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Old songs have new meanings after Oct. 7 — and new music helps the heartbroken
(JTA) — After a week of witnessing the pain and resilience of Israelis in war time I went to Jerusalem’s Yellow Submarine music club. I was driven by a prayerful hope to find some solace during the war, along with communion, with fellow heartbroken folks for whom words were failing.
The last time I went to Yellow Submarine was almost a decade ago. It was also wartime. I was visiting Israel for the summer with my family when conflict broke out with Gaza. Rockets flew, fear reigned and the heartache of war weighed heavily. That was the night I first heard the Israeli singer-songwriter Daniela Spector, an artist I never heard before whose lyrics and haunting voice are now part of my inner soundtrack.
From the very beginning of this war, music has been a lifeline for me and many others. I listen to Israeli radio — usually on Fridays to fill my house in suburban New Jersey with the spirit of a country where everyone shifts into some form of sabbath mode every Friday. But since the start of the war, I have been especially connected to Galatz, Israeli army radio, with its constant stream of news and talk shows and its sister music channel Galgalatz.
Silly pop songs take on deep meaning when requested by someone from the front lines, or by their girlfriend or boyfriend back home, or their kid who loves to sing that song with them. Or how about the daily radio show “Habaita” — “Come Home” — which plays the favorite songs of the kidnapped? Some of the songs have become ubiquitous because of their use in videos showing the reunion of soldiers and their families, a bright spot in a country with so much darkness.
I returned to Israel this month as an organizer of the Jewish Studies Scholars Faculty Solidarity Mission. I hadn’t heard of the artist performing when I went back to the club, hoping for another night of surprises and of words and music that could take me somewhere deep. It was Sivan Talmor’s first performance since Oct. 7, and she spoke to my heart, sharing the cliché that is a cliché because it’s true: Old songs have new meanings now.
Throughout the show she was funny, she overshared and was vulnerable. She told us about her husband who was away on reserve duty, how she took her two kids and moved in with a friend whose husband is also fighting. One night, they took their guitars and went out to a park and began playing with friends. A crowd gathered and they sang some more. They sang the nostalgic songs of their youth — one of which she played with her trio at the Yellow Submarine.
Maragalit Tzanani’s 1986 hit “Naari Shuva Eli” — “My Boy, Return to Me!” — is about a girl waiting for her boyfriend to return. She waits at the bus stop all night long only to reach daybreak without him. Despite it all, the girl sings to her God, beseeching Him to watch over her boy. “Please, God, take care of him,” she sings.
This classic song of love and heartache sounds different now. I imagined that each time Talmor repeated the refrain about “his curls being coated with the dust of the road,” she was thinking of her husband, one day coming back from the war, his curls dirty, his body broken and ready for comfort. The crowd sang along with every word.
Talmor invited us into her own therapy session on stage. She requested a shot of arak from the stage and shared another story: A female reservist wrote to her saying that her song “I Am Not Afraid” was keeping her strong on her way to the front.
At one moment towards the end of the evening, Talmor prayed. I was happily surprised to see this artist who seems to belong to the tribe of free-spirited Israeli secularists, a tribe with deep roots in this miraculous, heartbreaking country, address her audience in prayer. She prayed for the return of the hostages, for the safety of the soldiers, including her husband serving on the front lines, and she prayed for peace in Gaza. Someone in the audience called out that her son was fighting also, and then another mentioned a loved one.
Talmor asked for their names, and she prayed that Ido and Oded and all of the soldiers and the hostages return safely. She prayed that the sense of connection felt throughout the country would not be lost, that the nation would not lose the realization that you can feel a bond with your neighbor without thinking the same way as him, that we emerge stronger from this crisis because of the power of our people.
Then Talmor played “Hof,” or “Shore,” which is something of a hit in Israel. A few days later, she shared on Instagram that her husband in Gaza managed to pick up a signal on his transistor radio and heard this song that she wrote about him, about their love, and for that moment they were together again.
At the beginning of the show Sivan told us that she used to feel most at home on an airplane and that now she knows where home is.
The Israel that I found throughout my travels and intense conversations was an Israel that is awakened, ready to help, to solve problems, to be there for each other. And to create their way through pain, loss and confusion. As one sign I saw prominently displayed in Tel Aviv — “United, anew.” After a year of tearing their society apart, Israelis are finding strength and vitality in coming together, in being there for each other and creating something new.
This trip to Israel was different. I saw more pain, and more togetherness, than ever before. And through it all, I was reminded that music is a story we tell ourselves when we have no words. Israel’s wars have always had songs that become closely associated with them. For me, Sivan Talmor will forever be a defining sound of this moment.
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The post Old songs have new meanings after Oct. 7 — and new music helps the heartbroken appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Why Does the Media Not Tell the Truth About Hezbollah’s Attacks on Israel?
