This is It

Once in the late 1980s or thereabouts I read a vivid description by an American journalist - it may have been Thomas Friedman - about sitting in an event full of secular and probably lefty Israelis who were singing something with great fervor. When he asked he was told the song was Ein Li Eretz Acheret - I have no other country. He was deeply impressed.

Actually, there was a twist to the story he wasn't aware of (this is almost always the case with foreign reporters, even the best informed of them). It's a song of love for the homeland, yes, but a homeland which is changing, which needs to be woken, to return to its previous condition. So it's both a song of love and a protest, simultaneously.

It's a very 1980s song, in other words, for that was the decade when Israeli society came the closest to tearing itself apart since the early 1950s. There were multiplying fracture lines, and the arguments were vehement, and many of those singing the song with the greatest fervor were those who feared their beloved homeland was slipping away from them.

For all the shrillness of the argument that lead to Rabin's assassination in 1995, the dynamic was different, it wasn't as severe as the 1980s, and while this song was again sung fervently in the weeks after the assassination, other shirim were more important.

In 2004-5, as Sharon's government prepared to uproot 8,000 settlers, the opposite camp took up the same song with the mirror fervor.

Nowadays, however, it has settled to being what that foreign fellow thought he was seeing 30 years ago. Oh well: eventually he got it right.

Hebrew text.
English translation:

I have no other country
even if my land is aflame
Just a word in Hebrew
pierces my veins and my soul -
With a painful body, with a hungry heart,
Here is my home.

I will not stay silent
because my country changed her face

I will not give up reminding her
And sing in her ears
until she will open her eyes

I have no other country
even if my land is aflame
Just a word in Hebrew
pierces my veins and my soul -
With a painful body, with a hungry heart,
Here is my home.

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 will open her eyes

I have no other country
until she will renew her glorious days
Until she will open her eyes

I have no other country
even if my land is aflame
Just a word in Hebrew
pierces my veins and my soul -
With a painful body, with a hungry heart,
Here is my home.

With a painful body, with a hungry heart,
Here is my home.

Here's a video with the original version, posted in Russian, as sung by Gali Atari.

And here's a later version, by Gali Atari and Korin Alal, from an evening of commemoration for Ehud Manor, so sometime after his death in April 2005. Atari is older, but better, as sometimes happens.