Viral Israeli Simon & Garfunkel parody calls on right-wing politicians to ‘Get Out of Here’
Ori Weinstock, who wrote the song, appears in the video with Lee Gaon and Gaby Sidon. Photo by YouTube
By Ilana Trachtman November 20, 2023
Friends from different parts of the world have all been forwarding me the same Israeli music video. It’s shot in black and white, and shows two men and a woman sitting in a bomb shelter with somber expressions. One has a guitar.
The tune is Simon & Garfunkel’s 1964 hit “The Sound of Silence.” The Hebrew lyrics eviscerate Israel’s right-wing politicians, with the refrain translating to, “Get Out of Here.” It’s by a trio of relatively obscure children’s theater performers.
Unlike a lot of the videos making the rounds on social media, this one does not celebrate Israeli unity, righteousness and resilience since the Oct. 7 terror attack by Hamas. Instead, it captures the fracture and despair many Israelis feel about the Netanyahu government.
And it has captured attention. The original post of the song on the X platform (formerly Twitter) has more than 800,000 views. Moshe Radman Abutbul, a leader of the pro-democracy protest movement that had convulsed the country before Oct. 7, described the song as “the truth” in a post on X.
תפעילו סאונד ותקשיבו לאמת - פשוט וברור, כולם הביתה! pic.twitter.com/P4asWfD3aa
— Moshe Radman Abutbul משה רדמן אבוטבול (@RadmanMoshe) November 10, 2023
Writing in Haaretz, the left-leaning political analyst Dahlia Scheindlin called “Get Out of Here” the “most precise metaphor” for life in Israel right now.
“The song isn’t an irreverent twist on a somber mood; it’s just somber,” she wrote.
“Bleak, trapped, angry,” Scheindlin added. “Humor and symbolism are dead for now. What’s left are the lyrics of ‘The Sound of Silence,’ warning that terrible truths emerge from the places of suffering and despair.”
The song was written by Ori Weinstock, who appears in the video with Lee Gaon and Gaby Sidon. Theirs are not household names — the children’s show in which they perform, Once a Child, has 324 followers on its Facebook page.
In “Get Out of Here,” they call out 21 members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government by name, using simple, blunt and rhyming language. It reminds me of the recitation of names of the dead each Holocaust Remembrance Day. Each politician, in turn, is berated: “Get the hell out of here.”
Some of the rhyming lyrics are punctuated by childlike name-calling — “the scaredy-cat,” “the liar,” “the dangerous,” “the idiots” — or taunts: “Go to a thousand, thousand hells.”
Like most children’s songs, there is not a lot of nuance. But there is little need for fancy wordsmithing: A 5-year-old’s vocabulary adequately captures the grim Israeli zeitgeist. It also echoes the level of discourse between politicians and activists today, who are similarly reduced to name-calling.
And the chorus hauntingly employs the same verbs used to describe Hamas’ actions on Oct. 7: “Get out of here,” the trio sings, “because you killed us/ you butchered us/ you kidnapped us.”
One leader conspicuously not named in the song is Netanyahu himself. But it’s clear who the singers mean when they speak of “the loser at the throne/ who tore out people to the bone.” He gets a whole verse.
“Who incites with every breath he takes/ This whole shit-show is his own disgrace,” they sing. “He can go to hell and take us off his hook/ He’s a crook/ Cause we have been slaughtered.”
Why do they name 21 Knesset members and not Netanyahu? Perhaps Weinstock wanted to draw a parallel to Lord Voldemort, villain of the most popular children’s book series in history, who is referred to as “he who must not be named.”
The singers declined my request for an interview. “We have nothing left to say,” Weinstock wrote in an email.
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