Palestinian hip-hop collective DAM: ‘Music can’t stop a war machine’

It’s just after 10.30pm on a Friday night when, fresh from their packed-out sundowner set, Tamer Nafar, Mahmoud Jreri and Maysa Daw – AKA the Palestinian hip-hop collective DAM – squeeze into a cramped backstage cabin at Womad, the global music festival in Wiltshire. Theirs is, quite clearly, a confused and contradictory mood: adrenaline-filled, but downbeat and sombre.
“All of this,” Nafar says, gesturing around, “is confusing emotionally. We may as well confront it.” Face-painted revellers trickle past outside the window – funk music seeping through the prefab walls – as we prepare to discuss the situation in Palestine. Since the 7 October attack by Hamas, which killed more than 1,000 Israelis, over 40,000 Palestinians – the vast majority of them civilians – have been killed in Israel’s military offensive across the 25-mile-long Gaza strip, according to health authorities under the Hamas-run Gaza government. The UN has warned that half of the region’s population – 1 million – face starvation and death this summer.
“It’s a strange feeling,” Jreri says. “In a way, we’re privileged. We’re here while a large number of our people are being murdered daily.” Minutes earlier, these complexities were clear. Nafar and Jreri are seasoned performers; Daw is a charismatic presence, seamlessly switching from rapid rapping to note-perfect vocals. They are hype artists by trade, but there is pain in their performance. “The majority of western media dehumanises Palestinians. They don’t think of us as musicians or writers; people who love and dance and go to bars and restaurants. What we can do as artists is to talk through our music, and bring our art. Humanise ourselves. But even we can’t imagine what people in Gaza are going through.”
Nafar chimes in: “Even the ‘Free Palestine’ chants, and flag-waving we just had in the crowd; people cheering us simply for being Palestinian? It’s complicated.” For 20 years, the band fought to be recognised as artists first and foremost, not defined by their nationality. “But right now, I’d give it all up – all the art, all the music – to save one child being slaughtered 35 minutes from my home. His bandmates nod. “So fuck my art. Fuck my lyrics. Honestly.”
There are nuances, Nafar worries, that are being lost on international audiences. “In 1948, the Palestinian community was shattered to pieces. Some stayed, got passports and became, on paper, Israeli nationals. There were 300,000 then. Now, we’re almost 2 million.” It’s into this situation each of DAM were born. “Others went to refugee camps, the diaspora, the West Bank and Gaza. A lot of our families are in Gaza, but we have this distance. So we have no clear answer for you to sum up who we are, how we feel.” Gaza has been under Israeli blockade since 2007 – even before 7 October, access into and out of the strip was hugely restricted.
“I still get a thrill from performing, Daw adds, “but it’s muted, and comes with guilt and depression. Being on stage tonight? It does mean something to see reactions and support.”
They’re in the middle of a short, intense festival tour: France and Portugal these last two days, ahead of their Womad booking. “Tomorrow we go back to France,” Nafar says, “then a Belgium show. It’s an adjustment. No Palestinian art shows are happening at home, for two reasons. The party people aren’t putting on events because we are sad. People are dying while we talk. And the resistance [artists] aren’t getting approvals from the authorities, or are getting arrested.”
DAM’s first show on home soil since 7 October was scheduled for a month ago, in Jaffa, a mixed city. “Over the five- or six-day event,” Nafar says, “a load of artists selected by Jewish residents played. Then on the day of [our] show, the police made excuses about security, saying they needed to increase the number of armed officers present but couldn’t arrange it in time.” They were forced to cancel. “We found an underground venue. Instead of a 600-strong crowd, we did it to 70, on principle.”
That’s how DAM started out. The group formed in Lyd (Lod, in Hebrew) – a working-class city in the centre of the country. Nafar and Jreri are still based there. “It’s maybe 70% Jewish,” Nafar says, “30% Palestinian. It’s a hard, complicated place, high in crime and poverty.” Nafar started making music in 1999, alongside his brother, Suhel. The following year, Jreri joined. In 2012, Daw, a singer-songwriter, did session vocals with the band for their second album. In 2015, Suhel left – he’s currently a VP at Empire Records – and Daw joined full time. To date, they have released 100+ singles and three albums. Whether exploring discrimination, displacement and state violence – or widespread intra-Arab violence and crime – DAM’s back catalogue is a decades-long archive of their Palestinian experience.
