Music as Solidarity and Resistance

Rapper and actor Clifford Smith, Jr. - better known as Method Man- was raised in the Park Hill neighborhood, and attended New Dorp High School in the 1980s. His 1994 debut solo album Tical was a critical and commercial success, reaching number four on the US Billboard 200, and number one on the Top R&B/Hip Hop Albums. The lead single Bring the Pain was released, along with P.L.O. Style.

Tical was released on November 15, just 64 days after the first of two Oslo Accords were signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The Oslo Accords were a pair of interim agreements aimed at achieving permanent peace within five years. As Omar Karmi wrote on the Accords' 25th anniversary, specifics around Palestinian freedom and self-determination on their own territory,

would be addressed over five years of negotiations that were to culminate in 1998. It was hoped that during this time, mutual trust and confidence-building measures would generate enough momentum to ensure that a final settlement would be unstoppable.
Not only did it not happen, it all turned out to be unworkable subterfuge.
Largely, the problem was the negotiating part. The process was deliberately set out with no sense of what a final agreement would actually look like... and it served only the stronger party [Israel].

In a video from 2015, writer and producer Sama'an Ashrawi spoke with Method Man on the origins of his song P.L.O. Style. Method Man explains that in the early 1990s, he frequented a neighborhood deli in Staten Island and studied the photos of children from Palestine's First Intifada that were taped to the walls. The First Intifada, from 1987-1993 was a spontaneous uprising of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank following the shooting death of seventeen-year-old Hatem al-Sisi in the heart, by an Israeli soldier. Photos of young children facing down one of the most powerful armies in the world, by throwing rocks at tanks inspired the rapper. “They [are] freedom fighters, and we felt like we were fighting for our freedom every day, too, where we lived at,” adds Method Man, making connections between the systemic oppression of the Palestinian people and police brutality against Black communities on Staten Island. During the Intifada, Israeli colonel Yehuda Meir, after being accused of ordering soldiers to break the limbs of resisting Palestinians testified during his defense in 1990, that the brutality was “part of the accepted norm in that period.”

St. George-based Leila Hegazy released her album We Are the Resistance November 1, 2024, nearly thirty years to the day after Tical. Hegazy created the album as a gift to the Palestinian liberation movement. "The image of children in Gaza holding a press conference outside Al-Shifa Hospital will stay with me forever," says Leila Hegazy, "something that I have struggled to fathom is how starkly different children’s realities are based where they are born. I watch friends in the US raise their children in comfort, while the children of Gaza plead with the world to simply let them survive. When I attend actions in New York, I think of these kids from Gaza, begging for the right to live. They are the heart of the resistance, because they are the future of Palestine. Everything we do in the worldwide Palestinian liberation movement is for them."

The 12-track album features some of her Tik Tok viral Palestine covers, as well as original tracks calling out imperialism, the War Machine, and more. Hegazy's favorite song to perform "is an original called Catastrophe which is about the 1948 Nakba [Arabic for Catastrophe] that made Palestinians refugees. Since it’s about the violent founding of the Zionist entity, you’d think it’s a depressing song, but it’s actually about the right of return, and hope for future generations. The last line of the song is 'inshallah you’ll be the one to tell your children yes', and I think that line speaks to the immense faith Palestinians have in God, and their own future freedom."

Initially released exclusively to Bandcamp, Hegazy pledged all proceeds directly to the Palestine Children's Relief Fund (PCRF). To date, We Are the Resistance has raised and donated in excess of $15,000 for PCRF. We Are the Resistance is now available on all streaming platforms.

Leila adds, "Resistance takes many forms. Music is the way that I resist, and I believe art is a powerful tool for shifting public consciousness. I’m not always physically able to be out on the streets, so I use what I have. We all have a responsibility to figure out where we have leverage or influence in society. That’s how change happens from the ground up."

Leila and her twin sister Omnia also perform as a duo named HEGAZY, honoring their late father's surname, and have performed for Plea's online concert series.