I took a musical interlude from the dizzying Israeli news cycle last week and went to a performance of Koolulam. The Koolulam experience has long been on my bucket list. It’s a show which the audience creates rather than attends. Under the motto “Singing is believing,” Koolulam describes itself as “a social-musical initiative aimed at strengthening the fabric of society.” The ideals might be lofty, but it literally sounds like fun.
The name comes from the English “cool” and the Hebrew words kulam (“everyone”), and kol (“voice”), and “kululu,” the onomatopoetic ululation heard at weddings and other celebrations across Israel and the Middle East. The idea is to gather an informal choir, sometimes thousands of people, and over the course of the evening get them to sing in harmony in two or more voices.
Tickets sold out fast for the event I attended at one of the smaller halls in the Jerusalem Theatre, and all 460 seats seemed to be taken. The audience-choir was encouraged to introduce themselves to those sitting nearby. They seemed to cover a broad range of religious and non-religious and presumably more than one political persuasion. The youngest participant was a six-year-old, and the oldest were in their eighties.
The song for the evening was Koolulam’s version of Arkadi Duchin’s classic “Yesh bi Ahava” (“I Have Love”), made popular by Arik Einstein, the late iconic singer who provided so much of the soundtrack to Israeli life. The hall was divided into two voices; and under the enthusiastic guidance of conductor Rony Stav, who radiated positive energy, we learned to sing together.
Music in a post war Israel
I have been to several music events since October 7, 2023 – the black day of the Hamas-led invasion and mega-atrocity – but this was the first performance I’d attended since the ceasefire went into effect last month. For the first time in two years, there were no instructions on what to do if there was a rocket alert, and there were no prayers for the return of the hostages in Hamas hell in Gaza. With the return of the last 20 living hostages last month and the gradual return of most of the bodies being held captive, we were able to breathe.
It’s incredible how the fate of people we didn’t know personally affected us all. When the remains of fallen soldier Hadar Goldin were returned this week, 11 years after he was killed and his body snatched during a UN-brokered ceasefire, the country felt a wave of relief. That might sound strange to an outsider, but the family and nation needed closure and Goldin deserved the hero’s funeral that he received on Tuesday.
After the hostages returned from the terror tunnels, more stories of their ordeals in captivity started coming to light. One of the most haunting is the suffering inflicted on Rom Braslavski by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists who held him.
Braslavski, 21, had been working as a security guard at the Supernova music festival when he was abducted on October 7. In an interview with Channel 13’s Hazinor program, he bravely recalled not only beatings, starvation, and sexual abuse. After he refused to convert to Islam, he was subjected to another particularly sadistic form of torture. For three weeks, he was kept blindfolded and had stones pushed into his ears so he could neither see nor hear – alone, in a terror tunnel. It is unfathomable that he survived such physical and psychological torment without losing his sanity.
It’s a cliché that music brings people together, but there are those who actively want to prevent such togetherness and joy. A performance in Paris by the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Lahav Shani, was disrupted four times by pro-Palestinian rioters, at least one of whom lit flares and tried to set seats on fire – in a closed concert hall. Let the possible tragic consequences of that sink in. This is what “Globalize the intifada” looks like.
To its credit, despite the disruptions, the IPO was able to finish the concert to a standing ovation, concluding with the national anthem, a heartfelt “Hatikvah” – “The Hope.” France’s Culture Minister Rachida Dati, who had laudably rejected calls to boycott the Israeli orchestra, condemned the attack on the concertgoers.
Trying to set a packed concert hall on fire is just one of the recent serious antisemitic incidents carried out in Europe, North America, and Australia. Jihad is simultaneously being waged in Africa – in Mali, Mozambique, Sudan, Nigeria, and elsewhere. While the world obsesses over Israel’s efforts in Gaza to prevent another October 7, atrocities being committed by jihadists against Christians and moderate Muslims are going under the public’s radar.
Some of the useful idiots facilitating this are sitting in high places indeed. BBC director-general Tim Davie and the head of news, Deborah Turness, were both forced to resign this week following an unprecedented scandal. The internal report drawn up by BBC veteran Michael Prescott and leaked to The Telegraph detailed too many incidents of media bias for “the Beeb” to ignore.
The distortion by the flagship documentary program Panorama, which doctored a speech by US President Donald Trump to make it look like he was calling for the Capitol to be stormed, grabbed most headlines. But the Prescott report had other findings which confirmed what most Israelis and their supporters have known for a long time: that the BBC systematically spread Hamas lies while downplaying Israeli suffering.
BBC Arabic was shown to be a particularly serious offender. (I refused to be interviewed by BBC Arabic after they asked me to contribute to reports on the funeral of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah but did not want me to talk about the murder in captivity of Shiri Bibas and her young boys, being buried the same week.)
It has long been time for the BBC top brass to face the music and for a major reform to be carried out in the organization, which is funded by British license fee and taxpayers. As Jake Wallis Simons wrote on Spiked: “When activists in London, New York, Toronto, Barcelona, Paris and everywhere else march to ‘globalize the intifada,’ what they are saying is that they wish to overturn the democracies they live in...
“In its relentless bias against Israel, the BBC has been effectively lending its corporate heft to that same message. With every misleading piece of reporting sent out into the world, public opinion is hardened against the Jews. As has been the case for thousands of years, anti-Semitism is based on lies. The modern loathing of Israel is no exception.”
Unfortunately, it’s not clear whether the BBC can be reformed after so many years. The pro-Palestinian narrative pushed by the peculiar Progressive-Islamist, Red-Green alliance, has hijacked corporate bodies and minds.
Trump’s announcement this week that Kazakhstan was joining the Abraham Accords met with almost ridicule in some circles, which noted that Israel and the huge Central Asian country have had good diplomatic and trade relations for decades. They missed the point. As Israeli commentator-influencer Eylon Levy noted: “It’s about a Muslim-majority country saying they want to deepen those ties at a time when so many are pushing to cut theirs. The Abraham Accords... are about promoting intercultural dialogue, developing friendly relations, [and] bringing nations together through culture and science... While activists in the West are busy demanding boycotts, isolation, sanctions – Kazakhstan is saying the opposite... That’s why this matters.”
Adding to its significance, it also strengthens the alliance against the Russia-China-Iran axis.
Back at the Koolulam concert, two high school students from Texas, who were sitting in front of me, were interviewed by Channel 13 about their possible plans to make aliyah and make Israel their home. While they were talking, the crowd sang another Einstein classic, “Kama tov she’bata habayta” (“How good it is that you came home”).
We’ve been through a lot these last two years, and who knows what lies ahead? But you can count on Israelis to carry on singing. We will not be silenced. In the words of the song that brought hundreds of strangers together for a magical evening in Jerusalem last week:
“Between sanity and sleep,
Between childhood and old age,
They say there is still hope.
It is called love,
And we await its arrival...
There is love
And it will triumph.”