Dreaming of ‘A Good Ending’

In one of my earliest memories, I am sitting on my grandmother’s lap gazing out of her living room window. Her tiny kibbutz house smells of freshly baked apple cake and mint tea. My grandmother follows my gaze towards the hills of Lebanon and tells me that our two countries are not friends. Perhaps she notices a concerned look on my face, because she hastens to add that I shouldn’t worry. Soon there will be peace and by the time I am 18 there will be no need for me to serve in the army.

It was a declaration, occasionally even a promise, made to many Israeli children of my generation.
I remembered it recently as I listened to Israeli singer Yoni Bloch, whose new song, A Good Ending (Sof Tov), has been difficult to avoid in Israel over the past few weeks.

A Good Ending has gone viral in Israel not simply because it is a catchy song, but because it is a revealing reflection of the current tension between hope and despair in Israeli society.

Bloch’s song is both optimistic and deeply tragic. On the one hand it depicts a utopian future, on the other the extremity and absurdism of his fantasy exposes the seemingly insurmountable obstacles it ignores.

The camera pans across two giant billboards advertising “a dream weekend in Tehran, $299” and “Discover Beirut, $199.”

The song and its accompanying video clip—largely generated by AI—present an imagined future in which Israel overcomes all its major challenges from the grand geopolitical conflicts to the snubbing of the country by Taylor Swift.

Bloch presents a series of positive consensus points that would likely appeal to a settler from Ariel as much as to a Tel Aviv liberal: flag-waving, teary crowds welcoming back all the hostages from Gaza; a CNN headline proclaiming “Peace in the Middle East”; the Israeli Defence headquarters in Tel Aviv turned into the “Yitzhak Rabin Water Park”?

Bloch imagines that Israelis will, “be able to travel wherever [they] want, and return home when the holiday ends,” as the camera pans across two giant billboards advertising “a dream weekend in Tehran, $299” and “Discover Beirut, $199.” He depicts an Israeli railway service to the Giza pyramids, and a hiking trail from Israel across the Levant.

Tal Becker, a legal advisor to the Israeli government who recently spearheaded Israel’s defence at the Hague, argues that in order for the nation to maintain its moral sanity it needs to constantly believe in “the permanent possibility of the presently unimaginable.” A Good Ending’s vivid depiction of this presently unimaginable future is precisely the moral ballast that this country needs.

However, place this vision under a microscope and cracks begin to appear. A Good Ending doesn’t purport to deal with process or policy, and it ignores the sacrifices that would shatter this Israeli unanimity.

The elephant in the room is Palestine. The video is awash with Israeli flags and blue and white balloons but there are no signs of Palestinian nationhood. The song avoids any mention of settlements, the West Bank or Gaza, beyond a reference to“returning the hostages from ‘there’ ”.

The cracks deepen when we look at the region more broadly.This is a good ending as envisaged by Israelis, but for many across the Arab world it is an abhorrent prospect. To understand the current situation, one must confront the uncomfortable reality that much of the Arab world would reject any rail service to Giza whose terminus is in Tel Aviv, and any transnational hiking trail that passes through the Jewish state. This is a critical, fundamental difference between Israel and its neighbours, and is a core reason for the intractability of the conflict. For Israel’s neighbours, Bloch’s future, with all its peace and prosperity and humanity, doesn’t constitue a good ending— it is a continuation of a Nakba.

Bloch’s utopian creation is also intentionally, charmingly parochial. There is no resolution for Yemenis starved and bombed by Saudis; for the Shia-Sunni conflict; for Yazidi sex slaves; genitally mutilated Egyptian girls; fwomen entombed in burqas by the Taliban. Even if it were possible to remove the Israeli conflict from the equation, not that much would improves in the Middle East. It would take much more than resolving Israel’s problems for Yoni Bloch to be able to hike from Syria to Iran.

I was four years old when I sat on my grandmother’s lap and looked at the Lebanese hills. I didn’t know it at the time, but as I sat there Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak was in Camp David, offering Yasser Arafat a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. We are further from that good ending today than we were then.

With any luck, in a few months my family, who have been displaced from Kibbutz Yiftah near the Lebanese border because of Hezbollah rockets, will be able to return to their homes. My cousin will be able to sit by the window with her four-year-old son and see the sun setting over the Lebanese hills, and the smouldering ruins of Blida poking over the mountain ridge.

But there will be no reassuring guarantees for this child. Israelis have come to the sad understanding that a utopian song and an AI video clip might be the closest we’ll get to a good ending.