DAM started out shortly after the Oslo accords, the interim agreements in the 1990s between Israeli and Palestinian leaders that marked the beginning of a hoped-for peace process. “We started to make music in English, then Hebrew. There was an Israeli hip-hop scene then. We played in Tel Aviv clubs, performing in Hebrew. And, to be honest, we were much better than most of the Israeli MCs.” Shaped by Tupac Shakur and the music of Algerian rap group MBS (Le Micro Brise Le Silence), DAM developed a unique sound that blended traditional Palestinian melodies, Arabic rap intonation and western hip-hop beats and baselines.
The second intifada from 2000 to 2005, a period of heightened unrest and violence, changed everything. “Before that,” Jreri continues, “we were [seen as] cool to Israelis, even when singing about social issues. Suddenly our shows and music were censored and boycotted. And at the same time, we began to understand our situation differently. Growing up Palestinian with Israeli citizenship in the occupation is complicated. You are a living identity crisis.”
Many Israel-based Palestinians hold Israeli passports, Jheri says, but are treated as “second-class citizens … You go to a school that doesn’t teach you about your history, your poets, your people. You learn it via stories from your grandparents, who don’t want you to be involved in politics: they know the repercussions. We realised who we were in the second intifada; that the scene we were in was against what we stood for. We disconnected from Hebrew.” Today, they only write and perform in Arabic and English.
Their output became more explicitly political. Their 2000 track Posheem Hapim me Peshaa (Innocent Criminals), recorded over an instrumental Tupac track, set the tone: “Before you judge me … walk in my shoes, and you will hurt your feet, because we are criminal, innocent criminals.” The following year their follow-up, Min Erhabi? (Who’s the Terrorist?), was downloaded more than a million times, its chorus posing the question: “How am I the terrorist when you’ve taken my land?”
“As Palestinians, we often want to make music not about politics,” Daw says. “Palestinians don’t wake up and decide to be activists. We document our lives, which – in every field: our work, our homes, our love – is dictated by politics. There’s no way around it.” This last year, she has struggled to write. “I’ve felt paralysed since October. I couldn’t get myself to create, or hold my guitar. How do you put what’s happening into words? It felt like anything I would come up with would be ridiculous.”
She is based in Haifa, a northern, mixed port city. “Now I walk down my own street, and see neighbours with stickers: ‘Finish them all.’ The frequency of fear controls everything. I think twice before saying anything in Arabic. It’s impossible to know when someone will flip, or if you’ll be reported.” Since 7 October, Israeli settler violence in the West Bank has increased, an escalation of the decades-long, state-sanctioned campaign to annex land and displace Palestinian residents. “And now they’re moving into the Arab areas of Haifa. I sound so privileged: it’s hard when you’re having dinner and an armed settler walks by, yes. But I’m not being bombed. It’s this loop I’m stuck in.” They sit, for a minute, in silence.
“When you grow up,” Nafar then says, “you think your art can change the world.” Recently, that belief has left him. “You realise, maybe, a $10,000 song does not compete with billions of dollars’ worth of American weapons. What the fuck I was I thinking?” He shrugs. “So now I think differently. Art can only document, for good or for bad; happy outcome or otherwise. Right now we’re in a second Nakba [or catastrophe, in Arabic – the term used for the mass displacement and expulsion of Palestinians in 1948]; a time of massacre. So that’s what I’m documenting.” Yes, he admits, that was painful to accept. “But if you cannot change the world, that weight is taken off. Music can’t stop a war machine, but it has a tiny role. Knowing that is freeing, in a way. I’ve never felt more creative.”
It’s a different takeaway, I suggest, from that of this evening’s crowd, who left galvanised and charged up, hopeful that what they had witnessed had meaning. Nafar looks up, then sighs. “And maybe,” he reflects, “it can mean something; a butterfly effect. Maybe people will somehow affect something bigger. Excuse the cliche, but there’s something Tupac said which made me fall in love with hip-hop: ‘I’m not saying I’m gonna change the world, but I guarantee that I will spark the brain that will.’”
Such incremental change remains his hope, as DAM regroup at home, then return to the UK for slots at Greenbelt festival and Shambala later this summer. “Only,” Nafar says, “I’m not sure I believe it [Tupac] any more. It’s hard to be optimistic when I feel guilty, not being in Gaza. It’s easy to say when your kids are safe. Maybe the sun is out there, but we’re stuck in the clouds. We’re sad, devastated and in mourning.”