\n\tIn the sleek, detached comfort of a Brooklyn loft or a London flat, the idea of a \u201cbomb-shelter rave\u201d sounds like grotesque performance art \u2014\u00a0a desperate, neon-soaked clich\u00e9. In Tel Aviv, it is something else entirely.<\/p>\n
\n\tThis week, as I was visiting Israel<\/a> for a conference and to meet my family and friends in Tel Aviv, I experienced it first-hand. In Israel, every building is required to have a reinforced bomb-shelter. Ours is a bare concrete bunker underground. That night, someone dragged in a speaker. Someone else switched on a small strobe light. Within minutes, what had been a tense room of strangers waiting for the authorities to tell us we are safe to go back home, turned into something else entirely. As Iranian ballistic missiles were intercepted in the sky above us, our shelter became something resembling a nightclub.<\/p>\n \n\tSimilar gatherings happened throughout the city \u2014 some in below-ground parking lots, others in train stations. There was even a wedding<\/a>. All had one thing in common: the instinctive, almost stubborn insistence on living.<\/p>\n \n\tYou might be wondering: How can anyone dance while war\u2014 and the loss of so many lives\u2014 hangs overhead? But this isn\u2019t bravado, and it isn\u2019t a celebration. No one here calls it \u2018partying.\u2019 It\u2019s something closer to release. A way through the fear rather than around it. We aren\u2019t dancing because we\u2019ve forgotten the conflict, we are dancing because it has stripped us of every other form of agency. When cornered, the human body refuses to stay passive. It moves. It resists. It asserts life in the face of a sky that tells you to cower.<\/p>\n \n\tIn the mamad, the fortified safe room, which I\u2019ve visited more than 40 times this week, the air is thick with recycled oxygen, and heavy with metallic adrenaline as 20 bodies are squeezed into a space meant for four. Normally, this is a sensory warning: \u201cPrepare to die.\u201d Then someone, a stranger in a dusty hoodie and worn sneakers, hits play on a JBL boom box.<\/p>\n \t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n \n\tThe track is relentless, 128 beats per minute, a heartbeat that overrides the erratic thrum of our own pulses. In that moment, Purim \u2014 the Jewish holiday that commemorates an ancient attempt by a Persian madman to annihilate the Jewish people \u2014 isn\u2019t a holiday, it\u2019s a call to action. When sirens scream \u201chide,\u201d we rise. When the world demands smallness, we take up space. The bassline repairs the city\u2019s psychic infrastructure, one four-on-the-floor bar at a time.<\/p>\n \n\tIsraelis have always had a special relationship with dance music. Decades before this war, electronic beats were part of the country\u2019s rhythm, from late night in Tel Aviv\u2019s clubs to massive festivals that draw thousands of young people looking for a few hours of freedom under the open sky. I remember dancing in the desert when I was younger, arriving with my friends after midnight and leaving only once the sun came up over the Mediterranean \u2014 soaked and exhilarated \u2014 the city slowly waking around us.<\/p>\n \n\tOn Oct. 7, 2023, that culture of joy was shattered when Hamas militants stormed the Nova music festival <\/a>in the south of Israel, murdering hundreds who had gathered simply to dance. Since then the act of dancing has taken on a deeper meaning for Israelis. Nova survivors used the slogan \u201cwe will dance again\u201d as a promise, to never give in to hate and darkness.<\/p>\n \n\tWhen I was dancing in that mamad, the fear which usually paralyzed me \u2014 the way my chest would tighten, teeth rattle, prayers repeat \u2014 evaporated. Inside the concrete cocoon, explosions become percussion, the track becomes therapy. Violence and music collide, destructive energy reframed into something creative, collective, and alive.<\/p>\n \n\tI found myself dancing to trance music I grew up with. Beside me was a young woman with dark, curly hair. Her family is from Iran<\/a>, she can only speak to them over the phone once in a while, since the internet is often blacked out. They are safe but she worries for them. She spoke with terrifying, beautiful clarity about watching the regime\u2019s power flicker, about relatives she hasn\u2019t seen in years, and about her dream of dancing in Isfahan one day. She laughed softly at the irony: Here, in a Tel Aviv shelter, she was reclaiming the very freedom that had been denied her, and that upsets the Iranian regime to no end.<\/p>\n \t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cThey will dance again,\u201d she said, voice cutting through the bass. The sentiment wasn\u2019t one of surrender, but rather pure, unbridled hope. Her words hung in the recycled air, defying gravity and expectation alike. Around us, strangers joined hands, jumped, spun \u2014 tiny acts of courage multiplying, forming a tribe in concrete.<\/p>\n \n\tThis is context at its most extreme. How can you explain a group of strangers spontaneously dancing in a bomb shelter? In terror, we can become victims. In a room where bass drowns blast, we are a tribe. We are not ignoring the missiles \u2014 we are refusing to let them set the tempo of our lives. Every movement is a claim: Life, freedom, joy, and defiance are not negotiable.<\/p>\n \t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n \n\tThe track faded long after the all-clear. We emerged into the tense, quiet night of Tel Aviv. Smoke trails from the air defense lingered like ghostly brushstrokes, fading into clouds. Rhythm still pulsed in our bones. In a city under siege, the dance floor isn\u2019t escape \u2014 it is survival. Every beat, every jump, every flash of light is a reminder that even under fire, we remain unbroken, moving, alive.<\/p>\n \n\tHen Mazzig is an Israeli author and educator based in London, the son of North African and Iraqi Jewish refugees. He is a Senior Fellow at The Tel Aviv Institute, a non-profit focusing on uplifting marginalized Jewish voices online and fighting antisemitism. Find him on Instagram at @HenMazzig<\/a>.<\/p>\n