Making apartheid look like a party

How DJs like Roi Perez manufacture consent for settler colonialism

London nightclub FOLD is advertising ‘Origins: All Night Long’ with Roi Perez, an artist who has done more than almost anyone to normalize ‘Israel’ in underground rave culture.

Roi Perez has personally invited international DJs to break the cultural boycott and play in the entity, including NIKS, Shanti Celeste, Marie Montexier and Gabrielle Kwarteng. He has glamorised Tel Aviv’s ‘diverse, dynamic’ queer nightlife scene in media. His LAUNDRETTE collective held a fundraiser for ‘Nova survivors’. And, alongside the other DJs in his collective, Partok and David Elimelech, he consistently undermines our community’s boycotts of Berghain, HÖR and Boiler Room.

Despite this, allegedly queer and resistant spaces—from Basement to Body Movements—continue to book Roi Perez and other settler DJs who profit from the entity’s occupation. Most damagingly, they promote this artist on line ups alongside ostensibly pro-Palestinian artists.

These are grave instances of normalization: defined by Centering Al-Thawabet as actions which “co-opt, disarm and deradicalize revolutionary demands for liberation”.

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Laundering the occupation

Roi Perez was born and raised in Ashkelon in occupied Palestine, a few miles from the Gaza border. He is a founder of the ‘Tel Aviv’ party LAUNDRETTE and played a key role in the city’s underground scene. In international media, Perez has often glamorised his settler coming-of-age, while championing the dynamism of the colony’s queer nightlife:

“When Perez eventually moved to Tel Aviv, the people he met there opened his eyes to queer clubbing’s vibrant soundtrack. “Being in Tel Aviv was much more free,” he tells me. Indeed, today Tel Aviv is known for its thriving queer party scene with loose, receptive crowds and clubs like The Block which act as a haven from the wider politics in the city.” (Crack Magazine, 2017)

And here, in Jaeger Oslo, also 2017:

“The queer scene in Tel Aviv is definitely out there [...] Everything was super diverse, maybe some people would think that’s political in and of itself.”

Versions of this also recur in his artist bios, e.g.:

“After a head start playing records in 2011 as a local resident in Tel Aviv’s underground queer clubbing scene...” (ADE)

As Nerdeen Kiswani has noted, scripts like this serve a crucial legitimising function for the entity:

“Tel Aviv’s club scene is often framed as a ‘beacon of light’—progressive, diverse, and full of life. But in reality, it plays a central role in whitewashing Zionism, making apartheid look like a party.”

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Liberal Zionist mythmaking

On 7 October 2023, the day of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, Roi Perez was scheduled to host an edition of Laundrette in Tel Aviv. The night before, he had headlined a night at Kabareet, a (now shuttered) “mixed queer space” for ‘Israelis’ and Palestinians in Haifa. A month earlier, he had brought London DJ NIKS out to the settler colony for the three year anniversary of Gazoz, proudly subtitled “Roi Perez invites: NIKS”.

We spell this out to underline that Perez is not incidentally ‘from ‘Israel’. He has served as a linchpin of its nightlife for many years—a convener and connector, energetically developing and mediatising its scene and encouraging international acts to visit.

In November 2023, Roi Perez threw a special fundraiser edition of Laundrette in Berghain:

“The funds will directly help survivors and evacuees of the 7/10 massacre, unsheltered Bedouin communities, displaced Palestinian communities due to settler violence, queer Arabs in both Israel and Palestine in need of professional psycho-social counselling and other underserved groups.”

This paragraph fully embodies the eliminationist project of liberal Zionism. The settler as innocent victim of senseless Native “massacre”. Caveated scraps available for the Natives deemed recuperable or non-threatening: the “loyal” Bedouin model minority, plus queers (ergo, Natives who aren’t at risk of producing more Natives).

In an additional note to their Berghain fundraiser for Nova survivors, Laundrette added the following:

“We would like to emphasize our belief in coexistence and our hope for peace. That is why our home club since day one has been Phi Garden, a communal political space with staff consisting of both Palestinians and Jews, providing a safe environment for our queer community and marginalized groups.”

The myth of settler/Native coexistence is one of the core discursive pillars of liberal Zionism. It posits the colony as an unchangeable reality which must be accepted by the Native rather than resisted. The current bio of Phi Garden, “PERMANENT CEASEFIRE NOW. HOSTAGES RETURN DEAL NOW. DE-ESCALATION & ELECTIONS NOW”, perfectly expresses the insidious violence of this script—which posits the occupation of Palestine by a fascist European death cult as a problem for ‘both sides’.

