Part of the Jewish world seems to be abuzz with a new plan for rewriting
Israel’s national anthem, “Hatikva.” Two left-leaning newspapers, Israel’s
Haaretz and America’s The Forward, celebrated Israel’s 64th independence day
with lead editorials demanding “an anthem for all.”
Haaretz editorialized
that “No Arab citizen who had any self-respect, political awareness or national
consciousness could sing these words without committing the sins of hypocrisy
and falsehood...Hatikva is not their song.”
Ten days later the
same newspaper, perhaps forgetting it had already run an editorial on this
matter, again noted that “Israel needs an anthem that represents Arabs and
Jews.” On April 27, the newspaper’s Independence Day issue again told the
country that “Israel needs national symbols all citizens can identify with.
Independence Day, like Hatikva and the flag... is not a holiday for Israeli
Arabs... they lost their land and national honor [on that day].”
The
Forward came out against Israel’s national anthem after its columnist
“Philologos” noted that “It’s unacceptable to have an anthem that can’t be sung
by 20% of a population. Permitting it to stand mutely while others sing is no
solution.”
It is interesting that The Forward acknowledged that it was up
to Israelis to decide, but the editorial also claimed “the conversation, like
the song, belongs to all of us.”
These editorials offer up a litany of
lies. First of all, in a classic colonial paternalistic mentality, that is all
too common in the way people from the West treat the Middle East, the editors
assumed they knew the hearts and minds of the Arabs.
The Jewish writers
spoke about Arab honor and “no Arab citizen who had any self-respect.” The
Orientalist always knows the Arab better than she knows herself, thus only the
non-Arab can propose an anthem that the Arab can identify with.
Of
course, no one asked “them,” because the conversation belongs to “us,” which is
a nice way of saying “the progressive elites know what is best for the
savages.”
But if we get past the sheer idiocy of Neshama Carlebach and
her friends at The Forward in New York deciding what is best for people sitting
in Eilabun and Rahat, we can see what else the doyens of delusion got
wrong.
Merav Michaeli, another well-meaning leftist, wrote that “in the
rest of the world an anthem is not holy. But in Israel apparently it is,”
because Israelis can’t see that their soul is not only Jewish.
In fact
many other national anthems include verses that seem hard to understand today.
The French sing: “Ye sons of France... to arms... the avenging sword unsheath.”
I can’t see the French in their coffee-shops unsheathing much more than a
baguette today, and yet they seem to be able to sing the anthem, “sons” and
daughters alike.
Ireland proudly displays her national anthem on the
government’s webpage. It speaks of “see in the east a silvery glow, out yonder
waits the Saxon foe.” No doubt, England is not the “foe” it was of old, and yet
they still love the anthem.
But if Israel’s anthem is not unusual in its
historical oddities that doesn’t mean there is nothing to talk about. The
decision by so many to opine on changing the anthem is a symbol, not of the way
the anthem is held up to be holy, but of the feeling that the country is fragile
and that anything about it can be changed at a whim. Israel is the ultimate
“opt-out” republic in this sense.
One Supreme Court justice doesn’t think
the anthem represents him, so he doesn’t sing it. One day an ultra-Orthodox
judge will surely feel the same way. And what of the Jews who came to Israel
from the East, rather than the West (the anthem speaks of “onward, towards the
ends of the east”). Jews from Yemen, Russia, Iraq, Syria, Iran, India could all
opt out as well. The radical Left doesn’t like the anthem, so it opts
out.
It should leave many wondering why it is that when the Left ran the
country, the ideological ancestors of the editors of Haaretz no less, and when
Meretz was in the government in the 1990s, why didn’t they create an inclusive
anthem? Why only now have they discovered that the Arabs “cannot” sing it? Why
do people assume that changing a word here or there is what would bring the
Israeli Arabs into the fold? When the anthem is sung at graduation at Israel’s
universities, half the Arabs do not stand. The ones that stand don’t sing the
words at all, as opposed to singing them and simply leaving out the bit about a
“Jewish soul.” It doesn’t seem as if changing a word will change
anything.
The country and society sent a message a long time ago that the
Arab minority could and should opt out of much of the state. Many applauded
Supreme Court Justice Selim Joubran’s doing so at a ceremony in February, and
many articulated for him how his saying a few words here and there would damage
his “honor” and “self-respect.”
The reality is that for many people in the
world the words of a national anthem are relatively obscure. How many Mexicans
truly believe in “war, war, without quarter to any who dare... may your fields
be watered with blood.”
One supposes that Mexican Jews stand at attention
when the anthem is played. Do they identify with the fields flowing with the
blood of the Mexican heroes of old? And yet they stand. They don’t opt
out.
Yet, ask so many Jews in the world if the Arabs of Israel can stand
and they will say “I’ve read they cannot.” They cannot stand because long ago,
in 1949, when the anthem was still being described as “the Jewish national
anthem,” no one expected them to. And to this day not only has the expectation
not changed, but in fact every group that feels a slight unease about any little
bit of the anthem has been encouraged to simply walk away from it.
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