How Dare Israelis Dance?

Last Friday afternoon, I posted a story on Facebook: a video I shot from my window in Tel Aviv’s HaCarmel neighborhood. People were dancing salsa on an unusually warm evening as the sun set, just before Shabbat — even as a haze began to blanket the city.

As the hours passed, some messages came. Not from Israel — though they could have. The senders were mostly upset acquaintances abroad.

One warned me that it was “not good to provoke.” That it was inappropriate to write that this is how Tel Aviv — and Israel — “empties” when haze fills the air.

I am neither a provocateur nor unaccustomed to provocation. Why should I be?

But this was not my intention. It was an opportunity to explain resilience — and something even harder to translate: chutzpah.

One of the messages read: “It’s empty in Gaza as well.”

With a single video of people dancing salsa, I had apparently become an apologist for what can fairly be described as the first “genocide” in history for which no evidence exists, but no evidence is needed whatsoever.

There is nothing more exhausting than attempting to engage in dialogue with people who do not want to think. Who do not want to verify, to learn, to question. Nothing more exhausting than talking to those who have settled comfortably into the spirit of our age: repetition. Reproduction. Slogans.

And this is no accident.

Before social media, the Middle East — like any complex political issue — was discussed among people who had at least some knowledge. Not necessarily academic expertise. But awareness. Context. Proportion.

In that environment, a conspiracy theory could simply not survive. A slogan would definitely be questioned. A simple “What do you mean?” was enough.

It was a discussion after all.

Just as no one would interrupt a heated Eurovision debate in a Soho pub on Old Compton Street to ask about Hamas.

“Are you all right, darling?” would be the instinctive reply — quickly followed by: “Can we get some water here?”

Today, one can chant “Stop Starving Gaza!” in the streets of London or elsewhere in the West without being asked what exactly that means — since there has never been a famine in Gaza, and there is none today.

Public discourse now lives on social media — where complexity is flattened, and control belongs not to those who know, but to those who shout.

If you align with this phenomenon — what might fairly be called an Alternative Slick Fascism — life is easy.

If you insist on data, on nuance, on reminding people that, especially, the Holocaust is not a metaphor but a documented historical fact, then you become the problem.

The Holocaust is not a theory. It is tangible history. Read anything on the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Faced with mountains of evidence and testimony, he did not deny it. He admitted it. He said he was merely following orders.

Sixty-two years after his execution — the only execution in Israel’s history — some still weaponize Hannah Arendt’s “Banality of Evil” to argue that Israelis were barbaric for showing no clemency toward the architect of the greatest genocide in recent history. That is, real genocide. Arendt did not intend this, I believe.

But when the subject is Jews, logic has often proven fragile. The writings of a Jewish intellectual become especially valuable as weapons — interpretation included.

Long story short, the choice is simple.

You can remain silent and drift with the current of cultivated ignorance — fueled by the opiate of social media applause — or just move on.

That is why Tel Aviv dances. That is why Israelis said they would dance again after October 7 and did just that.

Not out of denial. Not out of indifference. But out of defiance.

Out of refusal to surrender life to death cults. A refusal to let what Western civilization has built be quietly handed over to 6th-century darkness through the useful idiots of our time who mistake regression for righteousness and turn public discourse into a witch hunt.

Gaza is part of a political discussion. Those who wish to engage in it should stop shouting and start reading.

Serious conflicts are not resolved by moral theatrics.

History shows what happens when noise replaces thought, and fanaticism masquerades as virtue. We have seen this before. It does not end well.

The record is clear.