Contemporary Arabic hip-hop exhibits many literary features, and scholars of Arabic poetics would be remiss in ignoring hip-hop lyricism as a popular literary phenomenon. This paper, part of a larger project on Arabic hip-hop poetics, examines the role of Arabic rhetorical devices in the 2019 album Sindibād el Ward by the Palestinian rapper Shabjdeed. Specifically, the paper explores salient instances of two classic markers of innovation within the Arabic literary-cultural tradition (turāth): ṭibāq (antithesis) and jinās (paronomasia or wordplay). In doing so, the project engages with larger, ongoing debates on high and low culture in Arabic, language ideology, and the aesthetic consequences of the Oslo Accords. The paper argues that these rhetorical devices serve two complementary functions. First, they situate contemporary rappers within an aesthetic of innovation that evokes the ʿAbbāsid-era badīʿ mode as well as the culture of rhetorical creativity that sprang up around it. Just as ṭibāq and jinās came to be identified with medieval literary innovation, the two features mark hip-hop songs as objects of craft. Likewise, discrete hip-hop “scenes” have developed around particular rappers and music collectives, bringing to mind the affiliative character of ʿAbbāsid badīʿ, in which the “in-group” adopted sartorial and behavioral practices that distinguished them from the uninitiated. The paper’s comparative approach will demonstrate how ṭibāq and jinās are yet again marking a flowering of poetic creativity. Second, the paper argues that ṭibāq and jinās in contemporary Arabic hip-hop function as they have throughout Arabic’s literary history, adding formal elements that broaden the text’s possibilities for signification. For example, the paper’s title references an instance of ṭibāq in Shabjdeed’s NKD GLG (“Misery, Anxiety”): “we drink fire to chill out.” The line’s antithesis (fire/chill) draws attention to the extremes of Palestinian life, and its reference to drug use (“drinking fire” could refer to consuming alcohol or cannabis) invokes a means Palestinians might use to cope with life under Israeli occupation. Throughout the songs under consideration in the paper, ṭibāq and jinās reinforce the sociopolitical commentary Shabjdeed and his collaborators make about the realities of daily life for Palestinians. In depicting Palestinians’ lived experiences, Palestinian hip-hop therefore has much in common with the origins of the genre, which began as an expression of the struggles of U.S. Black and Latinx communities.