Nothing will harm me

Haifa, November 17, 2023

I am crying again, deeply touched by this new production of a very meaningful song called "nothing will harm me". I want to tell you about it.

Who wrote it? A soldier called Erez Stark (21). Before going to a military operations, soldiers are asked to write their last words to their family members. The letters are delivered if they don't make it back alive. How dreadful. Erez wrote: "Nothing will harm me. Nothing….I made a promise to my parents and I can still hear my father's voice saying "If something should happen to you, there is no point for me to live on. If you are standing hear mourning for me, it means that I did not keep my promise". Erez gave his life in a millitary operation against Hezbollah.

Who is the female singer in the new production? Amit Mann (22), the paramedic of Be'eri Kibutz who was murdered by Hamas on October 7, 2023. Amit is a Hebrew word that means colleague. And what a friend she was. For 6 hours she was treating many of the wounded people from her Kibutz until she was murdered at the emergency clinic that she was manning.  Two months before she was murdered, Amit recorded the song.

Be'eri is a small community that on October 6 still had 400 people. It was founded by youth organizations (the scouts and the workers union) in 1946, before Israel was formed, and is located very close to Gaza. The Hamas terrorists invaded Be'eri on October 7, murdering more than 100 people. I looked at their photos and names now. Most of the ones murdered members of the community of Be'eri. Four were caretakers from the Philippines or Sri Lanka, one was a guest visiting family, and 8 were soldiers who gave their lives trying to fight the hundreds of terrorists. Until yesterday, 25 were held captive in Gaza by Hamas. Yesterday the Israeli Military operating in Gaza found the dead body of Judith Weiss (65) so now there are 24.

Who is the band singing the song "with" Amit? The band's name is The Mind Church (Knesiyat Hasechel). Their Soloist, Yoram Hazan, wrote the music and performed the song with his band in 2008, as part of a project of turning the last words of soldiers who died protecting Israel into songs.

A bit about Sderot. Sderot is the name of a small city close to Be'eri and close to the Gaza strip that since 2000 has been constantly under missile attacks from Gaza. In the past 5 years the farms nearby have been burned very often by incendiary balloons that contain burning materials and are trashed over the fence form Gaza to the Israeli side.

The band who recorded the original song and who arranged the "duet" after Amit was murdered is from Sderot. Sderot was built in 1951 and the people there are mostly immigrants or children of Jewish immigrants who immigrated to Israel in the 1950's to escape antisemitism. They were from Iran and Kurdistan, North Africa, Morocco, and Romania. In the 1990's additional Jewish immigrants joined from Ethiopia and the former Soviet Union, mostly from the Caucasia area.

Red Color -- is the name of the alarm that is sounded when people have to run and seek shelter because their area is under attack. This happened all the time in Sderot and Be'eri and the towns close to the Gaza strip. And Israel did nothing about it till it is now a huge tragedy. In 2018 I posted about a photography exhibition that featured a work about the women from Sderot. The work was called Red Color and shows the women running to shelter. I quoted there a sentence by one of the women who were interviewed. She said "You want to protect the children. But you can't; you don't know how".

Hear and watch the video of the song in its new arrangement from 4 days ago

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