Radio alHara: Loud and Clear

Born out of boredom during the first lockdown, Palestinian online station Radio alHara has come to symbolise defiance and hope amid the unimaginable horrors of the Gazan genocide, giving voice to creative resistance in Palestine and across the world

I​​t’s during a Zoom call with the core members of Radio alHara that the realisation occurs: they have never been in the same physical space together at the same time. “I don’t think it ever happened. There’s always one person missing,” observes Saeed Abu-Jaber, who runs a graphic design studio from Amman, Jordan. The others – Yousef Anastas, Elias Anastas, Ibrahim Owais, Yazan Khalili and Moe Choucair – are dialling in from the West Bank, Beirut and the Netherlands. Together, they keep the station on air 24 hours a day. Although Saeed’s comment is offhand, it nonetheless says something profound about the Palestinian online radio station – ostensibly based in Bethlehem (its name means ‘neighbourhood’ in Arabic) but fiercely international in scope. In spite of all manner of unimaginable restrictions, alHara has managed to create a space for community, creativity and resistance by transcending borders in a region heavily defined by them. 

On the day I speak to them, the crew seem generally relaxed and upbeat, and some of them are busy working. Saeed drops off the Zoom to take another call, and returns, smoking a cigarette, while Ibrahim is busy uploading the latest mix. They seem keen to talk, but constant preoccupations linger in the background: Israel closed its checkpoints near Bethlehem that same day, and less than two weeks earlier, attacked Iran – while around 50 miles away, the unspeakable violence of the ongoing genocide in Gaza continues. 

Though the members of the group are wrestling with these issues, the origins of Radio alHara are much more humble. Launched in March 2020, Radio alHara began as a means of staying in contact with friends – and staving off boredom – during the first Covid lockdown. “I’ve known Ibrahim since 2010. We used to throw these parties in Amman, and I love Ibrahim’s taste. Ibrahim was the litmus test for the party. If Ibrahim was happy, then I didn’t care about anyone else,” says Saeed, about the early days of their friendship. “And then we got to meet Elias and Yousef through a mutual friend. Ten years later, we’re still friends.” 

From the beginning, the project’s capacity to collapse borders was baked in, as was its breadth of programming: among its core members are architects, graphic designers, sound artists and creative producers, whose combined passions and creativity helped shape the station’s open-eared approach. At the outset, the intention was to have “a public platform to which people would upload content”, explains Yousef, who, along with his brother Elias and sound artist Ibrahim, is based at the Wonder Cabinet – an arts centre in Bethlehem, just south of Jerusalem in the West Bank. “It would be programmed on the radio without any kind of specific selection, arrangement of schedules or anything. It would just play as in a public space.”

Even now, Radio alHara dispenses with any form of archive and resists algorithm-driven playlists. Depending on the time of day, you might tune in to hear recordings of Palestinian folk music, an experimental ambient set or West African music from the 70s. “It’s not only music,” Yousef continues, hinting at the station’s wide array of sonic outputs. “There are discussions, podcasts, cooking shows.” When Crack tuned in on a Wednesday morning, the song Intazirne was playing by Lebanese jazz/folk musician Issam Hajali, an exile from Lebanon who had fled the civil war in 1975. This was followed by Space 1, a blissed-out composition by Caribbean-Belgian ambient jazz artist Nala Sinephro.

Radio alHara’s experimental philosophy emerged, somewhat paradoxically, from the limitations imposed by lockdown, which mirrored existing restrictions on freedom of movement created by the ongoing Israeli military occupation of the West Bank. Yousef recalls the first time he and other Palestinians of his generation experienced curfews: during the second intifada of the early 2000s. “At that moment, we had complete curfews, no one was out. You could go every three, four days to buy groceries and stuff like that. Covid was a similar kind of situation.”

Yazan Khalili, an architect and visual artist formerly based in Ramallah, Palestine, but now living in Amsterdam (and affectionately referred to as “Karl Marx” by Saeed, due to his impressive grey beard), speaks at length on how these restrictions spurred the group into questioning the traditional structures of radio. “For us, it was very much an experimental, open medium to play with,” he says. “[Introducing] different kinds of sound formats opened up the meaning of what digital radio could be.” He explains how the platform borrows as much from social media as it does from conventional radio, creating a participatory and communal format – particularly through its active chat room community, which breaks down the binary between producers and audiences. 

In the beginning, the music selection also tended to be less club-focused and more oriented towards the liminal moments that characterised so much of lockdown. Listeners were encouraged to submit mixes via Dropbox. “Lots of people would send these very hardcore club sets, but everyone was in their pyjamas,” laughs Saeed. “I would email someone and say, ‘Listen, forget what you’d play on a Saturday night, what would you play on a Sunday morning?’”

