Israel National Anthem — Hatikvah

"Hatikvah" is, as its name says, a song of hope. It speaks of the "Jewish soul" that still yearns "within the heart", and of an eye that "gazes toward Zion" from the ends of the earth — the enduring longing of the Jewish people for their historic homeland.

Its most famous lines — "our hope is not yet lost, the hope of two thousand years, to be a free nation in our own land, the land of Zion and Jerusalem" — frame the entire anthem as the fulfilment of a two-millennia-old dream of return and self-determination.

Naftali Herz Imber wrote the nine-stanza poem "Tikvatenu" in 1878; the anthem uses a refined version of its first stanza and refrain. Around 1888 Samuel Cohen set the words to a melody based on a widely travelled European folk tune (also related to the theme of Smetana's "Vltava"). Adopted by the Zionist movement after the First Zionist Congress of 1897, "Hatikvah" was sung at the founding of Israel in 1948 and given official legal status in November 2004.

"Hatikvah" is deeply woven into Jewish and Israeli identity, sung at state ceremonies, Holocaust remembrance events and sporting victories. Its migratory folk melody, echoed in music across Europe, gives it a haunting, familiar quality, while its words carry the weight of centuries of longing.

"Hatikvah" ("The Hope") is the national anthem of Israel, one of the most emotionally resonant of the world's national anthems. The lyrics come from an 1878 poem by Naftali Herz Imber; the melody was adapted by Samuel Cohen.

It served as the anthem of the Zionist movement from 1897 and as Israel's de facto anthem from 1948, and it was formally enshrined in law in 2004. Both text and melody are in the public domain.