opinion
Meir Shalev, Yehonatan Geffen
Were Israeli Cultural Royalty
Gilad Halpern
O ver the last few months, since the far-right
government announced its plans for an
overarching constitutional overhaul,
Israel’s embattled liberal camp has experienced a
renaissance. Unprecedented mobilization on the part of protest-
ing masses, business leaders and the IDF vanguard
has left the government in disarray and, in the wake
of a seemingly endless string of electoral defeats,
invigorated the left to an extent that it had not seen
since the 1990s. The left may be dead, but it is not
quite buried yet.

But amid this process of rejuvenation and weeks
before Israel celebrated its 75th anniversary, the
Israeli left experienced two symbolic blows in ironic
proximity when two cultural titans died within days
of each other.

Meir Shalev, an eminent novelist, and Yehonatan
Geffen, an incredibly prolific journalist, author and
songwriter, were also prominent public intellectuals.

Both spent decades dabbling in current affairs as
columnists for the mass-circulation dailies Yedioth
Aharonoth and Maariv, respectively.

Shalev was 74 when he died on April 11. Geffen,
who died on April 19, was 76.

The symbolism did not stop at their premature
and almost simultaneous passing. It was, rather, the
final chapter of two lives that also began in great
proximity: Shalev and Geffen were born a little over
a year apart in the agricultural community of Nahalal,
the Camelot of the Labor Zionism movement. Both
were descendants of Zionist aristocracy: Shalev’s
father was the Jerusalemite author and educator
Yitzhak Shalev, and Geffen’s maternal uncle was the
legendary general-turned-politician Moshe Dayan.

Like many of their cohort, they were groomed for the
driving seat of the newborn state of Israel.

Their formidable life’s work, thus, was largely an
ongoing attempt to deal with the burden bestowed
upon them by their pedigrees. And this is where
they differ, despite the eerie similarities in their
biographies. Many of Shalev’s novels, especially the earlier ones,
were loving tributes to his lineage. They included “A
Pigeon and A Boy,” which is set during the War of
Independence and won the National Jewish Book
Award in 2006, and “The Blue Mountain,” set on a
moshav (an agricultural cooperative) shortly before
the founding of Israel. Though never overly senti-
mental and always strewn with a heavy dose of irony,
Shalev’s writings were adoring accounts of a bygone
generation, complete with their shtick and quirks and
foibles. His protagonists were shrouded in a certain
mythology, which Shalev did not labor to decon-
struct entirely; he was just attempting to humanize
and bring them down to earth.

But while Shalev looked up to his parents’ gener-
ation, Geffen blew a raspberry in their faces. He
was part of a tight cohort of musicians and artists
who grew up in Israel post-independence — a tribe
that included David Broza, Arik Einstein, Gidi Gov,
Shalom Hanoch and Yehudit Ravitz, all household
names in Israel. Geffen’s song “Could It Be Over?”,
about a timid and frail fallen soldier praised as a hero
against his will, was one of the first and best-remem-
bered anti-war songs in the Hebrew canon.

Geffen’s counterculture instincts were informed
by his great American heroes — notably the Jewish
iconoclasts Bob Dylan and Lenny Bruce — and
this admiration was in itself a jab at his upbringing,
characterized by vain parochialism masquerading
as self-sufficiency. Geffen felt more at home in New
York (where he spent several years) and Tel Aviv than
in the fields of the Jezreel Valley; his tools were not a
sickle and a plow, but rather a pack of cigarettes and
a bottle of whiskey.

Shalev, in his political writing, also advocated for
left-of-center politics that is sometimes derisively
The Israeli left experienced two symbolic blows in
ironic proximity when two cultural titans died within
days of each other.

featured on Arik Einstein’s 1973 album sporting the
deliberately ironic title “Good Old Israel,” exemplifies
the challenging relationship. From the opening line
(“They say it was fun before I was born, and every-
thing was just splendid until I arrived”), the song is
a mischievous and self-deprecating take on Israel’s
founding myths. Enumerating them one by one — the
draining of the swamps, the heroic battles for Jewish
sovereignty, the nascent Hebrew culture in the
pre-state Yishuv — Geffen sarcastically concludes:
“They had a reason to get up in the morning.”
More broadly, Geffen was bent on smashing every
aspect of the Zionist ethos. In defiance of the image
of the Hebrew warrior, of which his uncle Moshe was
the poster boy, Geffen was an adamant pacifist as
well as, famously, a very bad soldier himself. Having
been called for reserve service during the first
Lebanon War, in 1982, he was performing for soldiers
ahead of the IDF offensive on Beirut when he was
dragged off stage by the commanding officer for
calling on the troops to refuse. His song “The Little
Prince of Company B” (sung by Shem-Tov Levy),
described as “Ashkenazi”: moderate, civil, Western in
its orientation, calling to rally around a common good
— a type of political discourse that, as recent events
show, speaks to fewer and fewer Israelis. “The Israeli
public is moving more and more to the right. The
war in 1967 may have destroyed Israel,” he told an
interviewer in 2017. “We took a big bite that is now
suffocating us. All Israel has done since 1967 is deal
with aspects of the occupation. Israel has not been
dealing with the things I feel it should deal with. With
my political views, I am a minority in Israel.”
Shalev was a pastor of sorts; Geffen was sometimes
a Jeremiah and sometimes a court jester, and
often both.

They were representatives of two distinct streams
within the traditionally fragmented Israeli left; the
very same left that, despite the current resur-
gence, seems too often to have more streams than
members. ■
Gilad Halpern is an Israeli journalist, broadcaster and
media historian.

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