Firefighters respond to a fire near a rocket attack from Lebanon, amid ongoing cross-border hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, near Kiryat Shmona, northern Israel, June 14, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad
Last month, the BBC News website published a report by the BBC Jerusalem bureau’s Lucy Williamson under the headline “Fires in northern Israel fuel demands to tackle escalation with Hezbollah.”
The following day, the BBC News website published another report by the same journalist on the same topic titled “Israelis using gardening tools to fight wildfires sparked by Hezbollah rockets.”
A couple of weeks later, that pattern was repeated. On June 19, the BBC News website published a report by Williamson headlined “Israel and Hezbollah play with fire as fears grow of another war,” which was previously discussed here.
Late on June 22, the BBC News website published another report titled “Unable to back down, Israel and Hezbollah move closer to all-out war,” which is credited to “Lucy Williamson, Reporting from the Israel-Lebanon border.”
If one assumed that the reason for the appearance within days of a second report on the same topic by the same journalist was the emergence of new information concerning the situation on Israel’s northern border, one would be wrong.
A considerable proportion of Williamson’s second report (which was also translated into Swahili) consists of interviews with people on both sides of the border: Israelis from Kiryat Shmona and Malkiya, and two residents of southern Lebanese villages.
Failing to clarify that her interviewee lives in a town described as one of the “bastions of strong Hezbollah support” where a strike against a Hezbollah command center took place in March, Williamson tells her readers that:
Fatima Belhas lives a few miles (7km) from the Israeli border, near Jbal el Botm.
In the early days, she would shake with fear when Israel bombed the area, she says, but has since come to terms with the bombardments and no longer thinks of leaving.
“Where would I go?” she asked. “[Others] have relatives elsewhere. But how can I impose on someone like that? We have no money.”
“Maybe it is better to die at home with dignity,” she said. “We have grown up resisting. We won’t be driven out of our land like the Palestinians.”
Readers may recall that just days earlier, another BBC report from southern Lebanon promoted that same “Nakba” comparison.
Similarly failing to note Hezbollah’s presence and infrastructure in Mays al Jbal (also Meiss al Jabal), Williamson continues:
Hussein Aballan recently left his village of Mays al Jbal, around 6 miles (10km) from Kiryat Shmona, on the Lebanese side of the border.
Life there had become impossible, he said, with erratic communications and electricity, and almost no functioning shops.
The few dozen families left there are mainly older people who refuse to leave their homes and farms, he told the BBC.
But he backed the Hezbollah assault on Israel.
“Everyone in the south [of Lebanon] has lived through years of aggression, but has come out stronger,” he said. “Only through resistance are we strong.”
Williamson fails to remind her readers that Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon 24 years ago, and that the only “aggression” has been in response to attacks by Hezbollah and other terrorist groups, such as the cross-border attack that sparked the war in 2006.
As in her previous report, Williamson portrays the events resulting from the Lebanese terror group’s decision to attack Israel on October 8 as “tit-for-tat”:
But as the tit-for-tat conflict grinds on, and more than 60,000 Israelis remain evacuated from their homes in the north, there are signs that both Israel’s leaders and its citizens are prepared to support military options to push Hezbollah back from the border by force.
Also, as in her own previous reports and in most other BBC content, Williamson fails to explain to her readers that according to UN Security Council Resolution 1701, Hezbollah should be nowhere near the border with Israel ,and that the UN’s “peacekeeping force” in Lebanon has failed to enforce that resolution since it was passed in 2006.
Williamson’s framing of the situation in the north of Israel includes the following:
The dangerous stalemate here hinges largely on the war Israel is fighting more than 100 miles (160km) to the south in Gaza.
A ceasefire there would help calm tensions in the north too, but Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is keeping both conflicts going, mortgaged by his promise to far-right government allies to destroy Hamas before ending the Gaza War. [emphasis added]
And:
Demands for political change are likely to increase when Israel’s conflicts end.
Many believe Israel’s prime minister is playing for time: caught between growing demands for a ceasefire in Gaza, and growing support for a war in the north.
In other words, Williamson’s framing ignores the fact that Hamas chose to attack Israel on October 7, and that Hezbolah chose to attack Israel on October 8, and almost every day since then. She erases the fact that Hamas has rejected multiple ceasefire offers in order to promote a narrative whereby it is Israel’s prime minister alone who is “keeping both conflicts going”.
Moreover, she tells BBC audiences that:
The problem for Israel is how to stop the rockets and get its people back to the abandoned northern areas of the country.
The problem for Hezbollah is how to stop the rockets when its ally, Hamas, is being pounded by Israeli forces in Gaza.
