Palestinian rapper Tamer Nafar’s politically-charged lyrics have sparked the same kind of controversy that may have made his hero Tupac Shakur proud.
Nafar, from the pioneering political rap group DAM, has touched a nerve with songs like “Who’s the Terrorist?” skewering what he and others say is discrimination against Arabs in Israel.
He has become a star among Israel’s Arab population and Palestinians, but Israeli Culture Minister Miri Regev, a former military censor with a combative style, is not a fan.
She has singled him out for criticism, accused him of incitement and sought to have one of his recent performances canceled, helping make him a target of rightwing protesters.
Speaking to AFP in a recent interview, the 37-year-old, who wears a hoody, baggy pants and simple gold chain, dismissed her remarks, saying: “Regev is nothing but a government mouthpiece spreading racist poison.”
Regev accuses Nafar of taking it too far, reportedly saying he “chooses at every opportunity and before every possible audience to come out against the idea of the state of Israel and its existence as the state of the Jewish people.”
She charges that some of his lyrics justify “terrorism.”
Arab Israelis like Nafar are descendants of Palestinians who remained after Israel was created in 1948, and they currently make up around 18 percent of the country’s population.
They tend to sympathize with the Palestinian cause and Nafar refers to himself as Palestinian.
Growing up in the 1990s in Lod, a mixed Israeli city southeast of Tel Aviv, Nafar listened to Tupac, the provocative American hip-hop star murdered in 1996.
“The imagery in Shakur’s videos was similar to our reality in Lod — how the police were chasing them in the streets,” he said.
In his song “Who’s the Terrorist?” Nafar says: “they call me a terrorist but I live in the country of my ancestors.”

Source: Arab News