“Israel will never be same,” we have all been saying for months. And that is undoubtedly true.
For as long as my generation is alive, Israel will be a traumatized nation. People’s trust in the army will take decades to return. The ultra-Orthodox world, as we saw yesterday, may find itself under great pressure to embrace Israeli-ness. Israeli attitudes to Palestinians, even among our left, are likely to be much more harsh and less trusting for years to come. Politics will almost certainly be different.
Nothing will be the same.
Over the years that we have been publishing Israel from the Inside, we have sought to illustrate how Israeli music is a window into the soul of this country; absent some appreciation of the world of Israeli music, it’s truly hard to get a feel for what Israelis are thinking and feeling.
So today, we share two songs (in addition to the one that we wrote about recently) that have emerged since October 7, and reactions to it.
The first song, “Noam’s Song,” is in the video above. Noam Cohen is a photographer and filmmaker who went to Kibbutz Re’im to document and take photos of the festival. Maor Ashkenazi is an Israeli hip hop artist and musician. The two of them wrote the song together based on Noam’s traumatic experience on that black Shabbat.
Because the song “popularizes” a way of talking about the horrors with which Israelis are still grappling, it has become something of a phenomenon on Israeli radio and elsewhere. The words are graphic and the images are painful — but the fact that they are now part of Israeli popular culture is one indication of how 2023 will be etched into Israel’s collective memory.
“Noam’s Song,” was written with the help of someone who survived the Nova festival. The song below is in part by someone who did not.
The name of the song is Eich Sarafti Gesher (“How I Burned a Bridge"). It was produced by two best friends, Tamar Samet and Ben Ronen. They shared a love for music and had recorded the song only for themselves, as a form of therapy after they had each experienced the painful end of a relationship with someone else.
On October 7th, Tamar was murdered by Hamas at the music festival in Kibbutz Re’im. Ben would later enter Gaza as a combat medic.
After being wounded and discharged from Gaza, Ben decided to put out the song, uploading it to Spotify and getting it played on Israeli radio. The song and Tamar’s vocals were a “souvenir” left to Ben from his “best friend”, Ben said.
The song has touched Israelis because of the simplicity of the lyrics, the beauty of Tamar’s voice, and perhaps because “how I burned a bridge” is a painful reminder that we don’t always have the time we imagine we will to repair things.
It’s the shock of our hearing these young people, writing a song about the most natural phase of young life and expecting many more years of friendship that they will not have, that I think has helped the song burrow its way into Israeli hearts.
There are many “burned bridges” in Israeli life today — so it’s not surprising that a song with that image at its core would prove so alluring.
Tomorrow, we will post our podcast with Yaakov Katz, former Editor-in-Chief of the Jerusalem Post and now Senior Fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute, who reflects on whether Isrsael is actually winning the war and whether the war is indeed winnable. As for the return of toxic Israeli politics, Katz has some very clear suggestions for what those seeking to topple Netanyahu should and should not do.
Impossible Takes Longer is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and at other booksellers.
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