The Constitution, Law and Justice Committee of Israel's Knesset is discussing the possibility of changing the lyrics to Israel's national anthem, Hatikvah, so that it will be meaningful to non-Jewish citizens of Israel as well, particularly Israeli Arabs. The current anthem speaks of the historical yearning of Jews to be a free nation in the land of Zion.
In a July 7 article, Haaretz reports: "The debates were held within the framework of meetings on formulating a 'widely approved constitution'. The main proposal debated was to change the lyric 'the soul of a Jew yearns' to 'the soul of an Israeli yearns'."
A July 10 Haaretz article remarks: "The real surprise is that the person who led the discussion on the subject of changing the anthem is the chair of the committee, Michael Eitan, one of the hard-core members of the nationalist camp in the Likud. Although Eitan emphasized that he is not proposing practical solutions, afterwards he couldn't restrain himself. He said, for example that 'if we add another line, so that even an Arab citizen will be able to say 'the Jewish soul', but will feel that his own soul is also included in the enterprise that belongs to all of us, we have to be proud of that if we succeed'.... Eitan pointed out that the public debate 'will be about the identity of the State of Israel and not about the difficulty of getting used to a new version...' "
Although adopted by the 18th Zionist Congress in 1933 as the national anthem of the Jewish people, Hatikvah was not formally made the national anthem of the state of Israel until November 2004 when the Knesset amended the Flag and Emblem Law of 1949. A July 12 Haaretz article traces much of this background.
