The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement does not forgive anyone’s mistakes. The boycott culture it has instated in recent years is not limited only to Israel but is affecting artists and musicians from the Arab and Palestinian world who try to stray from the fold as well. The verdict is known in advance to any artist who dares collaborate with Israel or perform in the West Bank. The result is the same: a general boycott with serious damage to one’s career.
The current victim of this uncompromising policy is the Palestinian-Jordanian rapper Msallam Hdaib, aka Emsallam. Hdaib has been scorned by BDS activists in the past and has apparently learned his lesson. Despite the anticipation of his Palestinian fans on both sides of the Green Line (1967 borders), Emsallam will not appear in Israel or anywhere in the West Bank in the near future.
“The persecution by BDS hurt him personally, and any further performance within the borders of Israel will cost him his career, wrecking everything he’s achieved so far,” says W., a source in Jordan’s music industry, in answer to my request to interview Emsallam ahead of his next round of performances, his first, in Arab countries. “Even if he wanted to, it wouldn’t happen, since it really would end his career.”
It all began in 2018, when Emsallam went against the current and performed in Haifa, as well as in the West Bank and the Golan Heights. His performances in Israel evoked the fury of BDS activists, who argued on the movement’s official Facebook page that such a move was worthy of a boycott by Palestinians and the Arab world, since he was normalizing relations with Israel. “Msallam Hdaib’s performances should be boycotted, with no one showing up,” they wrote, showcasing the kind of pressure they apply on Palestinian musicians in the Arab world to hinder them from taking part in normalizing relations with Israel. “Following attempts to deter Msallam from performing in territories occupied in 1948, he did not cancel his performances and did not express his commitment to abide by boycott instructions.” Since that incident, Emsallam continued to suffer from persecution by BDS activists. In his current tour, he has performed in Cairo, Beirut and Amman, but Haifa is no longer on the agenda.
Emsallam is not the first Arab musician to be targeted by BDS. Singer-composer Aziz Maraka, who performed in Kafr Yasif in 2019 and then interviewed by Haaretz, was subjected to a sweeping boycott in the Arab world. He hardly performs anymore, and his musical activity has been severely curtailed. In videos he published following the incidents Maraka claimed that the Haaretz reporter misquoted him throughout the article and casued him to be targeted as a result. But one of the reasons he was boycotted was the fact that he even spoke to an Israeli newspaper in the first place, regardless of what he said.
In contrast, Emsallam confronted BDS in the past, even posting criticism of the way BDS activists relate to Palestinian musicians who come to Israel or the West Bank, without checking exactly where their shows took place. “My aim is to break the political consensus upholding a cultural boycott which isolates Palestinians in the West Bank and in areas conquered in 1948 (i.e., Israel) because of the occupation,” he wrote.
Msallam Hdaib performing in a music video. Keife Records 2020 / Emsallam
The 30-year-old rapper was born in Amman, and grew up in neighborhood called Jabal Amman, in a family with many children. He began his career in music at the age of 14, focusing on hip-hop and creating visual art as well. In 2020, he completed a graduate degree in art at the Stroganov Academy of Design and Applied Arts in Moscow. After finishing his studies, he decided to remain in the Russian capital.
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Emsallam has produced three albums so far and was the first rapper to introduce trap into Arab music. In his texts, he frequently deals with the occupation and the fate of Palestinian refugees. He opens a window onto the lives of the third and fourth generation of Palestinian refugees in Jordan, their struggle of living in poverty, their need to form a national identity and their longing for self-realization that does not conform to the national narrative.
Emsallam speaks in a Jordanian dialect of Arabic, mixed with Palestinian words. His texts include many terms and concepts which are unfamiliar outside the worlds of the West Bank towns of Hebron and Jenin, adding to them cultural symbols from countries from all over the region. In his song “Because of that”, he incorporates the sounds of the Iraqi drum, common in Iraq and Syria, activating the nostalgia glands of young people who have emigrated or fled from these countries.
In an interview he gave six months ago to the Arab channel France 24, he talked about his life as a Palestinian living in Europe. “The struggle takes place not just in Amman. The September 11 attacks impacted young Arab men because of the way Western countries regard us. For two decades we’ve been paying a heavy emotional price because of our identity and ethnic background. It’s like a war of attrition. It’s obviously impacted me personally too. The Western view of me as an Arab percolates into me, damaging my self-image.” He also talks about the response of Arab countries that sow fear among their population in order to prevent terror attacks. “That attack has had implications that persist to this day. The intimidation and attempts to deter citizens from expressing extremist political opinions affects us.”
Leaving your identity aside
In his third album, “Dyslexia,” Emsallam takes his listeners into the soul of a young Palestinian who is fighting for his national identity, clamoring for freedom. In the song “Made in Mama”, he objects to the way a Palestinian patriot is defined. Among other issues, he objects to the importance many Palestinians ascribe to occupied lands, saying: “I don’t feel pity for the land orphans, only for the motherless ones.”
“After I left Jordan to go study in Moscow, I left the issue of my identity aside – something inside me was hurt and I needed a break from dealing with political issues,” he explained in a recent Marvellous Talks podcast interview. “I wanted to arrive at a safe shore, and my last album was a journey of self-healing after all the harsh experiences I had in Jordan and Palestine,” he said. It’s hard to miss the emotional and choked up voice when he talks about past difficulties. “I wanted to reach an equilibrium, and in making this album I underwent an internal change, which is why this album is very dear to me.”
Emsallam managed to breach the BDS wall once, but he won’t be back in Haifa or Ramallah again, even if he’d like to. His story raises the question of whether the boycott enacted by BDS on artists and musicians in the Arab world does more harm than good, especially given the fact that Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line have been under a cultural siege for decades. The struggle for ending the occupation by non-violent means, within Israel, is a legitimate one, but many people ask what happens when the boycott itself oppresses weakened minority groups, even when they are not part of the occupation enterprise.
This question has come up in recent weeks on the backdrop of an uproar in Arab and foreign media over the conduct of BDS, which presented a petition signed by 250 Arab intellectuals who were boycotting an exhibition called “Jews of the East,” presented by the Arab World Institute in France. The fierce opposition of BDS to the exhibition has evoked debates among Arab intellectuals, including Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury. In an article he published in the daily al-Quds al-Arabi a few weeks ago, he wrote that “the mission to revive Arab-Jewish culture is the mission of Arab intellectuals.” He explained that the culture of boycotts ignores other tragedies that took place in 1948, including those of Jews in Arab countries who were expelled from their homelands. “One must emphasize the fact that the tragedy of Arab Jews is the flip side of the Palestinian Nakba. When Palestinians were expelled from their land in 1948, Arab Jews were also expelled from Arab countries, and they had no choices left,” he wrote.
Khoury’s article reflects the complexity of the boycott policy operated by the BDS movement, undermining its single-minded and one-sided nature. The two cases, that of Emsallam and that of the “Jews of the East” exhibition, highlight the obtuseness of the BDS movement, which wishes to boycott other minorities besides the Palestinians who’ve suffered a loss. Khoury and others believe that it’s time the BDS movement re-examined its practice of boycotting other ethnic groups living under ongoing oppression.
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