dancing during a genocide.

an essay by Elyah Benson.

The other night I went to one of my favorite places to dance. I wore a black pleather bra with a big buckle across the front, a garter belt with matching thigh-high fishnet stockings, and four-inch platform boots that are falling apart at the seams from years of pumping around the city. It wasn’t the best night out but it was decent enough. I took enough molly for a few hours of fun before the inevitable depressive comedown. As I rolled, the music flowed through me with ease. My arms stayed in the air practically all night. My feet stomped to the deep bass of the DJ’s set. I looked around and saw a seemingly endless wave of bobbing heads, red from the lights above. I asked my friend to hold me tight. He complied. His grip felt like heaven as the drugs pumped through my veins. Everything was right in the world. I was exactly where I needed to be. 

Then my stomach began to bubble. Oh no. Here came the molly poops. 

I dragged my friends to the bathroom and waited in the longest line imaginable as I tried to think of anything other than the knots being tied in my belly. After about a twenty minute wait we finally made it to the front of the line. Then a stall door toward the back of the long hallway opened and I rushed in, pulled down my black thong, squat precariously over the moist seat, and released. 

Once I had done my business and got myself dressed back up I turned around to flush the toilet with my heavy boot and noticed for the first time a bold “FREE PALESTINE” scribbled across the wall in Sharpie between carelessly doodled blowjob jokes, phone numbers, and stickers advertising weed dealers. 

I put my boot back on the floor and imagined the writer’s smug smile as they admired their work. What did they think would be the result of this message? Were they looking to change someone’s mind? Did they truly believe that an otherwise anti-Palestinian raver would see their words and have some sort of dramatic Scrooge-esque revelation about how they’ve been wrong the entire time? “Maybe children don’t deserve to be bombed to bits after all.” Undoubtedly well intentioned, the writer of this message had illustrated exactly why most Americans, most westerners, are not prepared to confront what a free Palestine would actually mean for themselves and the world. 

On October 6, 2023, thousands of Israeli ravers danced in celebration of the Jewish holiday Sukkot just miles away from Gaza at Nova Music Festival. The party, honoring classic rave ideals of “friends, love, and infinite freedom,” was predicted to rage so intensely earlier that week that the organizers decided it would be extended an extra day into the weekend. Attendees reveled in the glory of drugs, community, and the otherworldly electric melodies that trance music promises, ignorant that just hours later, hundreds amongst them would be dead. 

The following day armed Hamas fighters stormed the grounds with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades that left upwards of 300 festivalgoers dead. These attacks were part of a larger plan against southern Israeli military posts and villages that ultimately left about a thousand civilians dead. This bombardment would mark, for much of the world, the beginning of an Israeli-Hamas war that still rages on to this day. But to mark this day as anything other than a symptom of the three-quarter-century-long occupation of Palestinian land by Israel is to ignore factual context that dramatically complicates this attack beyond mainstream zionist ideology that sees itself as a perpetual victim of gratuitously ceaseless Arab terrorism.

What conformist liberal news media outlets fail to report is that the grounds in which the music festival took place are located just a short three miles from the largest open air prison in human history, incarcerating not convicted criminals, but millions of innocent Gazans, most of whom are under the age of eighteen. Those same Hamas “terrorists”, who ostensibly hate Israelis with such little rationality that they would indiscriminately murder a thousand “innocent” ravers simply celebrating the pleasures of life, grew up in a concentration camp built purely for the purpose of giving those same ravers a utopian dreamscape in which their privilege relies directly on the subjugation of native Palestinians. In fact, the very land in which the Nova massacre took place was located directly outside the Re’im kibbutz which was established just a year after the commencement of the 1948 Nakba. Those innocent ravers only had an empty desert in which to dance because their ancestors had ethnically cleansed it to make room for their romantically communal, idealist settlements. Their joy and liberation did not exist in a vacuum; it is predicated on nearly eight decades of a systematic disintegration of Palestinian ties to land that is rightfully theirs. So before one can misrepresent those who sent bullets flying through those innocent ravers, it is vital to first ask, “What would you do if someone bulldozed your home then mockingly danced on the rubble?” 

Perhaps terrorists are not born; they are made. Why do we never give these so-called incendiaries the same benefit of the doubt we award to global military superpowers that have given us every reason to distrust them, who haphazardly murder in the name of profit and exponential expansion, who invest trillions on technologies that streamline said murder while the world starves, whose very existence rests on nearly a century of ethnic cleansing? We have lost all sense of international solidarity if we ever had it. Our fear of some faceless brown monster has blinded our ability to see that the evil isn’t some Arab other on the opposite side of the earth, but the same governments that claim with every fiber of their being that genocide is necessary to western security. Following their own line of thinking that sees an entitlement to exist and defend oneself as natural and compulsory, shouldn’t those Hamas fighters have every right to do whatever is necessary to take back what is theirs? Israel launched an ongoing genocide, that at the time of the publication of this piece has seen more than 70,000 dead, 170,000 injured, and millions displaced under the pretense that about a thousand of their citizens were killed two years ago. Why is retaliatory violence only reserved for those with the biggest guns? 

