In Palestine Skating Game, rollerblading is resistance

At eight meters tall, the West Bank wall was first constructed in 2002 to keep Palestinians away from Israel. Apartheid, cast in stone. Unwitting to its architects, it soon became a compelling blank canvas for the occupied. The murals on the inside, isolated as they may be, carry Palestinian stories of permanence and resistance worldwide.

The wall is illuminated with paintings of murdered medic Razan al-Najjar, journalist Shireen Abu Akleh killed by Israeli snipers, and the recently released Ahed Tahimi, who was jailed at only 17 years old. Harrowingly, they are only a few of many tributes. The enablers of violence onto Palestinians do not escape their place on the wall; Netanyahu, Trump, and IDF soldiers pointing automatic rifles at children are the subject of comic ridicule. Yet inspiringly, floral graffiti declares the Palestinian intent to remain through rooting olive trees. 

This storytelling practice – the binding of protest and expression – has become a museum of the Palestinian experience over the past two decades.

The wall and the ​“giant international political art collective” behind it serves as one of the inspirations for Palestine Skating Game. Currently under development, the video game sees a cast of diverse skaters, some clad in traditional hijabs and thobes, to push through occupied land, evade gunfire and tag Israeli soldiers with pastel spray paints – all to the thump and drum of Arab dance music.

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Borrowing from the early noughties cult classic game Jet Set Radio, which pits pirate radio roller-skaters against Tokyo law enforcement, and Nida Manzoor’s We Are Lady Parts, a sitcom about Muslim women who form a punk rock band, the Palestine Skating Game prototype paints with psychedelia to express itself. It’s flashy, intentional, and oozes with admiration for the timeless skating and graffiti subcultures it owes itself to. 

The team recently hired a new developer and expects the next episode to be released within the next six months. A prototype has been in development for several years now, but has faced troubling circumstances due to Israel’s destruction of Gaza and bombing campaigns over Lebanon.

In the face of that, the game sets out to answer a question: what would a better future look like – could it be less awful? This has taken Justin*, the game’s creator who has wished to remain partially anonymous, far beyond the typical expectations of the video game industry.

“When I went to the West Bank, at first I thought: ​‘I’m not sure what I can do to help this situation,’” he recalls. ​“This one guy I stayed with, he’s been fighting this all his life and his sons, brothers and himself have all been to jail. He had several family members killed too.”

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Although Justin is yet to visit Gaza, he relied on the experiences of friends there to portray it as faithfully as possible. Israeli patrols suffocate the streets and surveillance cameras spy from rooftops. It’s austere and harrowing, but brought to life by the rebellious streaks of paint its people have left behind.

The developer describes it as a blend of Tony Hawk Pro Skater games and ​“ethnic strife”, and this idea reverberates in both the paint-splattered Bethlehem and global efforts behind its development. Part video game, part activism, the project is a defiant shred of cultural resistance – a marriage of musical culture, rollerskating rebels, and liberation seldom seen within the video games industry.

Palestine Skating Game currently involves six different developers and artists. Working from Gaza, Lebanon, and the United States, they were brought together by a sense of duty that bridged the digital and physical. In 2024, Justin travelled to the Gaza border to help colleagues evacuate a strip of land ravaged by indiscriminate bombing and famine.

Doaa* had previously been working on the project from Gaza, before a £30,000 round of fundraising helped her evacuate. She lost her entire family, with only her sister and nephew surviving after their home was bombed.

Wael**, one of the game’s current developers, is still in Gaza and a second fundraiser has been launched to support him. So far, over £5,000 has been raised to help him. Since Israel seized control of the Rafah crossing in May 2024, it has been impossible for him, or any others, to leave. Despite this, Justin is relying on ​“connections elsewhere in the Middle East” to try to help get Wael out.

• Read next: The Gaza breakdancing crew helping children escape the trauma of war

Wael explained his choice to remain anonymous, fearing he would ​“be terminated” by the IDF. We spoke during the most tumultuous period of the genocide in August last year, after Israel had announced plans for a full takeover of Gaza. 

“I’d heard they killed more than 20 coders from Gaza at the start of the genocide. The IDF has free rockets to use here and they were targeted specifically in their homes.” 

