We’re excited to introduce our protest music series Resist / Track. In each installment we feature a piece of resistance music, exploring its message and the context surrounding its origins.

Our series begins with “Meen Erhabe” (Who’s the Terrorist?), a song released by Palestinian hip-hop group DAM in 2001. DAM is an acronym for “Da Arab MCs.” Dam also means “eternity” (دام) in Arabic and “blood” (דם) in Hebrew. The group was founded by Mahmoud Jreri and brothers Tamer and Suhell Nafar in 1999, shortly before the Second Intifada in 2000. In 2015 they were joined by fellow Palestinian indie musician and singer-songwriter Maysa Daw.

In the words of Mahmoud, Meen Erhabe is a “no-bullshit protest song.” DAM flips the narrative that Palestinians are terrorists in their own land, and instead questions the extreme violence of the Israeli occupying forces, calling them out as the real terrorists who destroy the Palestinian people and their homeland.

Who's a terrorist? I'm a terrorist?
How am I a terrorist while I live in my country?
Who's a terrorist? You're a terrorist!
You're swallowing me while I live in my country

The narrative that Palestinians, and Arabs at large, are by default “terrorists” exists to not only disenfranchise and exile people from their land, but to serve larger Western imperial interests. "Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region," said US President Joe Biden in June 1986. Meen Erhabe puts a magnifying glass up to the reality of this dynamic.

Meen Erhabe changes the narrative of Palestinians being seen as terrorists to instead being those that are terrorized. This dynamic exposed in DAM’s music feels deeply in solidarity with the Black American experience, especially as DAM has been inspired by rappers like Tupac and NWA. DAM’s lead rapper Tamer Nafar compared the connection between the struggles for Black and Palestinian liberation in a 2019 interview, saying, “We are the black people of, yani, the Middle East.” Yani is a pause word in Arabic, comparable to the word “like” in English.

Nafa continued, “Tupac, when he said, ‘It’s a white man’s world,’ spoke to me, because I live as an Arab in a Jewish world. Check it out: I’ve been growing up inside of Israel and that makes me a minority; not only by number but also by rights. They call me a citizen, and still the symbol of Israel is only for the Jewish. It’s like a club for white people, and black people are allowed only from the door of the kitchen.”

The connection between the two struggles also involves a close relationship between United States law enforcement and Israeli occupation forces, known as, “the deadly exchange.” During the 2014 Ferguson (Missouri) uprising after the extrajudicial police killing of 18-year old Michael Brown, Palestinians provided advice for protestors on how to deal with tear gas. One included a photo of a canister fired in Palestine that reads, “COMBINED TACTICAL SYSTEMS / 388 KINSMAN ROAD / JAMESTOWN, PA 16134.“

Since 1992, the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) has sent US police officers to be trained by Israeli Occupation Forces and vice versa. These same officers are responsible for aiding in the arrest of 61 activists protesting the Atlanta police training center known as “Cop City” on September 5, 2023. The indictments came under the direction of Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr, five of whom were charged for domestic terrorism.

Killing me like you killed my ancestors
Go to the law? Why bother, my enemy
You play the role of witness, lawyer and judge
Before the judge my end begins

While the term “terrorist” is leveraged with state backing to interrupt resistance globally, DAM shares a first-person perspective of how that term is weaponized for their people through Meen Erhabe.