frgdr.com Blog

War, A Rock Opera has been running for a while now at Tzavta Theatre in Tel-Aviv, but I had the pleasure of watching it for the first time just this week. I really liked the show, but above all I think it is a very important show to watch. Kobi Vitman, a young Israeli musician, started writing songs about his ordeals as a reserve infantry soldier during Operation Defensive Shield in 2002 and about battling symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder upon returning home. Dialogues joined song and accumulated to an all-Israeli rock opera. Just like stand-up comics excel in the phrasing of our mutual experience into funny, Vitman and the cast serve the audience an intensive dosage of articulate Israeli bitterness, which, when served in the form of rock tunes, appeals to the sense of utter despair felt by an entire generation of my peers.

Highlights:
Cast: Dvir Benedek plays an excellent IDF commander, with just the right amounts of arrogance and smugness he reminds everyone the army commander each one of us had in our time.
Music: Vitman wrote some powerful songs, some of which are bound to enter the Israeli pantheon of political tunes. Most of the lyrics are written tongue in cheek and appeal to a cynical generation all too familiar with the knee-jerk sentences Israeli political figures dish out oh so easily.
Band: Electric guitarist Ron Bunker should be singled out for praise. While the entire band plays awesome rock, Bunker’s solos brought the roof down. Bravo!

Lowlights:
Sound: As I have said before, this is my biggest pet peeve when visiting the Israeli theatre. You always have to strain your ears to distinguish the words from the music. If they can balance it well abroad, why can’t they do it in Israel?

Have a listen to Sleep My Child (Shan Yaldi), one of many songs that so eloquently convey the pathos used in the efficient indoctrination of the Israeli citizen in the acceptance of perpetual war. My ad-hoc translation of the lyrics into English is provided for your listening pleasure.

Sleep My Child (Shan Yaldi) - War, A Rock Opera - lyrics:

Here you can watch snippets. Here you can buy tickets.

Instead of discussing the issues that lead to the ongoing decrease in army enrollment, the powers that be have decided to embark on a campaign that aims to shame Israelis that did not enlist, and emphasize the superficial shared experiences that connect Israelis who did serve.
Having served in the IDF myself, I think I earned the right to say I find this campaign to be quasi-fascist on one hand and super-shallow on the other – an all out war on secular middle-class Israelis.
Only in a newborn democracy would the government dare to attack a portion of its citizens without ever opening the subject for real debate: in the commercials you would not find a single governmentally-exempt Orthodox Jew, nor a single sexually-harassed female soldier, nor a single MoD-ignored PTSD veteran.

Here is one of the TV spots of this campaign (mostly in English):

Here is a spoof ad that was recently released by a group of brave Israelis (with less than brave acting skills) in an effort to open the subject for debate (starts in Hebrew, continues in English):

Hat tip to Mizbala.