategy continues to define Israeli policy towards Palestinians today. It defines Israeli attempts to crush any Palestinian hope of liberation with overwhelming colonial violence, evident most disturbingly in Israel’s current genocidal assault on Gaza. Though largely made of concrete, the iron wall is even physically manifest today in the Apartheid Wall. However, what Jabotinsky failed to predict is that, a century after he penned this colonial strategy, the Palestinian commitment to liberation is as fierce as ever before.
I suggest that the affective sovereignty I have described in this article underpins the Palestinian refusal to be colonised. The attachment between the Palestinian body and home/land drives an unrelenting Palestinian will to resist. That is, affective sovereignty is the molten core of Palestinian resistance that burns straight through the iron wall. Overwhelming colonial violence cannot extinguish this Indigenous sovereignty – it simply adds fuel to the fire.
The fire of affective sovereignty burns steadily through long periods of apparent calm, then erupts as soon as a spark ignites it. We saw just such an eruption during the 2021 Unity Intifada. Ongoing Palestinian resistance to ethnic cleansing in sites such as Sheikh Jarrah ignited the affective sovereignty that persists amongst Palestinians across the colonial borders that divide them.
Released merely days before the Unity Intifada began in full, the track ‘Inn Ann’ by Palestinian rappers Daboor and Shabjdeed, produced by Al Nather, became arguably the anthem of the intifada, particularly for younger Palestinians.Footnote 76 The song’s music video has amassed over ninety million views on YouTube to date, making it by far the biggest hit in Palestinian rap history. This success is all the more astonishing given that it was released on the independent Palestinian record label BLTNM.
‘Inn Ann’ introduced the young, newly signed Palestinian rapper Daboor to the BLTNM audience. The fact that Daboor hails from al-Quds – in many ways the epicentre of the Unity Intifada – played no small part in the song becoming an anthem for the intifada. In Daboor’s lyrics on ‘Inn Ann’, he pulls no punches, unapologetically describing life for a young Palestinian man on the streets of al-Quds. He raps of the violence and incarceration at the hands of Israel, the corruption of the Palestinian leadership, the betrayal of collaborators, but, above all, the overwhelming and unceasing will of the Palestinian to resist. With lines like ‘Anā idrinālīn fāqi‘ bishabāb bayn ḍarb al-ghāz’ (I’m adrenaline exploding in youth between shots of teargas), it is clear why this track resonated so powerfully with Palestinians facing down Israeli soldiers, militarised police, and armed settlers in the streets across Palestine during the Unity Intifada.
Such defiant lyrics are matched by Al Nather’s combative beat on the track, heavily inspired by UK drill music. The kick drum pounds through a dancing hi-hat pattern, like the heart pumping adrenaline through the resistant body. An unyielding bass line underpins a synth riff that resembles the sound of a siren, invoking a sense of resoluteness in the face of danger.
The music video channels this defiance visually. We see Daboor and Shabjdeed rapping among a group of young Palestinian men dressed in black, as the Apartheid Wall towers in the background. The video is heavily inspired by those characteristic of the drill genre, but has been adapted to Palestine, with the young men in the video reflecting a distinctly Palestinian street aesthetic. Daboor wears a numbered vest that invokes a prison uniform, while Shabjdeed wears a style of heavy jacket-jumpsuit sometimes worn by Palestinian street vendors in winter. The rappers’ words strike a particularly resolute tone as they echo off the Apartheid Wall in the background. Daboor opens the first verse:
The power of these three lines is driven home by the kick drum forcing its way into the track for the first time with the word iḥnā (we/we are), rattling the listener into collective movement. These lines became a code for young Palestinians of al-Quds in their resistance during the Unity Intifada. As journalist Ali Obaidaat recounts, a group of young Palestinian men were seized by Israeli forces in one of many waves of mass arrests that Israel employed as an attempt to intimidate and suppress Palestinian resistance. They were then blindfolded and driven off in an Israeli military vehicle. As the journey grew longer, one of the young Palestinians wanted to ensure that he was not alone with the soldiers. So, he called out Daboor’s first line, ‘ihdā’ (Calm down), to which his friends responded with the subsequent lines ‘māhu kull shī bāyin fī al-miḥna / Allah byishhad mīn iḥnā’ (Everything is clear in struggle/God attests to who we are).Footnote 77 Despite being literally unable to see under blindfold, everything is crystal clear in the struggle they are waging against their captors. Likely anticipating the abuse and torture often perpetrated against Palestinians in Israeli custody, the young Palestinian men remain calm in the knowledge that God and their fellow Palestinians know exactly who they are. After the opening three lines, the drums now in full effect, Daboor continues:
Long description
Arabic Transliteration: rijāla dam niṭarṭishlak būm ḍarb ḥarb al-layla mā binighlab biddak jibāl waʿādī binhidlak marḥab fik fi awlād al-quds binddābir ḥālnā niḥill al-lughz rannāt ʿalā nafḥa wakulluh bikhush walak shūfnā wayāmā wakulluh biṣuff walā marra nikhāf walā marra wanuṣ biddak burkān bnifqaʿbūv English Translation: Men pouring out our blood for you Boom, war is striking tonight, we won’t tire If you want us to move mountains, no problem Welcome from the sons of al-Quds We figure it out, we solve the puzzle Ring up Nafha, everyone will join in And we’ve always seen it, everyone lines up Not once we’re afraid, not once, not ever You want a volcano, we’ll erupt, boov! Superscript 78 indicates a footnote or endnote reference.
