When I saw Hamouda ambling toward us in my car’s rear view mirror, I wasn’t sure it was the teen I had arranged to meet at the entrance to the Shuafat refugee camp.
He was a teddy bear of a guy, not the tough kid I was expecting from Jerusalem’s most down-and-out neighborhood, encircled by a towering cement wall. The only exit for its roughly 70,000 inhabitants was the Israeli checkpoint looming behind him.
Hamouda doesn’t remember the days when kids here could go fly kites on a nearby hill. But he says he’ll never forget waking up to Israeli soldiers over his bed when they came to arrest his brother during the second intifada, which broke out when he was 4 years old.
“I want to see the new generation feel the real life,” he says, “because when I was a kid I didn’t really feel free and I didn’t feel safe – even in my own house.”
Today more than 5 million Palestinians are classified as refugees – those who fled or were expelled in fighting with Israel, and their descendants. Shuafat is one of the worst camps, a lawless warren of concrete.
As we enter the camp, a rusted car frame is teetering over a congested street, where trash is piling up. Though this is part of Jerusalem, the municipality doesn’t provide services, and the PA isn’t allowed to. The only Israelis who dare enter the camp are security forces. Drugs run rampant. The only protection is a big extended family.
“It’s like a jungle,” says Hamouda. “If you’re strong, you’re going to live. If you’re weak, you’re going to die.… I really want to fix that.”
As we talk, I hear live gunfire nearby and flinch. Hamouda and his mentor, sitting in their recording studio, just laugh. It’s part of the rhythm of life here.
As a kid, he was “kind of a devil,” trying to survive in the jungle. But he has found a refuge in rap, and sees parallels between Palestinians and African-Americans searching for justice.
“We be the same,” says Hamouda, the only member of his family who speaks English, which he learned on his own – in part from YouTube videos of Drake and Juicy J.
He sees rap as a way to help people outside understand the reality in Shuafat, which doesn’t have a newspaper and is sometimes closed to outside journalists when Israel shuts down the checkpoint.
“Why should I be violent if I have something I can really do?” he says. “I am like the voice of the refugee camp.”
He has one main goal for the future: “I want people to feel hope.”
He doesn’t mean me. But I feel hope anyway. It’s one thing for diplomats in five-star hotels to talk about peace; it’s quite another to surmount the dire consequences of conflict with a smile and a sense of unflappable purpose.
“When I play music, I feel free,” raps Hamouda just before we leave the studio, occasionally reading from his crumpled handwritten lyrics. “I’m Hamouda, it’s nice to meet me.”
