Those of us who mourned the late John Lennon on the 40th anniversary of his murder have gotten used to his political image as a peace & love activist, which in today’s political jargon would make him a leftist. But 51 years ago, Lennon and his new bride Yoko Ono sang an oath to Jerusalem, in Hebrew. So there.
In 1969, entertainer and future MK Akiva Nof gained great fame in Israel as the only Israeli journalist to interview John Lennon and Yoko Ono on their honeymoon in the presidential suite at the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel during the week between March 25 and 31, 1969. The couple invited the world’s press into their hotel room every day between 9 AM and 9 PM.
Nof, who was studying in the Netherlands, not only interviewed the most famous couple on the planet at the time, in their bed but also taught Lennon to sing an excerpt from Nof’s song “An Oath to Jerusalem” which he had written for an IDF entertainment band. Then Nof, Lennon, and Ono performed the song in Hebrew, with the lines: “Jerusalem, we have all sworn / we will never leave you from here on and forever.”
Plant a tree in Eretz Israel for John Lennon (for Yoko make it a lemon tree?), we insist.