These lines affirm precisely who they are: Indigenous Palestinians justly resisting their colonisation. The line ‘Men pouring out our blood for you’ invokes a distinctly masculine instantiation of the figure of the martyr, sacrificing themselves to the violence of Israeli colonialism for the betterment of their people. Despite the fact that Israel will invade their neighbourhoods under the cover of darkness, as they often do, Daboor proclaims, ‘we won’t tire’. In the next line, he attributes to Palestinian resistance a miraculous capacity, claiming that moving mountains is no problem (more literally in Arabic it is ‘to demolish’ mountains). By welcoming the listener on behalf of the sons of al-Quds, Daboor locates the source of this resistant capacity in the land on which they stand firm. He then expresses their creativity in resistance, as no matter what forms of colonial violence the coloniser brings, Palestinians will ‘figure it out’. The evidence that Daboor provides for this fact is that, if you call up Nafha (a notorious Israeli prison) then the Palestinians incarcerated there will join in the resistance without fear. Daboor’s invocation of the volcano metaphor in the final line might seem like a threat, but it is in fact a promise: grounded in knowing who they are and where they come from, Palestinians will never cease resisting.
The chorus of ‘Inn Ann’, from which the song’s title is drawn, begins with Daboor rapping, ‘in ann qad āna awānuh’ (If the pain endures, then its time has come). Resonating powerfully with Palestinians, this line has come to represent the song’s sentiment and all it encapsulates – for example, the line was painted in graffiti on a wall in Haifa during the Unity Intifada. Its words reference those of the tenth-century Arab poet al-Mutanabbi, who writes, ‘alamun alamma alam ulimma bidā’ihi – in āna ānun āna ānu awānihi’. With intricate wordplay that is more apparent when read in its Arabic script, the line roughly translates to, ‘I’ve been struck with a pain that I haven’t known before – and if the time has come to cure it, then it is time for it’. With his references to colonial violence, the pain Daboor addresses in his lyrics is that of colonisation, which has endured for decades. He makes clear in the remainder of the chorus that this pain includes significantly the corruption and betrayal of Palestinian political leaders. By stating that this pain’s ‘time has come’, Daboor calls on Palestinians to resist colonisation in all its forms.
Released a few days after ‘Inn Ann’, in the heat of the Unity Intifada, Daboor’s track ‘Sheikh Jarrah’ reaffirms the same message of Palestinian sovereignty and resistance.Footnote 79 Produced by Al Nather and Taymour, the beat follows a similar drill pattern as ‘Inn Ann’, with a stuttering hi-hat, and the kick and snare drums countering one another like stones and gunshots in the battle for the streets of al-Quds that Daboor describes. A resounding bassline and ghostly synth riff complete the minimalist composition. In the song’s music video, Daboor raps on the streets of Sheikh Jarrah at night, with fellow BLTNM members Shabjdeed and Shabmouri sitting in a car behind. Within the first verse, Daboor raps:
Long description
Romanized Arabic text in a left column, paired line by line with English text in a right column. Line 1 (left): anā aṣlī walak Line 1 (right): I’m genuine, boy Line 2 (left): anā jīt burkān bil-sīn wafaqa’t Line 2 (right): I came on the scene like a volcano and erupted Line 3 (left): anā ibn al-quds Line 3 (right): I’m the son of al-Quds Line 4 (left): wahadūlā jamā’tī shabāb al-ward Line 4 (right): And these are my people, shabāb al-ward Line 5 (left): anā aqda‘shab Line 5 (right): I’m the most resolute Line 6 (left): khasirt khasirt wamāzilt al‘ab Line 6 (right): I lost and I lost but I’m still playing Line 7 (left): mush raḥ aḥmad Line 7 (right): I won’t be extinguished Line 8 (left): law kull hal-dunyā btitshaqalb Line 8 (right): Even if the whole world turns upside down.
These lines turn once more to the metaphor of the volcano in expressing persistence and defiance in the face of colonialism. While ‘aṣlī’ has been translated as ‘genuine’, it can also denote ‘original’ and ‘Indigenous’. Read alongside Daboor’s proclamation of being ‘the son of al-Quds’, this constitutes an embodied claim to place. As a descendent of the city, his people are shabāb al-ward. Literally translating to ‘the youth of the flower’, shabāb al-ward refers to the young Palestinians seen out in the streets, particularly in al-Quds. The visual aesthetic of the BLTNM crew and the young men in the music videos for ‘Inn Ann’ and ‘Sheikh Jarrah’ – particularly their clothing and haircuts – is characteristic of shabāb al-ward, making clear who Daboor and BLTNM aim to represent in their music. These shabāb are defined by their gada‘‘ (roughly, ‘resoluteness’) and Daboor is the most resolute of all, as he raps. This resoluteness is evident in the fact that ‘I’ (Daboor) – also referring collectively to the Palestinian people – have ‘lost and lost’ but I am ‘still playing’. These lines suggest that despite the constant losses for Palestinians, the ongoing and escalating colonisation of their lands, they are unrelenting in their resistance. Reiterating that this resistance will not be suppressed, in the penultimate line – referring back to earlier in the verse where he embodies the volcano – Daboor raps, ‘I won’t be extinguished’. The molten sovereignty that fills the resistant Palestinian can never be extinguished by the violence of colonisation, not ‘even if the whole world turns upside down’.
