Can’t Stop the SlingShot: Hip-Hop Arises in Palestine

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We watch a group of five rappers prepare for their first show in their hometown. Dressed in requisite hip-hop style—football jerseys, baseball caps, and the like—the performers primp nervously and practice their rhymes, while they talk about their pre-show jitters. This could be any crew of kids in the world that’s recently found a voice in the global phenomenon of rap music. But the impact hits as we watch them enter a modest club to their friends’ greetings, and then hit the stage after one of them gets on the mic and announces: “We are PR, the first rappers from Gaza.”

2005

Ending the Occupation, Saving Israel/Palestine: Strategy and Morality

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I am firmly convinced that ending the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, if done by Israel in a spirit of generosity and open-heartedness, would be the necessary prerequisite for a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinian people. A plan to achieve that—the Geneva Accord—has defined many of the contours of what that peace could look like. The Tikkun Community was the first national organization to embrace and promote that Accord, though always with the caveat that it is not enough to have a legal agreement unless each side embraces a spiritual consciousness that affirms the humanity of the other, recognizes its own sins in having treated the other side disrespectfully, and seeks genuine repentance and atonement.