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‘Like the candle that mocks the darkness’
Leon Rosselson’s song The Ballad of Rivka and Mohammed draws an illuminating parallel between nazi war crimes and Israel’s 2014 assault on Gaza, says Robert AH Cohen

A NAZI soldier smashes the head of Rivka, a seven-year-old girl wearing her new red dress in the Vilna ghetto in 1942.

An Israeli soldier fires a shell onto a Gaza beach and kills Mohammed, an 11-year-old boy playing football with his cousins in 2014.

In songwriter Leon Rosselson’s dream, Mohammed and Rivka take each other’s hand and “leave this world of war” together.

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