Daboor opens the second verse with the same intensity, rapping fiercely ‘idhā fish ḥijār nuḍrub bil-qalb’ (If there’s no stones, we strike with the heart). That is, even when the material means of resistance are exhausted, Palestinians turn to their unyielding emotion. In the music video, Daboor performs the motion of seizing his heart and hurling it at the viewer. Crucially, rather than denigrating emotion as a passive state, Daboor seizes it as a weapon with which to strike the coloniser.
The graffito shown in Figure 6 – painted onto the Apartheid Wall next to the infamous Qalandiya checkpoint – enacts the sentiment of Daboor’s line visually. In the piece, a kuffiyya-clad Palestinian resistance fighter pulls back their slingshot loaded with a heart. The shot is aimed directly at the checkpoint – a site of intense colonial violence, ranging from everyday humiliations to summary executions. Just as in Daboor’s lyrics, this piece figures emotion as the material of resistance, its affective core. As I have demonstrated, this core is constituted by feelings of belonging with and longing for Palestine – forms of affective sovereignty that draw together the Palestinian land and body. This affective sovereignty is molten – persistent, malleable, and inextinguishable: ready to erupt at any moment. Although they might be more literally limestone or dolomite, the stones that Palestinians hurl at Israeli soldiers are an igneous rock – they are molten sovereignty hardened upon erupting into resistance.
‘If there’s no stones, we strike with the heart’, Qalandiya, Palestine. Photo taken by author.
Figure 6 Long description
A concrete wall features graffiti art. The graffiti includes the text 'What 20 September?', 'Will change', and 'No peace'. There is a drawing of a person with a slingshot loaded with a heart. Additional text reads 'SINDE', 'FOR HOUB', 'Lucha', 'Mon', 'ting Crimen', 'At Caparien usa', and over.
Conclusion
Theorising between the sites of Palestinian hip-hop music and graffiti, I have argued in this article that Palestinian feelings of belonging to and longing for Palestine can form an affective sovereignty with the land. That is, a Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty with Palestine is sustained, affirmed, and reproduced through feeling. Put differently, while an Indigenous Palestinian claim to the land is persistently denied through ongoing colonialism, this sovereign claim continues to be lived in the realm of emotion, as it does in the interrelated ideological and material realms. This affective sovereignty entails a range of constellations of feeling, including a belonging to the land of Palestine, belonging to a unified Palestinian people, and longing for Palestine from the condition of exile. These feelings form an ontological connection with the land that precedes, exceeds, and fundamentally disrupts Israeli settler state sovereignty. They form the molten core of Palestinian resistance, burning through Israel’s ‘iron wall’ of colonial violence. Signalling the impossibility of the Zionist settler colonial project, Israel has wholly failed to eliminate a Palestinian affective sovereignty with the land.
This is to say that there is something steadfast in the being of Palestinian – something that is utterly impervious to elimination. It is the pit in the olive, breaking the tooth of the one who steals the tree. It is the spine of the ṣabr, spiking the hand that tries to uproot it. It is the freshly picked za’tar spread out to dry on the dining room table. It is the bitter taste of halayūn, the sweet scent of fresh knafa, the feeling of earth between your fingers that you know you belong to. It is the refusal to forget, the collapsing of time from one catastrophe to another. It is the artist who finally returns through his creation, and its relentless re-inscription on the walls that imprison. It is the stitches that sew together a fragmented land, and the body reforged in the fires of struggle. It is the molten heart of Palestine that cannot be extinguished.
Video Abstract
To view the online video abstract, please visit: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210525100880.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Muhib Nabulsi and Lana Tatour for crucial feedback on an earlier draft of this article. I thank Chelsea Watego for teaching me the meaning of Indigenous sovereignty, through both actions and words. Big thanks to BISA Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial (CPD) Working Group convenors Sharri Plonski, Heba Youssef, and Jenna Marshall, as well as Cian O’Driscoll, Andrew Hom, Priya Dixit, and RIS colleagues for selecting this paper as the winner of the BISA CPD Early Career Paper Prize, providing important feedback and mentorship in the process. Shout out to fellow prize winners Alice Engelhard and Sara Wong, whose work it was a pleasure to engage with and learn from. I thank participants at the 2023 Palestinian American Research Center Conference and the 2023 BISA Workshop on the Emotional Politics of Social Movements for feedback on an earlier draft. Finally, thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their generous and rigorous feedback.
Open access
