--------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Hilda Silverman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Hilda Silverman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 06:40:51 -0400
Subject: FW: Avnery on song scandal
Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
What a terrific piece this is! I haven't had time or psychic energy to
read
many of my e-mails thoroughly in recent weeks, but this one I think is a
gem, and wanted to pass it on. I learned about the "myth" of the Six Day
War when I interviewed a progressive Israeli friend for a radio show I
was
producing for a local Phila. college station some time in the
mid-eighties,
and thought it was incredibly useful information, and now this. . .
I actually don't know the song; but when I went to see Schindler's List,
I
was with a friend who had lived in Israel for many years and she
recognized
that the background music accompanying the scene at the end where, as I
remember it, survivors who had been saved by Schindler are depicted
placing
small stones on Schindler's grave is none other than Jerusalem of Gold!
Hilda
Uri Avnery
14.5.05
Death of a Myth
The uproar has been raging for two weeks so far, and is showing no
sign
of abating. Israel is shaken to the core - is it the postponed
"disengagement plan? Is it the killing of demonstrators against the Wall?
No, it's a song.
Like a devout Christian, Naomi Shemer confessed, on her deathbed, to
the greatest sin of her life: her immortal song, "Jerusalem of Gold", is
a
copy of a Basque lullaby she heard some years earlier from a Spanish
singer.
The way she told it, she had not stolen the melody consciously, but
had
absorbed it into her subconscious and taken it for her own. It was, as
she
put it, "a work accident". She also took pains to stress that she had
altered eight notes of the melody, so that, according to the law, she had
every right to the royalties she had been receiving for 38 years.
Good. Can happen to anybody. You see or hear something, it enters
your
unconscious mind, and when it later emerges you believe it's your own
idea.
But in this case, something more serious happened: several times in the
past
she was asked about the similarity of the songs, and she reacted angrily,
denying any resemblance and even attacking the questioners. But in her
letter of confession, addressed to a close friend, on the eve of her
death,
she admitted that pain of remorse had been gnawing at her guts, and had
perhaps caused her fatal cancer.
Up to this point, a painful but not very important story. A
songwriter
makes a mistake, her song turns out to be a plagiarism. Except that she
was
no ordinary songwriter, and this no ordinary song.
Naomi Shemer is a symbol of what is called, nostalgically, "the
beautiful Eretz Israel". She was born in a socialist Kibbutz on the
shores
of the Sea of Tiberias and celebrated the landscape of the country in
words
and music. Even when she married an extreme rightist and became an icon
of
that trend, leftists continued to admire her for her modesty, engaging
personality and the quality of her songs.
But the song was even more important than the songwriter. Not only
because of its quality, but also because of its extraordinary history.
Exactly 38 years ago, on the eve of the 1967 Independence Day,
Shemer
took part in an Israeli song competition. For this occasion she wrote the
song - lyrics and music - and insisted that it be sung by an unknown
young
singer. Just another song, just another festival. But the moment the
song
was heard in the hall and on the radio, something happened. It touched
the
souls of all who heard it.
Even then it would have remained just a beautiful song, if the
Six-Day
war had not broken out a few weeks later. The Israeli army conquered East
Jerusalem, the soldiers reached the Western Wall, a remnant of the
ancient
Jewish Temple. Israel was swept by the intoxication of victory, spiced
with
a semi-religious mysticism.
Overnight, "Jerusalem of Gold" became the supreme expression of the
national mood, the symbol of a victory that was seen as redemption, a
second
national anthem.
I myself saw in this an opportunity. I was a member of the Knesset
at
the time. I do not like - to say the least - our national anthem. It was
written more than a hundred years ago, and expressed the longing of the
Jewish Diaspora for the Land of Israel. It is a hymn of a dispersed
religious-ethnic community rather than the anthem of a sovereign state.
Even worse, more than 20% of the citizens of Israel are not Jews at
all, and it is not healthy that so many citizens cannot identify with the
anthem and the flag of their state. By the way, the melody of the anthem,
HaTikvah ("The Hope") was also "borrowed", but no one ever tried to hide
this. It is a Romanian shepherd's song (with a version appearing in The
Moldau, the symphonic poem of the Czech national composer Bedrich
Smetana.)
I thought that if I proposed Naomi Shemer's song as a national
anthem,
I might be able to build a consensus for the idea of changing the
existing
one. I was not happy with several nationalist phrases added to the song,
but
I believed that we could change that along the way.
I introduced a bill to this effect. The Speaker insisted I obtain
the
agreement of the author. So I met her in a Tel-Aviv Café. I thought I
detected a certain hesitation on her part, which I understand only now.
In
the end she allowed me to announce that she was not opposed to the idea.
The bill was never put to a vote, but throughout the years
"Jerusalem
of Gold" has enjoyed the unofficial status of a second national anthem,
and
especially as the anthem of the Six-Day War.
This is what makes the present uproar more than a scandal about a
song
and its author. "Jerusalem of Gold" has suffered the same fate as the
Six-Day War.
That war was preceded by three weeks of mounting, nerve-racking
anxiety, when almost all Israelis - from members of the cabinet to the
last
citizen - believed that the state and its inhabitants were in mortal
danger.
The armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan were poised - so it seemed - to
invade
its territory from three sides and eradicate it from the face of the
earth,
when the Israeli army attacked first, defeated all three and conquered
not
only the remainder of Palestine, but also the Sinai Peninsula and the
Golan
Heights.
Years later, it became clear to historians that there had been no
real
danger to the state, that the neighboring countries has not intended to
attack but merely to bluff, that Israel's victory had been no miracle but
the result of meticulous preparations, especially by the Air Force. But
the
myth survives to this very day.
During the fighting and the following days, it looked like a classic
war of defense. Nobody even considered a permanent occupation. It was
clear
that we would be compelled to leave the occupied territories very soon,
as
happened after the 1956 Sinai war. The question was who to give them back
to: The government and most parties were thinking about Jordan and Egypt,
while I and those who shared my ideas, including at the time several army
generals, proposed handing them over to the Palestinian people, so as to
enable them to establish the State of Palestine. Until that happened, it
was
believed, they would live under a "benign occupation".
Since then, 38 long years have passed. The "benign occupation" has
long
since turned into a brutal and ugly regime of oppression. The prophecy of
Professor Yeshayahu Leibovitz, that the occupation would corrupt us
through
and through and turn us into a people of exploiters and
secret-service-men,
has come awfully true. Nothing has remained of the "beautiful Eretz
Israel"
but a cloying nostalgia, of which Naomi Shemer was a standard-bearer. A
small and gallant state, progressive and (relatively) egalitarian,
respected
by the world, has become an occupying and looting state, hostage to
delirious settlers, full of internal violence and "swinish capitalism" (a
phrase coined by Shimon Peres, one of those most responsible for this
situation.) Throughout the world, the idea of boycotting Israel is
gaining
ground.
What looked at the time like a divine miracle now looks more like a
pact with the devil.
Israel is a country built on many symbols and myths. What could be
more
symbolic than the destruction of the myth of the Six-Day war, now
followed
by the collapse of the myth of "Jerusalem of Gold", that war's symbol in
song?
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