Toward Making Sense of the Hamas Assault on a Global Youth Music Festival
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This column has been updated
Guest Column by Dr. Charles Weller | Associate Professor of History (Career), Washington State University
Amid the multiple analyses emerging of the latest major development in the now 150-plus-year-old Palestinian-Israeli conflict, one matter being largely passed over is any mention of how an international youth music festival played a central role in the planned Hamas assault.
The Universo Paralello (UP) festival took shape in the early 2000s in Brazil and has since become “one of the largest alternative culture festivals in all South America,” according to the UP website. It is self-described as “an international gathering of people from different styles and cultures, all together to celebrate Peace, Love, Union, and Respect.” This includes their concept of the “Rainbow Family Tribe” which, “share[s] ideas of freedom, peace, and harmony, in a connected familiar atmosphere around nature” with “no commerce nor alcohol available.” They consider themselves “brothers and sisters, the children of God” who are “mostly influenced by the 60s counterculture … embracing philosophies and practices with historic utopian roots in the mid-19th century.” All those who join are “invited to reach an agreement where peace could be achieved between all human beings, … without capitalism, consumerism, and mass media…,” according to the UP Rainbow Gathering description.
The UP global vision aligns with the Qur’anic-Islamic vision for all tribes and cultures of the world to know and respect one another. Likewise, in their critique of Western capitalist exploitation and materialism the UP shares significant overlap with many Islamic groups, including some of the more militant, fundamentalist groups such as Hamas. Given these liberal values, one has to wonder, in fact, just how many Palestinian-sympathetic youth there were among the worldwide UP community and how the Hamas assault on their gathering will possibly shift perspectives.
Worldwide Gatherings
As a rising global movement in the early 21st century, UP holds various gatherings and festivals all around the world, including Brazil, Panama and other South and Central American countries, Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, Hungary, Portugal, Croatia, India, Australia, the U.S, and more; most recently Israel.
On the “Tribe of Nova” Facebook page, which advertised the “the highly esteemed Universo Perello Festival” 2023 as being “hosted,” for the first time ever, in the deserts of Israel, it echoed the Brazilian-based group’s vision: “…different people from different places that have become one special and diverse family that includes everyone and gives freedom and self-expression a central place through emphasis on a deep quality experience for everyone who takes part.”
How then does an international youth music festival with Brazilian roots being hosted in Israel for the first time in its 23-year history factor into the Hamas attacks?
The achievement of meditational, peaceful ‘trance’ through music and dance — which is central to the UP festival and its related events — is comparable in certain ways to Islamic Sufi meditational practices that are, likewise, music- and dance-related. Hamas had targeted Sufis in Gaza as recently as 2022, though seemingly more for the political opposition they voiced against Hamas than for their dance- and music-centered meditational practices. Such Sufi practices have, nonetheless, been at the heart of debate among especially more conservative Islamic groups historically for centuries.
Beyond this, the festival commenced immediately following the week-long Jewish celebration of Sukkot, which ran from Friday evening, Sept. 29, through Friday evening, Oct. 6. Sukkot commemorates the fall harvest as well as 40 years of wandering in the desert following Israel’s (alleged) deliverance from Egypt under Moses as recounted in the Hebrew Bible. How many festival participants were there to celebrate that holiday religiously as Jews or even Jewish-Israelis is unclear, but the main Tribe of Nova event page explained that, “on the upcoming Sukkot holiday, we are going to host for the first time ever in the Jewish state, one of the largest, oldest and most influential festivals in Israel!!! A festival which is actually the beating heart and outlines the path of the Brazilian psy-trance community in particular and the South-Central American one in general…”
The festival was not, in their eyes, an Israeli national(ist) holiday, but a gathering of “a huge community …which inspires globally across continents, centered around a set of basic and important human values: Love each other. Maintaining the quality of the environment and the rare natural values within which the festival takes place every two years,” according to the Tribe of Nova webpage.
The Jewish Sukkot celebration was adapted symbolically in alignment with the ‘global tribal’ vision of the Universo Paralello Festival. UP events have done similar things with shamanism and other religious-cultural traditions from the areas of the world they visit as a means of showing respect for those local traditions from a global perspective. One can easily imagine that if an Islamic country ever hosted a UP event, the organizers would find some way to honor and celebrate an Islamic festival as part of their inclusive global vision for humanity. Sufi traditions would be a great place to start.
