Israel’s Rave Music Drowns Out the Sound of its Victims
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Israel’s Rave Music Drowns Out the Sound of its Victims
Originally published in our magazine’s hallowed print edition
2026<br>July/Aug
Details
For decades, a combination of EDM and drug culture have helped to numb the horror of occupation, apartheid, and genocide.
Zenab Huriyah Ahmed
filed 03 August 2026<br>in
Israel/Palestine
It’s 6:29 AM on a Saturday. A drum machine repeats the base four kicks on a four-beat measure; 1/2/3/4 for up to 150 beats per minute. EDM fans pour through the dance floor with tribal tattoos, piercings, and canopies dye-printed with Ganesha fluttering in the wind. Israeli DJ Yarin Illovich plays, under his stagename Artifex, to a crowd dressed in pashmina scarves, bindi forehead jewelry, and loose-fitting shalwar trousers. Dancers pulse to mushrooms, pills, ecstasy, LSD, DMT, and ayahuasca. Like other psychedelic trance festivals worldwide, it is a well-funded dream of Hindu paganism. Attendees float outside their environment and consciousness, smoking opium and building a Xanadu pleasure-dome near the desert stream of Wadi Nahabir. Suddenly: a massive boom. Sirens. Cracks. Pops. Hisses. And screeches. A universe is broken and remade by the warfare that nurtured it into being.
The Supernova Sukkot Gathering is a festival planned for the holidays of Simchat Torah and Sukkot, the Feast of Booths. It is an Israeli spinoff of Universo Parallelo, a Brazilian psytrance festival founded 23 years earlier. The festival takes place biannually in the state of Bahia in the depleted remains of Brazil’s eastern rainforest following slavery, genocide, industrialization, cattle ranching, and other intense colonization of the Bay of All Saints. “The legendary Universo Parallelo festival is set to land in our small but vibrant land!” proclaim the promoters for a group of scene regulars called Tribe of Nova in an official announcement, translated from the original Hebrew. “The meaning of the words ‘Universo Parallelo’ is ‘Parallel Universe’ in Portuguese, the native language of the land of Samba.”
The Israeli live music events company Nova promotes the Gathering and brings together well-known artists like Artifex, Astral Projection, and NoFace. It switches to the site near Kibbutz Re’im only two days before the event. In Rolling Stone, Israeli entrepreneur Yoni Diller explains that “it’s quite known that we do these events around the Gaza area. There’s a lot of open areas. Most of us did the army, so we’re not scared. It’s not our first time being in the Gaza area. It’s not supposed to be a dangerous area.” After the initial explosions, NoFace tries to calm the non-Israeli musicians backstage. “[We’re] used to having alarms about missiles. We didn’t think the shooting part would arrive,” he recalls. Qassam rockets smashing into missile interceptors is as common as bird calls in Khirbet Shalala.
Two squadrons of Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigades storm out, leading fedayeen fighters from every major Palestinian faction. The Gathering is spotted by militants originally deployed to the city of Netivot; they are surprised to find it and later head to Kibbutz Be’eri. Most festival goers flee, but others are caught in the crossfire. Some are killed by Israeli police and security forces. News spreads worldwide, as Palestinians raid installations, take hostages, fight through another smaller festival called Psyduck near Kibbutzim Nir Oz and Nirim, and pull back into the Gaza Strip with heavy losses. Shocked, the Israeli military rapidly mounts a huge bombing campaign in retaliation, later declared a genocide by a special commission of the United Nations. Earlier that year, the Tribe of Nova lingers on the concept of a supernova in its original announcement: “the explosion of a massive star, causing an immense burst of light in galactic terms. What can one imagine when these concepts intertwine during the upcoming Sukkot holiday?”
11 Points in the Naqab (77 years before 7 October)
Seventy-seven years and a day earlier, Kibbutz Be’eri emerges near the river Wadi Nahabir. Three years later, shortly after the ethnic cleansing of Palestine known as the Nakba, Kibbutz Re’im is founded near the Green Line with Egyptian-administered Gaza. The Green Line is drawn as part of the 1949 Armistice Agreements between Israel and several countries including Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. Article 5 of the Egyptian-Israeli Armistice Agreement says explicitly that the Green Line is temporary and “not to be construed in any sense as a political or territorial boundary.” Six years later, in 1955, Kibbutzim Nirim and Nir Oz are established on land that was the ethnically cleansed village of Ma’in...