If your social media feeds were anything like mine last night, you saw images of Israel's invasion of Rafah alternating with images showcasing the glamour of the Met Gala. As many people have pointed out, it was a dystopian and alienating time to be scrolling. That's why it was particularly meaningful when, just before 7 p.m., Macklemore dropped the song and video for "Hind's Hall," a bolder pro-Palestine statement than any other mainstream musician has yet offered.
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The rapper of “Same Love” fame dropped “Hind’s Hall” on social media on Monday night, named for the building at Columbia University that protesters occupied and renamed for Hind Rajab, a six-year-old Palestinian child who was killed in January by Israeli forces along with two Palestinian Red Crescent Society paramedics who had tried to rescue her from the car where she was stranded, the only survivor after Israeli forces reportedly fired on the car they were in while fleeing Gaza City. Knowing that this was Macklemore of “Same Love” fame, a famously corny LGBTQ+-rights anthem, my expectations were tepid.
But I needn’t have worried; the new Macklemore song lives up to its intention. With an instrumental that samples “Ana La Habibi” by the Lebanese singer Fairuz, in less than three minutes the rapper succinctly pushes back against some of the most common arguments against pro-Palestine activism.
“What is threatenin’ about divesting and wantin' peace / The problem isn't the protests / it’s what they're protesting,” he says in the first verse.
And it turns out that when Macklemore was in the third grade, thinking that he was gay wasn’t the only lesson he learned that year, as he raps, “When I was seven, I learned a lesson from Cube and Eazy-E / What was it again? Oh yeah, fuck the police,” referencing NWA’s iconic protest song, “Fuck tha Police.”
On a more serious note, the rapper succeeds in contextualizing the violence in Palestine beyond the events of the past six months. “History been repeating for the last seventy-five / The Nakba never ended, the colonizer lied,” he says. And beyond calling for a ceasefire (which he also does in the song, in the instantly iconic bar, “I want a ceasefire / Fuck a response from Drake”), Macklemore ends the video with white text on a black background that read “Free Palestine.”
The song has yet to drop on streaming, but Macklemore has said that once the song does land on Spotify and other platforms, the money it generates will go to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which provides crucial support to displaced Palestinians. The release of “Hind’s Hall” was also particularly well timed, as Israel launched a military assault in the city of Rafah last night, just 24 hours after ordering roughly 100,000 already-displaced Palestinians to “evacuate.” Last week, the United Nations called a ground invasion in Rafah “nothing short of a tragedy beyond words.”
While it always gives me pause when a white celebrity is lauded for doing something that would often go ignored, if not vilified if it were done by a person of color or a Palestinian, I do commend Macklemore for doing what so many public figures seem to be afraid to do — use one’s platform to call attention to what Israel is doing to Palestine and its people, even if it is professionally risky to do so. And as the rapper pointed out in his nod to Ice Cube and Eazy-E, rap has been used as a vehicle for urgent social commentary since its inception.
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