"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."
Leisure and travel have historically been used to obscure state brutality, and similar mechanisms operate today in Israeli society. Pride parades, travel culture and trance festivals offer sanctioned forms of escape that separate participants from the realities of violence. Tarmila'ut—the post-military travel rite—operates as both a cultural expectation and an industry, with agencies selling all-inclusive forgetfulness. Amid the Nova massacre and the genocide in Gaza, escapes acquire sharper political meaning: Israelis can flee the ha'matzav while Gazans remain trapped by sealed seas, skies and crossings. State promotion of travel and soft-power events further normalises and conceals violence.
Read at www.aljazeera.com
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