Shirat hano’ar h’kommunisti: exploring the cultural dynamics and influence in the songs of Israeli-Jewish Communist youth in Palestine/Israel

Abstract

ABSTRACT Settler colonial projects are not only focused on the economy of a population and the formation of a settler state, they are also cultural undertakings whereby the settlers form their own settler culture. In this article, we explore the dynamics of Zionist settler culture from the point of view of its most radical critics, Jewish-Israeli Communists. We analyze the ways Zionist settler culture has been both absorbed and negated by BANKI (Young Israeli Communist League). In an analysis of musical practices, as well as the lyrics of Israeli pseudo-folk songs, known colloquially as SLI (Songs of the Land of Israel), we discuss how BANKI members created their own Israeli national non-Zionist singing culture, and formed a singing culture that was both part of, as well as distinct from, the Socialist-Zionist youth movements. In this way, we explore how, from the 1920s through the 1960s, Zionist settler-colonial culture was informed as well as co-created by Jewish-Israeli Communist youth.