Next month, the band will take the stage with an unlikely musical guest: legendary "king of Mizrahi music" Zohar Argov. Unlikely, because Argov has been dead for 37 years. His appearance at the Revivo show will be via hologram. "The first of its kind ever to be used in Israel," the correspondent said with breathless excitement.
In 1978, he was tried and found guilty of raping a woman who refused to go home with him and spent a year in prison. Nine years later, while on furlough from a prison sentence he was serving for stealing a pistol from a police station, Argov attempted to rape the girlfriend of his friend and fellow singer Yishai Levi.
But it's not only dead singers accused of rape who are given a pass in mainstream Israeli society. All of which pale in comparison to Israel's most recent, and arguably most glaring, example of rape denial and apology: the Sde Teiman prison facility, where nine reserve soldiers were accused of severely sexually abusing a Palestinian detainee.
News of the allegations prompted many on social media to speak out in their defense, calling the soldiers "national heroes" and "completely innocent of any wrongdoing," even as the evidence began to mount against them. When it was discovered where the suspects were being detained, dozens of protestors, including Knesset members, stormed the base and entered the military court inside while soldiers attempted to stop them.
The one thing we have not done, or at least done enough, is look inward at our own biases. Alongside the worthy #MeTooUNlessURaJew social media campaign, it's time for Israel to collectively declare that rape is rape is rape, no matter the victim, no matter the perpetrator, and certainly no matter the use of angled lights and lasers to create a three-dimensional illusion that appears to move and exist in real space.