Williamson cites a statement made by the UN Secretary General on June 21:
Hezbollah is a well-armed, well-trained army, backed by Iran; Israel, a sophisticated military power with the US as an ally.
Full-scale war is likely to be devastating for both sides.
The UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, said it would be a “catastrophe that goes […] beyond imagination”.
Like the UN Secretary General, Williamson has nothing to tell her audiences about the Lebanese state’s decades-long failure to tackle the Islamist terrorist organization that has repeatedly dragged that country into conflict, and has nothing to say about the failure of the United Nations to enforce its own resolutions designed to prevent further conflict.
The BBC’s sidelining of UN Security Council Resolution 1701 and its whitewashing of the failures of the UN forces that are supposed to enforce it, did not begin in October 2023: that editorial policy has been evident for many years.
Now, however, that policy is being used to advance framing of a potential escalation after over eight months of continuous attacks on Israeli communities by Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations, as something that is the responsibility of Israel alone.
Hadar Sela is the co-editor of CAMERA UK – an affiliate of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA), where a version of this article first appeared.
The post Why Does the Media Not Tell the Truth About Hezbollah’s Attacks on Israel? first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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University of Toronto is granted an injunction to dismantle a pro-Palestinian encampment that has been on campus for two months
The University of Toronto has received an injunction to dismantle the pro-Palestinian encampment on its property. The 98-page decision from Justice Markus Koehnen of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice said that members of the encampment must take down the tents within 24 hours, by 6 p.m. on Wednesday, July 3. Toronto Police will have […]
The post University of Toronto is granted an injunction to dismantle a pro-Palestinian encampment that has been on campus for two months appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.
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Jewish Cemeteries Vandalized in Cincinnati, Montreal
Vandals in Canada targeted a Jewish cemetery. Photo: Screenshot
Vandals have targeted notable Jewish cemeteries in Cincinnati, Ohio and Montreal, Canada, sparking outcry and concern over mounting threats of antisemitism.
Vandals at Montreal’s Kehal Yisrael Cemetery placed memorial stones in the shape of a Nazi swastika on top of tombstones. Ones with the last names Eichler and Herman were targeted in the antisemitic attack.
Placing memorial stones on graves is an ancient Jewish custom to memorialize the dead. Jewish cemeteries oftentimes have stones nearby tombstones for mourners.
Canadian leaders decried the vandalism.
“It is absolutely abhorrent and revolting to defile the dead with swastikas,” Jeremy Levi, the Jewish mayor of a Jewish-majority suburb of Montreal, commented on X/Twitter. “This desecration at the Kehal Israel cemetery in Montreal is beyond contempt. [Canadian Prime Minister] Justin Trudeau, step aside and get out of the way so we can reclaim our country. May this Kohen’s neshama have an Aliyah on high.” One of the tombstones vandalized belonged to a Kohen.
The leader of the Conservative Party in Canada’s parliament and candidate for prime minister, Pierre Poilievre, lambasted Trudeau and denounced antisemitism. “We cannot close our eyes to the disgusting acts of antisemitism that are happening in our country everyday,” he posted on X/Twitter. “The prime minister must finally act to stop these displays of antisemitism. If he won’t, a common sense Conservative government will.”
Canada, like many countries around the world, has experienced a surge in antisemitic incidents since the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’ massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7.
Meanwhile in Cincinnati, vandals targeted two historic Jewish cemeteries this past week, toppling and shattering ancient tombstones — some dating back to the 1800s.
According to a statement from the Jewish Federation of Cincinnati, 176 gravesites in Cincinnati’s West Side were ruined “in an act of antisemitic vandalism.”
“Due to the extensive damage and the historical nature of many of the gravestones, we have not yet been able to identify all the families affected by this act,” the statement continued. “Our community [is] heartbroken.”
The Cincinnati Police Department and the FBI are investigating the incidents.
The destruction of monuments is the latest in a greater trend of antisemitic vandalism. In an incident over the weekend, vandals in Australia targeted war memorials dedicated to Australian veterans who sacrificed their lives in Korea and Vietnam with pro-Hamas graffiti.
A couple weeks earlier, vandals in Belgium defaced two memorials for Holocaust victims with swastikas and a phrase calling for violence against Israel. In Germany, meanwhile, at least seven stolpersteine, or stumbling blocks in the sidewalk meant to mark Jewish homes seized by the Nazis, were defaced with the message “Jews are perpetrators.”
The US, Canada, Europe, and Australia have all experienced an explosion of antisemitic incidents in the wake of the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7, and amid the ensuing war in Gaza. In many countries, anti-Jewish hate crimes have spiked to record levels.
According to the B’nai Brith, antisemitic incidents in Canada more than doubled in 2023 compared to the prior year.
The post Jewish Cemeteries Vandalized in Cincinnati, Montreal first appeared on Algemeiner.com.