Yossi Schwartz, ISL (RCIT section in Israel/Occupied Palestine) 11.11.2026
Members of the Joint List faction left the plenum of the new Knesset during the singing of the anthem of hope. Mansour Abbas, chairman of Ra’am, remained in the plenum. Abbas and Yaakov stood during the singing of the anthem but refused to sing.
Hatikva is a song intended to commemorate the Zionists’ ownership of Palestine without mentioning the Arab residents at all. And these are the lyrics of the racist song:
As long as in the heart, within, The Jewish soul yearns. And towards the ends of the east, [The Jewish] eye gazes toward Zion.
Our hope is not yet lost, the hope of two thousand years. To be a free nation in our own land, the land of Zion and Jerusalem”
In 1877 or 1878, Jewish drunken poet Naftali Herz Imber wrote a nine-stanza poem titled Tikvatenu (“Our Hope”) in Iași, Romania. Over the decades, the original nine-stanza poem was shortened and edited.
In 1888, a Jewish-Russian farmer and composer, Shmuel Cohen (Samuel Cohen), set Imber’s words to a familiar folk tune. The melody traces back centuries to a 16th-century Italian song (“La Mantovana”), which also entered Romanian and Moldovan folk traditions and was used by Czech composer Bedřich Smetana in his symphonic poem The Moldau.
The song quickly spread among early Zionists in Palestine. At the First Zionist Congress in 1897, Hatikva was sung and unofficially became the Zionist movement’s anthem.
At the Sixth Zionist Congress, when a controversial proposal to establish a Jewish autonomy in Uganda came up for debate, opponents of the plan stood up and sang Hatikva in a protest to reaffirm their ownership of Palestine (Zion).
The 18th Zionist Congress in 1933 formally and officially adopted Hatikva as the anthem of the Zionist movement.
When the State of Israel was established in May 1948, and most of the Palestinians were expelled in the Nakba, Hatikva became the de facto national anthem at official state ceremonies, though the new government did not immediately pass legislation codifying it.
On November 10, 2004, the Knesset officially sanctioned Hatikva as Israel’s national anthem through an amendment to the Flag, Coat-of-Arms, and National Anthem Law, legally establishing the first stanza and refrain as the official version.
Any Palestinian who sings this anthem is a traitor to the self-determination of the Palestinians. Any Jew who sings this racist Anthem is a racist.
Mansour Abbas, who stood in respect of this racist song, is giving up the right of self-determination and is deadly wrong to condemn the members of the Joint List who left justifiably during the singing of the racist song, but supporting a Zionist government led by the former head of the Zionist government will be a worse act.
It is no coincidence that Abbas told Radio Al-Shams: “The path we are working on now is cooperation between the ultra-Orthodox parties and Ra’am, on a safety net with the Joint List. We cannot elaborate more and talk about this issue.”