Wael spoke of software developer Haitham Muhammad al-Nabahin and engineer Nasma Zuhair Sadiq, a married couple who were both killed after an airstrike targeted their home in the Al Burejj refugee camp in 2024.

Mohannad Shbair – also a programmer and close friend of al-Nabahin – said that the family had been targeted on two separate occasions. ​“The first rocket took the lives of his daughter, son, and sister. The second attack [two weeks later] killed him, along with his wife and parents.”

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Shbair’s own brother was shot and killed through a window in October last year. Bullets still regularly hit his apartment walls and bedroom windows, months after the ceasefire. He claimed that the IDF have fired at the solar energy cells powering his apartment, which houses seven people.

Between 2023 and 2024, analysis of news and social media reports has identified at least 65 programmers, engineers, IT experts, and technology academics who have been killed in Gaza by the IDF.

Genocide scholars have called this ​“eliticide” – the systematic erasure of cultural, intellectual and civic leaders who can influence and empower a repressed group.

Further attempts to get into contact with Wael have since failed – a symptom of the electricity blackouts and uncertainty of life in Gaza. After checking in with Justin to confirm Wael safety, his response was curt and sharply padded with the reality of life in Gaza: ​“He’s alive for now.”

Wael has been charging his laptop with solar panels and saves electricity where he can for contributions to the game. Despite this, he’s been unable to make frequent commitments to the project. ​“It’s just a matter of how much energy he has. He’s only able to work whenever he can, but if we do find an NGO that we can work with that can simply convert money into more food, then that’s hopeful.” Justin said.

Israel recently barred 37 aid groups from delivering to Gaza, which Médecins Sans Frontières has said will have a ​“terrible cost”.

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Justin says that he has recently faced harassment for his involvement in the project. He aleges: ​“There was a former IDF soldier at a tech event that started filming me, from afar – he didn’t do it in my face. He just decided that the game was about killing Israelis and started trying to harass me online.” 

“The broader tech industry is not exactly very receptive to stuff like this,” Justin said.

The gaming industry’s biggest companies have played vital roles in the technology stacks arming Israel’s war machine. According to Guardian reporting, Microsoft’s Azure servers held terabytes of surveillance data crucial to Israel’s targeting of Palestinians from as far back as 2021, while Nvidia – whose obscene wealth began in the manufacture of gaming graphics cards – provided the AI chips for Elbit Systems’ ​“combat-proven” Lanius UAVs, known in Gaza as ​“suicide drones”, according to the company’s tech specs. Nvidia has been reached for comment, with no reply at the time of publication.

Justin says he wants the game to be seen as a symbol of hope, possible by ​“breaking through to the American mainstream” and the wider gaming community in particular.

“Arabic electronic music is the biggest part of this,” he says. The team recently received permission to use tracks from Farhot, an Afghan producer who has previously worked with Giggs, Kano, and Ms. Dynamite. ​“It’s quite reggae, feels very carefree, poppy, kind of jazzy. It’s a lot of different things all at once.”

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The game also features tracks from Hazy Noir, a West Bank-based duo whose music is rich with the sounds of the oud and ney, instruments fundamental to Arab, North African and Middle Eastern soundscapes. But there will be no in-house tracks. 

“I want it to be music that was not influenced by us,” Justin says. ​“Independently made, essentially. If it’s already being influenced by Western electronic, that’s okay. But I would prefer that we don’t tip the scales even more in that direction.”

The game’s creators see it as a way ​“to reintroduce the Arabic world to the West through music.”

Justin explains part of the reason why Jet Set Radio and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater have lived so long in the collective consciousness. ​“These games meant so much to people because the music was just so fucking good, they even influence people 20 years later.”

It’s here in the permanence of counterculture and how music binds an emotion to a time and place that Palestine Skating Game aims to etch itself into the mainstream. It’s the same idea found beneath the peeling layers of art on the West Bank walls, of creative resistance refusing erasure through whatever means necessary.

*Only first names have been used for safety reasons.

**A pseudonym has been used for safety reasons.

Amaar Chowdhury is a freelance investigative journalist. Follow him on X.]

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