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. In the closely tracked decision over “HarbuDarbu,” YouTube’s trust and safety team consulted executives and reviewed internal and external expert interpretations of the lyrics, which include slang and clever phrases with debatable meanings.
The ultimate finding was that one of the song’s opening lines, which describes rodents coming out of tunnels, shows that the song is about Hamas (which regularly uses tunnels to navigate and hide in Gaza) and therefore does not qualify as hate speech, according to the sources. Employees who want the video removed say it should count as hate speech because, they contend, the lyrics urge viol.