For Elias, lockdown felt like a “blank new page” and offered a perspective shift that would help guide the ethos of the alHara project: “We all started to question everything that we do creatively, but also the way we live, the way we spend money, the way we interact with each other,” he explains. “What was really rich at the beginning was that the station also tried to create a space where we could speak about these elements of daily life.” 

Then, in 2021, Israel intensified its occupation – which already had a stranglehold on much of Palestinian life – by annexing several parts of the West Bank. This included the forced expulsion of residents of Sheikh Jarrah, a neighbourhood in occupied East Jerusalem where many Palestinians had lived since the 1950s. Israeli courts issued eviction orders against hundreds of Palestinian families, demolishing some of their homes, while the families that remained faced intimidation and harassment by Israeli settlers. A protest movement in solidarity with Sheikh Jarrah sprang up across Palestine, but Israeli authorities replied with often lethal force. 

In response, Radio alHara interrupted its normal programming to broadcast nothing but static for 24 hours. Soon after, it transmitted the first of many programmes under the banner of the Sonic Liberation Front, the first of which was by artist Dirar Kalash and featured field recordings from protests against the evictions. Many similar collaborations followed under the Sonic Liberation Front banner, providing a space for artists from across the globe to show solidarity with Palestine. 

At this point, Saeed is keen to interject: “Lots of people come and say, ‘You’ve taken a political approach,’” he says, referring to the tendency of Western media to define Palestinian cultural production in narrow terms. “Living in the Middle East, it’s not up to you. It’s not like being in the West, where you take up politics as a hobby or you don’t. You breathe it every day.” Elias concurs: “Every decision we took for alHara wasn’t based on pre-established or preconceived ideas and objectives,” he says. “Responding to what we are going through in Palestine through this structure naturally made sense.”

“We discovered, while doing it, that it’s not that the content needs to be politically oriented,” adds Yazan. “Rather, the structure itself is the political act. It’s how the community comes together under certain titles, under certain kinds of approaches to broadcasting – to speak, to announce its refusal [of injustice], or its solidarity with Palestine.”

Four years on from these initial sonic interventions, Radio alHara continues to be a platform where Palestinians – often in collaboration with artists from all over the world – can freely experiment with sound. Yet, the violence and volatility of the occupation continues to have an impact. While the collective is still geographically dispersed, half the team has a presence at the Wonder Cabinet, where there is access to a radio booth and space for artists and producers of different disciplines to experiment and collaborate. It’s a vital creative centre, but one that is not immune to the grinding brutality of the occupation.

“At the Wonder Cabinet, we have different residencies and we invite artists from Palestine and from all around to come here and produce, play sets,” says Ibrahim. “But it’s not always easy to have them here, because of the situation. For example, right now, all the [Israeli military] checkpoints are closed and we cannot run anything in the Wonder Cabinet. We cannot invite any artists to come and play.”

Similarly, the Israeli military’s ongoing genocidal onslaught on Gaza has profoundly affected the team. “At the beginning of the genocide, we stopped the radio station for ten days or more, trying to think and figure out: what do we do?” says Yazan. One of their first responses was Learning Palestine: Until Liberation, a 12-hour continuous mix of songs, poems and discussions on the ongoing struggle for justice. It featured the voices of writers, activists and academics, including Edward Said and Angela Davis. 

International collaborations continue to play a vital role in using sound to draw attention to what is happening in Palestine. One of Radio alHara’s recent projects is a residency at the Wonder Cabinet featuring Venezuelan sound artist Julio César Palacio. “He created this sound sculpture that has a number of loudspeakers – these loudspeakers that we usually have on minarets of mosques,” explains Elias. “The sound tower he built, placed in the gardens of the Wonder Cabinet, is broadcasting specific programmes that are meant to be heard in the public realm and on the street.”

This is part of a project with Soundcamp, an arts cooperative based in south London that broadcasts field recordings from locations around the world and holds a residency on Radio alHara. “We’re working together on the creation of a sound programme that would align with the Sonic Liberation Front, where people send sonic content reverberating with what’s happening in Gaza,” says Elias. 

Yazan adds that their project can only play a tiny role in highlighting the catastrophe playing out in the region. “What’s happening in Gaza now, and what’s happening in the region, is definitely beyond what our radio station can deal with,” he says. But he remains optimistic about the potential for radio to open up spaces for solidarity. “With the accumulation of small initiatives like ours, things can begin to happen on a bigger scale.” Radio alHara may be small, but its impact is far-reaching. Grassroots, communal and border-defying, it remains an essential platform for Palestinians to experiment, communicate their own reality, and create an ongoing dialogue with listeners around the globe who share a love of music and sound.