“I like ecstasy,” Kibbutz member Eyal Goldstein tells the Flipping Out crew, perhaps on ecstasy himself. “I like to dance on ecstasy. Ecstasy. Ecstasy? It seems to open you up the most. But it’s a lie, and everyone knows it. Still, they all fall for it when they’re high. What kind of a lie? It’s the hypocrisy you see in Israel, that’s the lie.” He speeds off into the night on a motorcycle.

Israeli raving culture follows the model of the raving marketplace worldwide, notably in current Saudi, Emirati, and Jordanian tourism, to promote leisure and entertainment instead of serious democratic accountability. EDM more widely is now in essence promoted by a neoliberal order staving off its collapse.

Socially liberal EDM fans are being pressured into disengagement by a rapidly evolving corporate fusion with the nation-state. Rich and developed countries, Israel among them, have now become even less democratic than they were in the 2000s. They seek to neutralize their populations, and like so much artistry in the capitalist epoch, raving is often a weapon against change in a world that desperately needs it. It is no wonder that an Israeli scene would develop to pull attention away from a state system that cannibalizes the region around it. Raving is a luxury option that is meant to sedate the mind and blind it to the horrors unfolding just nearby.

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Writers often ask whether it is possible for music to be a soundtrack for peace, but it is rare for them to seriously consider whether financials even allow it. Israelis face this broader problem in psychedelic trance. Even if there was a serious grappling with a century of slaughter and erasure, rather than a deepening of denial through bomb shelter raves profiled in Rolling Stone, a whole cultural sector reinforcing blissful ignorance would need to unravel. Denial is built into so much of Israeli electronic dance music, and money and power has clearly latched onto it as a lifestyle choice.

It is the soundtrack for a new era of genocide and ethnic cleansing, and it is complicit in its tranquilizing of a public that must urgently mobilize to end it. Israeli electronica launders the reality of mass killing, managing the psyches of those whose lives are built through the violence of a racist system. It will be remembered for its fascistic utility like Wagnerian opera and Beethoven symphonies in Nazi Germany, and those who resist it will be remembered for their bravery and steadfast opposition to injustice. When the guns fall silent, and Zionist leaders like Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir are brought before a new version of the Nuremberg Trials, there must be a parallel discussion about Israeli raving and the roles it has played in the bloodshed.