From Sun City under apartheid to Woodstock during Vietnam, colonial and imperial regimes have always used leisure to mask brutality. Today, Israel’s pride parades, travel culture and trance festivals do the same.
Some 4,000 miles (6,000km) away from Gaza, in the mangrove-thick hills of Goa, young Israelis stamp the earth to trance music. Here, you will not hear mothers wailing over white shrouds. The genocide is elsewhere, and that is the point.
Across backpacker trails, from Andean valleys to Thai beaches, a similar scene plays out. Israelis call it “tarmila’ut”: a post-military “rite of passage” and a chance, as DJ Zirkin puts it, to “go insane peacefully”.
It is not just for hippies, either. A 2018 Israeli study called it “practically institutionalised”, estimating that about 50,000 travel each year after service. For a few thousand dollars, agencies advertise all-inclusive amnesia: discounted flights, kosher kitchens, and five-star hotels where Palestinians do not exist.
Two years after the Nova music festival massacre, and amid genocide in Gaza, the idea of “escape” has taken on a different meaning. Israelis want to travel abroad to escape the ha’matzav, literally “the situation” – an absurd euphemism that reduces occupation to inconvenience. For Palestinians, there is no escape: Gaza’s seas, skies, and crossings are sealed. While Israelis “go insane peacefully”, Palestinians are driven insane without peace.
