What a Culture Sings Reveals What It Worships

How can we understand two national cultures that have fought over the same land for 78 years?

Read what they wrote. Listen to what they sang. Study the words they gave their children, the heroes they placed at the center of their stories, and the emotions they chose to preserve after war.

I grew up in Israel, served in the IDF, and now raise Israeli children in New York. I sang these songs before I carried a rifle. I understood them differently after I became a soldier.

Israel’s national anthem is “Hatikvah,” “The Hope.” It expresses the Jewish longing to live as a free people in our ancestral homeland. Its lyrics contain no enemy, revenge, weapon, death, or military victory. Its subject is Jewish freedom.

The Palestinian anthem, “Fida’i,” speaks of the fire of weapons, a volcano of revenge, crossing borders, fighting wars, and living and dying as a revolutionary until Palestine returns. The fighter is the hero. Revolution is the mission. Revenge is written into the official national song.

These anthems give children their first language for understanding national purpose. “Hatikvah” teaches hope for freedom. “Fida’i” teaches permanent struggle.

My military service taught me the purpose of an army. It must defeat the enemy, complete the mission, and bring its soldiers home. An army is built to win. That is why “Shir LaShalom,” “A Song for Peace,” deserves close attention.

The song was first performed by an official IDF ensemble in 1969, during the War of Attrition. Israeli soldiers stood in uniform and urged their own country to pursue peace. The lyrics told the living to act because prayers couldn’t return the dead. The song became the unofficial anthem of Israel’s peace movement. Yitzhak Rabin sang it at the rally where he was assassinated.

Israel’s defining peace anthem came from inside its army while the army was fighting a war.

Imagine Manchester United players leading Old Trafford in a song calling for a draw with Liverpool while the match is still being played. The players are there to win. Soldiers carry a far greater responsibility. These soldiers used their uniforms and voices to declare that peace remained the national objective.

I could find no equivalent in the Palestinian resistance canon: no national song that accepts Israel’s continued existence, no celebrated poem that prepares Palestinian children to build beside the Jewish state, and no armed organization that gave its people a peace anthem with the cultural authority of “Shir LaShalom.” That absence deserves attention.

The songs written around the 1973 Yom Kippur War provide another test. Israel was attacked on its holiest day and lost more than 2,600 soldiers. Naomi Shemer’s “Lu Yehi” became the song Israelis carried from that war. It was a prayer for good news, safety, and the return of loved ones. Israel survived and sang about bringing its children home.

Egypt created a different cultural record of the same war. “Bismillah, Allahu Akbar” praised the army’s advance across the Suez Canal. “Rayheen Shayleen Fi Eedna Selah” sent men forward carrying weapons and pledging their lives. “Om El Batal,” “Mother of the Hero,” gave a grieving mother pride in the son who died for the nation. The music turned battle, sacrifice, and military glory into national renewal.

The literary canon carries the same values.

Yehuda Amichai fought in Israel’s wars and became one of our most important poets. He wrote about war through parents, lovers, soldiers, children, memory, and grief. He carried the battlefield into ordinary life and showed Israelis the price that remained after the fighting stopped.

Amos Oz served in the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War, then became a leading voice in Israel’s peace movement. David Grossman’s To the End of the Land follows a mother consumed by the fear that her soldier son will be killed. Grossman completed it after his own son was killed while serving in Lebanon. Israel placed writers who examined the price of war at the center of its literary culture.

The politically dominant Palestinian canon developed around dispossession, return, sacrifice, and resistance. Ghassan Kanafani defined the tradition as “resistance literature.” His position in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine connected his writing directly to revolutionary warfare. Mahmoud Darwish’s early poetry became protest songs and public declarations of resistance across the Arab world. The writer and the fighter served the same national mission.

Joseph Massad’s academic survey, “Liberating Songs: Palestine Put to Music,” traces how songs after 1948 called on Palestinians and Arabs to liberate the homeland. Later music followed guerrilla organizations and the intifadas. These songs mobilized their audiences. They presented armed struggle as the road to return.

National priorities become visible through the works elevated into anthems, military performances, school ceremonies, public commemorations, and shared memory. Cultural authority reveals the values a society wants its children to inherit.

The Israeli canon treats war as a duty that carries a terrible human price. Its soldiers sing about peace. Its wartime songs ask for loved ones to return. Its leading writers examine grief, doubt, responsibility, and the cost of power.

The Palestinian resistance canon places the fighter at the center of the national future. Its anthem speaks of weapons and revenge. Its literature makes resistance a duty. Its songs call for liberation through continuing struggle. The possibility of building beside Israel remains outside its central national story.

This is how I ask readers to judge the two cultures. Read their words after war. Listen to what their soldiers and children sing. Examine how each canon interprets the dead and what obligation it assigns to the living.

Israel sings about surviving, returning home, and ending the war. The Palestinian resistance canon sings about return through struggle. Peace will begin when Palestinian culture produces a national story in which its children can fulfill their purpose by living beside us.

Do something amazing,
Tsahi Shemesh