Israeli Arab students resist national anthem
From yNet News comes this bit of Israeli bizarreness:
A storm broke out during a soccer game between high school students after Arab students refused to stand for the national anthem. The incident took place during the national soccer championship game between the Arab-Israeli Sakhnin high school and the Ort Bialik high school, which took place in Haifa.
When the national anthem played, the Arab students refused to stand, an act which was booed and condemned by the Jewish students. “It was a disgraceful,” said Guy Cohen, a student from Ort Bialik. “This is sports and there’s no reason that it should go off the rails. It almost got violent, but our teachers prevented us from confronting them,” he added.
The Education Ministry said in response that it “viewed the lack of participation among the pupils in singing the anthem with severity. The Ministry plans to take active steps against those pupils, citizens of the State of Israel, who chose not to honor the anthem.
The Jewish Voice for Peace email that reported this item also included HaTikva’s lyrics, which make the refusal of non-Jews to sing it perfectly understandable:
HATIKVA - THE HOPE
As long as deep within the heart
A Jewish soul stirs,
And forward, to the ends of the East
An eye looks out, towards Zion.Our hope is not yet lost,
The hope of two thousand years,
To be a free people in our land
The land of Zion and Jerusalem
I’ve noted here before that Gidon Elad, the Israeli who introduced me 40 years ago to the left-humanist form of Zionism I believed in for a time, strongly condemned Israeli policy toward its Arab citizens. Gidon was particularly insistent that Israel should change its national anthem to a nonexclusivist song its Arab citizens could sing.
I’m not a fan of national anthems in general, or of the other trappings of statehood like flags and uniforms and borders and the like, but this is more ridiculous than usual. The Education Ministry’s apparent intention to penalize Arabs for not singing about Jewish longing for land taken from Palestinians does more to point out the ludicrousness of Israel’s identity than anything else I’ve seen in a long time.
I wonder if this refusal to stand has happened before. Must have, I hope.