Let’s be clear—”peace” in this context is a euphemism for the orderly annihilation of Palestinian life. Any settler advocating for “coexistence”, rather than full decolonization and right of return, supports the colonial occupation of Palestine and its continuance.

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Soft power and the settler artist

Gal Gadot is a cartoonish example of a Zionist settler. She is martial, hawkish, provincial. She acts, poorly, in jingoistic Hollywood productions. She won Miss Israel in 2004.

DJs like Roi Perez are queer, metropolitan, subcultural. Largely, they want to stay out of politics. If pressed, they will distance themselves from the colony’s current government, criticise aspects of its policy, and even champion approved Native causes—like the mental health of queer Palestinians, or fundraisers for safe, imperial core charities like Palestine Children’s Relief Fund.

Despite these superficial differences, Gadot and Perez are both avatars of the colony’s soft power within culture. Gadot helps project Israeli futurity and permanence within mass culture: a tough, militaristic Sabra, a frontier guardsman of White Western hegemony. Perez performs a parallel role within the queer underground—soothing us with an image of the settler, of ‘Tel Aviv’, as enlightened and progressive.

Both profit from and depend on the settler occupation of Palestine. Both abhor and oppose actual Palestinian resistance. Perez is the gentrified side of the same genocidal coin.

In addition to normalizing the occupation in rave culture, Roi Perez also undermines community boycotts of Zionist and KKR-owned venues. His Instagram is an interminable visual loop of his scabbings, from Berghain door selfies (where he is resident) to, of course, a pinned post from Boiler Room.

It is critical we spell these links out. This is a DJ who encodes, via his plucky province-to-metropole settler backstory and appropriation of Black house music, the colonial narrative of a benevolent, queer-friendly liberal Zionism. At the same time, he is actively undermining boycotts aimed at resisting the co-option of rave culture by empire.

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“What can ‘Israeli’ artists do, then?”

‘Israeli’ is not an immutable identity. It describes an affiliation with a colonial project which is less than 80 years old. When Palestine is liberated, nobody will be called ‘Israeli’. Like “Rhodesian”, “White South African”, “Confederate”, the term will one day be a morbid artefact of a collapsed White supremacist regime.

Throughout history, there are records of settlers switching sides. Ronald Bunting, born into a military Loyalist family in the North of Ireland, helped to form the Irish National Liberation Army in the 70s. He became its leader in 1978 and was assassinated in 1980 by Loyalist paramilitaries. Similar examples can be found in Algeria, Mozambique, Angola and South Africa.

In doing so, these settlers sacrificed their status within the colonial project, their invidious spoils, their safety; they put their bodies on the line. They became ‘race traitors’, in the coinage of Noel Ignatieff.

By contrast, Roi Perez daily reaps the rewards of his settler self-actualisation. Having launched an international DJ career off the “thriving underground nightlife” of Tel Aviv, he continues to normalize the occupation and undermine collective boycott efforts. He does this with the indulgence of ‘underground, queer-centred’ spaces like Basement and FOLD.

There are many things Perez and the other Laundrette DJs could do to materially support Palestinian liberation:

• Publicly renounce their settler citizenship, passport and identity;

• Refuse all future commerce and association with the settler colony;

• Apologize for their normalization of the colony, and commit to repair and remedy in consultation with the Palestinian movement;

• Respect ongoing boycotts and actions aimed at delegitimizing the entity (i.e. of Berghain, HÖR, and KKR-owned venues);

• Use every tool at their disposal to agitate for the core tenets of Palestinian liberation—an independent and sovereign Palestinian state over all of historic Palestine; the right of return for all displaced Palestinians; and the legitimacy of all forms of resistance against the entity.

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A call for escalation

The horrors in Gaza are impossible to describe or comprehend. It is critical we escalate our efforts within the imperial core now to delegitimize and isolate the entity as rapidly and completely as possible.

This includes challenging individuals who normalize it within culture. In the 80s, there were public blacklists of musicians who broke the cultural boycott to play in apartheid South Africa. These measures were effective in raising the costs of normalization and scabbing. We have much to learn from them.

We urge Origins, FOLD, Body Movements, Basement and all other venues and collectives to cease platforming DJs from LAUNDRETTE until they take full accountability for their longstanding normalization of ‘Israel’ and adhere to the tenets of Al Thawabet. And we call on ravers and DJs to exercise pressure on these venues. Collectively, we are powerful. There are many ways we can do this.

Directly challenge club owners and promoters who are booking the Laundrette collective. Refuse to play on line ups with these DJs. Unfollow them on social media. If they are playing at the function, don’t go. Tell others not to go. And stop going to venues which celebrate artists complicit in the genocide.