Shir LaShalom
Many of the other members of the ensemble who took part in the recording of the song went on to become well-known figures in the Israeli entertainment scene.
When the musical director of the Navy Ensemble, Benny Nagari, rejected that condition, Rosenblum passed the song on to the Nahal Band, with which he had worked some time previously.
In a similar vein, they seem to confront an ethos that memorializes fallen soldiers: 'Let the sun penetrate through the flowers [on the graves]' (תנו לשמש לחדור מבעד לפרחים tnu lashemesh lakhador miba'ad la prakhim).
The lyrics are critical of songs that appear to glorify the culture of war; for example, Natan Alterman's War of Independence era Magash HaKesef ('Silver Platter'),[3] and the songs Giv'at haTaḥmoshet ('Ammunition Hill', for which Yair Rosenblum also wrote the music) and Balada laḤovesh ('Ballad for a Corpsman') from 1968.
That line originally read שירו שיר לאהבה, ולא לניצחונות 'Sing a song to love and not to victories'.
Since the song was intended for a military ensemble, the head of the IDF education department at that time demanded that the line be removed.
In the end the IDF agreed to the replacement of the last word of the line, ניצחונות nitsakhonot 'victories' by מלחמות milkhamot 'wars', and the song was recorded and published in that revised form.
That message, apparently influenced by the hippie counter-culture of the era in which it was written, struck a chord with a large segment of the Israeli population.
Scopus Speech given by Yitzhak Rabin on accepting an Honorary Doctorate from Hebrew University (June 28, 1967).
[7][8] However, this was also the period–in the wake of victory in the Six Day War and before the trauma of the Yom Kippur War–when 'Israeli assertiveness' by a portion of the Israeli public was at its peak.
The left-wing Meretz party purchased exclusive rights to use Shir LaShalom in its 1996 election campaign from the composer and lyricist,[10] and changed the first line of the song from 'Let the sun rise' (תנו לשמש לעלות tnu lashemesh la'alot) into the party slogan 'Let Meretz rise' (תנו למרצ לעלות tnu leMerets la'alot).
At the close of a peace rally on November 4, 1995, those on the podium–Miri Aloni, the groups Gevatron and Irusim, and the statesmen Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin–led the crowd in singing Shir LaShalom.
