It has become more common to hear oriental tunes on well-known Israeli radio stations, to the point that hearing Arabic songs performed by Israeli Jews is no longer a surprise as it was in the past.
In a park in the middle of a Tel Aviv neighborhood where most of the population is Jewish, a group of Israeli teenagers jogging broke the silence of the place with the din of a modern Arabic song, dancing to its tunes, chanting its lyrics, and posting recorded clips on the TikTok platform, where modern Arabic music songs that are far from politics are more popular among young Israelis than traditional Arabic music.
It is not surprising to find thousands of videos of Israelis, including male and female soldiers in the Israeli army, swaying to the lively oriental rhythm. During the last two decades, Arabic music has witnessed great popularity in Israel, whether in its classical aspect represented by the icons of Arabic music such as Umm Kulthum, Abdel Halim Hafez, Farid al-Atrash and Fairuz, or in the innovative aspect adopted by young Israeli artists, most of whom are of Eastern Arab origin known as (Mizrahi Jews), who immigrated from Arab countries, primarily Iraq, the Levant, Egypt, Yemen and North African countries.
According to the Israeli newspaper “Haaretz”, a third of young Israelis use social media networks, and 54 percent of them are active on “TikTok”, and learn Arabic music without an intermediary. How could it not be, when young Israelis find themselves on the Chinese platform that operates according to geography, exposed to more Middle Eastern content.
The percentage of Jews of Eastern, Asian and African origins, in addition to Jews who immigrated from Spain and Portugal (Sephardim), reaches 36 percent of the total Jewish population of Israel, which amounts to about 7 million and 200 thousand people.
Eastern Roots
With the arrival of Jewish Eastern immigrants in the 1950s, half of Israel’s population spoke Arabic, until the “Nation-State Law” passed in 2018 legally and officially weakened the status of Arabic, spoken by 22 percent of the population, and downgraded it from an official language in the state to a language with “special status,” after the law granted Hebrew a higher status as the state language.
Israeli research conducted by the Van Leer Research Institute in Jerusalem showed that the rate of knowledge of the Arabic language dropped from 25.6 percent among the first generation of Jewish immigrants from Arab areas to 14 percent among the second generation, and then to 1.3 percent among the third generation, despite the fact that teaching Arabic in Israeli schools from seventh to tenth grades remains mandatory.
According to a 2018 report by the Sikkuy Association, a nonprofit organization based in Israel, only about nine percent of Israeli Jews describe themselves as knowledgeable in Arabic. Because the culture of any people or nation consists of language, heritage, customs, literature, art and music, Israel has sought since its establishment in 1948 to melt the great diversity among the immigrants who make up Israeli society in an attempt to unify them within the framework of a single cultural identity and integrate them to produce “Israeli culture.” It has also tried to pressure Eastern immigrants in particular to speak Hebrew to facilitate integration into Israeli society. But after more than seven decades of their migration from the Arab regions, the Eastern Jews (Mizrahi) remained attached to the styles of singing in the Arabic language that were prevalent in the cultures they brought with them, and the Israeli melting pot did not succeed in distorting singing and making it Israeli, as every sect of Eastern origin remained loyal to singing in the languages of the countries from which they came. It is no longer strange for anyone who wanders in the popular neighborhoods of the major Israeli cities, which are usually inhabited by Jews of Eastern origin, to hear the sounds of Arabic songs and music emanating from the homes in these areas, which were not limited to the elderly who immigrated in the fifties of the last century and are still clinging to their cultural heritage. Rather, these people passed on the love of Arabic music and its various styles to their children and grandchildren who were born and raised in Israel itself, especially after Egypt and Jordan signed peace treaties with Israel, as the latter gradually got rid of the complex of the Arab-Israeli conflict that was a psychological obstacle to accepting the “language of the enemy.” Rebirth
Following the rise of voices of protest among the Eastern Jews that the share of Eastern songs was small, and that the prevailing singing had a Western character far from the tastes of the Easterners, officials at the Israel Radio responded to this trend, and organized between 1971 and 1982 the “Hebrew-Eastern Singing Competitions” festival. The festival was broadcast after it was recorded at the expense of the Arabic broadcast hours on Israeli television, which aroused resentment among the Israeli public, so in the following years it was broadcast on the Hebrew channel at peak hours and in a live broadcast.
The festival was subjected to large waves of objective and personal criticism on the basis that it perpetuates division and gaps within Israeli society, and does not present anything common in Israeli culture, which, according to them, is striving towards the melting pot that the first Israeli Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, declared in the early fifties. Observers at the time believed that this festival proved the truth of the saying that “Israeli society, which is composed of multiple cultures, is not united by a single culture.” In response to calls to stop the festival, the last concert was held in 1982, which made the Eastern Jews feel like strangers and rejected by the Jewish majority coming from the West and Europe (Ashkenazi) who dominate Israel.
In their book Popular Music and National Culture in Israel, authors Edwin Seroussi and Moti Regev point out that Ashkenazi society at that time “developed on the basis of two principles: the rejection of the culture of the Jews of the Diaspora, and the invention of a new Jewish individual, the Hebrew, or the Israeli.” However, this “new” Jew was not of Arab or Middle Eastern origin.
Cultural theft
Although the social and economic conditions of the Mizrahi did not improve much in light of the continued disparity between them and the Ashkenazim, a number of singers and musicians in Israel saw the Arabic language as a source of inspiration and a means of connecting them to their Arab roots, and Israeli singers resorted to many Arabic song melodies and combined them with the Hebrew language. After the Israelis called Eastern music “Mediterranean music” in 2000, and the rights of Arab composers were no longer reserved, a large number of Israeli musicians and singers began to copy Arabic songs and rearrange them musically while preserving some of the Arabic lyrics. Some Israeli composers even used Arabic music to compose Israeli lyrics, drawing a new line parallel to the Western-style “Ashkenazi” music that has dominated Israeli music since its founding.
