The national whine du jour is “I have no other country.” The French have another country, as do the Swedes, Germans, Congolese and Indians. Only the poor Israelis, just them, have no other country, and the heart breaks for them. What a miserable nation it is, that has no other country, and this gives it the right to do whatever it wants because, after all, “it has no other country,” so hapless it is. The Palestinians don’t even have one country, but the Israelis lament that they don’t have a spare country. How terrible.
The beautiful song – Ehud Manor’s poem that Corinne Allal set to music – was chosen last week as Israelis’ favorite song in a joint poll conducted by Kan Gimel radio and Israel Hayom newspaper, for Independence Day. This dirge is sung at every demonstration and the title text now shines forth from the high-rise headquarters of a few big construction companies, their courageous contribution to the fight against the judicial coup.
The charming, talented and unforgettable Manor innocently wrote a belated elegy for his brother Yehuda, who fell in the War of Attrition in 1968, that was immediately adopted as a protest song during the first Lebanon War and has become the protest song of all times. “I won’t be silent because my country / has changed her face / I will not give up reminding her / And sing in her ears / Until she opens her eyes … With a painful body with a hungry heart / My home is here.” His poem is genuinely very moving, but the use made of it to serve the Israeli self-victimization propaganda is intolerable.
Israel has no other country, just like all the nations of the world, only they don’t whine about it. More than a few nations don’t even have one country. It is true that Nancy Pelosi, the former, longtime speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, has quoted from Manor’s poem on several occasions, including in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s dismantling of the constitutional right to abortion, and after her husband was beaten with a hammer in their home, but even Americans have no other country, and usually they don’t complain about it. Their country is enough for them.
Not so for the Israelis. Since they are convinced that their country faces a permanent threat of immediate annihilation – in this, too, they are presumably the only ones in the world who feel this way, a regional power with a super-army that feels itself in constant danger of destruction – they are convinced that Manor’s words have a special significance for them. After all, everything is different when it comes to Israel, different and special, not like all the other nations, ever since the people of Israel was appointed to be a light unto the nations.
Nearly a million Israelis actually do have another country, and their number is only increasing. The state refuses to provide official figures, but hundreds of thousands of Israelis have dual or even triple citizenship, and in recent years no trend has been trendier than that of obtaining an additional passport. In 2020 alone, an estimated 50,000 Israelis applied for a Portuguese passport. About 750,000 Israelis have emigrated since the state was founded, never to return. They, too, have another country. In 2017, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics, over 500,000 Israelis lived abroad. In other words, to a significant part of us, perhaps more than most nations, there is in fact another country.
But the problem with this lament is in the self-victimization over nothing, a genre greatly beloved by Israelis; haven’t the Jews suffered enough, and now they also don’t have another country. For a nation that conquered a country from another nation, dispossessed and expelled it from its country and left it bleeding, humiliated, without rights and without respect for 100 years already, it is one too many acts of chutzpah to complain that it doesn’t have a spare country, as it deserves. For a nation that has not yet learned exactly how to manage its single country properly, it is particularly presumptuous to request an additional one.
Let’s make do, then, with the one country, beaten and groaning; let’s fight for its moral character and not ask for another one. Let’s sing ourselves a different protest song at demonstrations. Another country? That’s the last thing we need.
Ehud Manor’s poem is very moving, but the use made of it to serve Israeli self-pitying propaganda is intolerable.