Youth Music Festival Victims
All said, depending on which precise death tolls one follows from the initial Hamas attacks that day — ranging from approximately 700 to 1,000 — it means that approximately 25-35% of the deaths which Hamas inflicted that day were among these effectively unarmed international youth music festival participants, i.e., innocent civilians who identified themselves as part of a movement calling for world peace and unity. They were not ‘collateral damage’. They were prime targets of a weeks-long planned and orchestrated assault, with its own international networks of support.
The Hamas assault also killed, among others, 12 Thai citizens and 10 Nepali students, and nine additional Thai citizens taken hostage and four Nepali students injured.
In spite of all this, “[t]he United States Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO), the nation’s largest American Muslim civil society umbrella organization,” has, on the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) website, reaffirmed “its unwavering support for the Palestinian people and their right to freedom from the Israeli occupation.” In doing so, it insists that “[t]he silence surrounding these grave injustices is nothing short of complacency.” They are speaking, however, only of Israel. They themselves, therefore, remain completely silent and thus complacent regarding the “grave injustices” committed by Hamas against this innocent international youth group.
The USCMO, like many others, are, implicitly or explicitly, justifying the Hamas attack by ‘placing it in its larger context of ongoing Israeli oppression.’ While there is certainly truth to this, they frame the Hamas attacks as being solely against “Israel,” with no mention of this more complex storyline involving the UP international youth group at the center, who were Hamas’s first and most significantly impacted target.
Condemning the Attack
Meanwhile, Faizur Rahman, Secretary-General of the Islamic Forum for Moderate Thought in India, has condemned the Hamas assault on the international music festival as a ‘crime against humanity’, on par with what he considers to be Israeli government crimes against humanity in its continuing injustices against Palestinians and their cause (Personal WhatsApp conversation, 9 Oct 2023; cf. Kidwai 2019).
Also, as of Oct. 12 the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas declared, “‘We reject the practices of killing civilians or abusing them on both sides because they contravene morals, religion and international law.’” This was a later clarification of his original response to the incident.
The Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights for the United Nations, likewise, issued a press release on Oct. 12 declaring that:
“We strongly condemn the horrific crimes committed by Hamas, the deliberate and widespread killing and hostage-taking of innocent civilians, including older persons and children. These actions constitute heinous violations of international law and international crimes, for which there must be urgent accountability … We also strongly condemn Israel’s indiscriminate military attacks against the already exhausted Palestinian people of Gaza, comprising over 2.3 million people, nearly half of whom are children. They have lived under unlawful blockade for 16 years, and already gone through five major brutal wars, which remain unaccounted for.”
The Israeli government has certainly enacted inhumane policies and committed war crimes against the Palestinians throughout the long course of the P-I conflict; they are now doing so once again in extremist response. But this does not justify Hamas committing such war crimes against a group of largely innocent international youth gathered for a brief visit as guests in the country. Thus the prosecutor for the International Criminal Court in the Hague, Netherlands, has declared that “Hamas attack, Israeli response [both] fall under ICC jurisdiction.”
“Music With Message”
Along with other scholarship including on OpEd defending Muslim human rights, over the years I also employ creative artistic means to address these matters, namely ‘music with a message’, which is perhaps the most appropriate ‘note’ to end this piece on, in honor and memory of the victims of the UP international musical festival that was central in the Hamas assault, but left out of too many (early) attempts to make sense of this latest round of violence in Palestine-Israel (Weller, “Peace On Earth?”; cf. also: Aljazeera, “What to know about the deadly Hamas attack on an Israeli music festival,” and Pandey, “What Is The Supernova Festival That Was Attacked By Hamas?”). And, as the lyrics to the song say, in honor and memory of all of the “innocent people” who have tragically died, and even now will continue to be injured and even die, from both/all sides, as a result of Middle Eastern “brother fighting brother” in ‘the holy land,’ albeit too often with aid from various outside sources, including now America’s aid in Israel’s extremist response. Sign the petition to help save lives.
R. Charles Weller, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of History (Career), Washington State University, and Senior Research Fellow, Al-Farabi Kazakh National University. He teaches mainly Roots of Contemporary Issues as well as Middle Eastern and Islamic history courses at WSU. His work focuses on religious-cultural identity and relations in Western-Islamic history, with a special view to Russian and Islamic Central Asia, the Middle East and United States.
The views expressed in this opinion column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of FāVS News. FāVS News values diverse perspectives and thoughtful analysis on matters of faith and spirituality.
