A month after Hamas militants from Gaza attacked an Israeli music festival last October, the Hebrew rap duo Ness & Stilla premiered “HarbuDarbu” on YouTube. The military hype song celebrates Israeli forces waging war in Gaza and has drawn over 25 million views; its critics have termed the song a violent and hateful anti-Palestinian “genocide anthem.” “One, two, shoot!” its refrain thunders.
Despite demands from employees and activists for its removal, “HarbuDarbu” has been allowed to stay up on YouTube. Crucially, YouTube determined that the song’s violent rhetoric targets Hamas, not Palestinians as a whole, and that as a US-labeled terrorist organization Hamas can be subject to hate speech without penalty, according to three people involved in or briefed on content moderation work at YouTube but not authorized to discuss it.
Employees who want the video removed say it should count as hate speech because, they contend, the lyrics urge violence against all Palestinians by mentioning Amalek, a Biblical term used throughout history to describe Israel’s enemies.
Why is it when anyone criticizes Hamas, they’re accused of criticizing Palestinians?
I just watched the video because from reading OP’s post I was also confused about this - it’s 100% okay to criticize Hamas, but IMO the post didn’t do a great job at explaining why it feels like it’s actually targeting Palestinians as a whole.
They repeat several times throughout the video lyrics about Palestinian freedom. I think that’s the biggest reason I agree it should be removed. If they’d kept it very specific to Hamas and only talked about all the horrific stuff they’re doing, then that’s one thing. But it seems like they’re very focused on just general “Palestinian freedom” stuff, or at least they included it, which means that’s what it’s actually about.
From what it sounds like, the song isn’t “criticizing hamas”, it’s celebrating the mass murder and systematic starvation of an entire ethnic group of people. That’s fucked up. If isreal wasn’t systematically starving an ethnic group to death and systematically murdering journalists and people providing aid, there wouldn’t be much upset about isreal waging war against hamas, because then it would actually be war against hamas and not genocide of the palestinian people.