By this point I am sure many American readers are already defending themselves. “We, of course, are not Israelis and live nowhere close to this land. How are we to blame in all this? Why can we not dance guiltlessly?” And to them I must ask, “What would you do if someone paid for the bulldozer that destroyed your home then mockingly danced while you were left landless?” While we as Americans may not be as directly complicit in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, our names are surely on the check that pays for it all and the very logic of our western way of life justifies the Israeli occupation. We have all likely heard the repetitive talking point of conservatives and liberals alike that Palestinians have antiquated, traditional politics that do not align with American ideals of democracy, individual liberty, and equality so it is necessary that we bring them into the twenty-first century, forcefully or not at all. This line of thinking not only ignores the very real political desires of Palestinians (and Arabs more generally), but relies on centuries-old tropes of orientalism and racism that see brown people as inherently primitive and in need of saving. Our money is funding a project that requires the complete erasure of Arab existence. 

“But I still don’t see how I’m to blame in all of this. I can acknowledge that my taxes are used to fund this genocidal machine, but what choice do I have in that? In this day and age everything leads back toward some sort of evil root, so shouldn’t I dance in spite of it all?” To begin the conversation of this leftist nihilism we must first gauge how culpable a people are for the actions of their state. One may be in complete opposition to the decisions of their leaders, may even actively work against the goals of their government, but at the end of the day must still reconcile with the fact that they not only, willingly or not, underwrite those goals, but depend on them to inform their livelihood. Western forces are ultimately to blame for most of the violence in the Middle East (and the global south more generally). Are we not then, by our own metric, the criminals? The terrorists? 

We no longer have the means in which to share information about our activism, for example, without child slaves in the Congo mining cobalt for our phones and computers. We can share as many Instagram stories as we want to make ourselves feel better but ultimately it is those same technologies in which our whole lives revolve that create a demand for child slavery and other sinful truths. Are we willing to give up the luxuries so engrained in our everyday lives if it means, even for purely symbolic purposes, that we stand against the oppression of people globally that we will never see or meet, that will never thank us for our heroic act of going without a smartphone? If we, as dancers, as ravers, are as dedicated to liberation and boundless love as we say we are, we can no longer afford to dance simply to tend to our mental health, to forget about those evils.

Who are we to take drugs and stay up into the wee hours of the early morning laughing over bagel sandwiches, debriefing the night while a 5 year old Hind Rajab begs for help that will never make it, surrounded by the bleeding corpses of her closest relatives? Who are we to blow $200 dollars on tequila shots while a bag of flour is selling for comparable prices in Gaza? Who are we to enjoy a night out, to enjoy period, while the empire we call home decimates entire bloodlines with the press of a button? Who are any of us to smile, to laugh, while hospitals, schools, weddings, markets, playgrounds, roadways, homes are actively being destroyed in our name? If we are not willing to even consider these questions our commitment to anything spiritual that a party offers is simply imagined.

How then do we party ethically? If our access to luxury and nonproductivity relies solely on the subjugation of others, can we do anything ethically? To tackle this, we must first begin to understand that while our current political and economic circumstances demand a “third world,” tantamount slave class, there is a future where liberation reigns globally. We as Americans have been conditioned to believe that in order for us to have, someone else must go without. Inequality is accepted as natural to our way of life. This, however, does not have to be the case. Sure, in a world where child slaves are not used to make our devices or where Palestinians are not displaced or murdered to make room for our next vacation destination, things must function differently. We cannot have this world without a third world, but we can have a world where people globally have access to free time and enough resources to enjoy it. The world as we know it may have to end. We may even lose some of the things we have grown so accustomed to that we cannot imagine a life without them, but if we are not willing to make concessions for this hypothetical better world, were we ever really dedicated to a cause or dedicated merely to the optics of belonging to a cause, which I fear has become the dominant mode of political existence amongst those who rave. 

I do not wish in this essay to suggest that dancing is politically futile or that we are morally and ethically wrong as the beneficiaries of global capitalism to dance. I love to dance. I will always dance. I will always celebrate those who love to dance. As anarchist revolutionary Emma Goldman once wrote, “I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement would not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it.” But while dance may be vital to a revolution, the dancer must not mistake the dance for the revolution. Joy is not revolutionary. Hope is not revolutionary. Love is not revolutionary. They are truths of human existence that will survive regardless of the state. What is revolutionary is an unwavering commitment to realizing the liberation of the world. 

Equally, I do not wish to excuse the random killing of any person for any purpose, just or otherwise. Nobody deserves to die while dancing. Hamas should not have killed innocent dancing people. But also nobody deserves to lose their home to make space for others to dance. A dance is devoid of any spiritual meaning if the dancer, mindlessly or knowlingly, maintains one foot on the neck of another. So next time you find yourself in a building full of people celebrating empty liberal ideas of “queer joy,” “sexual liberation,” and “safe spaces” while children on the other side of the globe are kept awake through the night, quivering in fear, as bombs rain down on the only place they have ever called home, I ask you to take no comfort in knowing you are at least spending your money in a place that proudly has a call for a free Palestine on its wall. 

To those whose deaths I’ve funded and those loved ones that survive you, in the absence of everything I owe, I dedicate every dance from this point forward to you. Never again will I wait until I’m in the bathroom of the party to remember you.