NEW YORK — Socialist Workers Party presidential candidate Rachele Fruit and five campaign supporters June 19 toured an exhibit here — “October 7/6:29 a.m. The Moment Music Stood Still.” It graphically shows the truth about the anti-Jewish pogrom led by Hamas death squads at the Nova music festival in southern Israel Oct. 7. The weekend rave was “dedicated to peace and love that was brutally cut short,” organizers said.
The exhibit was in New York from April 21 to June 22. Its next stop is Los Angeles in mid-August.
“Anyone who has the chance, should see this,” Fruit said. “It gives you more tools to answer the lies and distortions of the Oct. 7 deniers — today’s equivalent of Holocaust deniers — who claim it never happened or promote the grotesque myth that it was the Israeli army that killed people, not Hamas.”
More than 370 of the 1,200 people murdered by Hamas and its allies — and 44 of the 250 hostages they kidnapped — were at the Nova festival.
The day Fruit and campaign supporters, including this correspondent, attended the exhibit there were hundreds in line waiting to get in. Over 100,000 people have seen the exhibit so far.
“The Moment Music Stood Still” opens with a video of some 3,500 people dancing at the rave. Then near dawn, Hamas began launching thousands of missiles into Israel. Organizers shut off the music and told everyone to leave. But by then Hamas murderers, some arriving on motorized paragliders, had begun to surround the site.
The Hamas pogromists chased people through farm fields, threw grenades into packed bomb shelters where some festivalgoers hid, riddled porta-potties with bullets and tied women to trees before raping and killing them.
The exhibit includes video taken by festivalgoers during the pogrom, from later interviews and dashcam recordings, as well as video taken by Hamas thugs themselves during their hourslong assault with semi-automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades.
There are recordings of cellphone calls made by Nova participants asking for help. And the recording of a Hamas thug, who called his parents to brag he had killed 10 Jews “with my own hands!”
Rada Rashed, a catering worker at the festival and member of the Arabic-speaking Druze minority in Israel, describes seeing a Hamas thug shoot a woman in the head and then laugh about it. “No one should ever have to see something like that,” he said in a video.
“It’s hard to walk out of here untouched,” Wendy Arbeit told the Militant at the exhibit. “Everyone has to bear witness to the evil in the world.”
On the first day of the exhibit a small silent protest of Hamas apologists took place outside. Nova survivor Eliat Tibi told the Forward, “We invited them in to see the exhibit and to talk with us, and they didn’t want to.”
Then on June 10, Within Our Lifetime, a group that openly backs Hamas and Hezbollah, provocatively mobilized hundreds of its supporters outside the exhibit, waving smoke flares and calling it “Zionist propaganda.”
“I’ve only been in the States for two months,” Tibi said, “and it’s the first time I’ve understood or felt antisemitism, seeing these protests. I was shocked by the slogans they shouted.”
In response, organizers extended the exhibit a week and the lines to get in grew longer.
“We still have a lot of work to do, so many people don’t understand what happened Oct. 7,” Naama Kristal, a volunteer staffer at the exhibit, told the Militant. “We challenge everyone to come see the exhibit. Let’s talk.”
Stakes in fight against Jew-hatred
“The protest against the exhibit highlights that what is involved isn’t an Israel question, what’s at stake is the question of Jew-hatred in the imperialist epoch,” I said to a fellow visitor at the exhibit. “And it’s growing because of today’s deepening capitalist crisis. It’s a threat to all working people.”
“That’s true,” he told me. “But right now Israel is on the front lines.”
“I did not really have an idea of how horrible Oct. 7 was until I saw this exhibit. It’s like you were right there during the terror attack,” said Mamadou, a supporter of the Socialist Workers Party campaign who is Muslim. “Most of the victims are in their 20s. Whatever their age, this is a huge loss for humanity. This horrific attack on Jews cannot be justified by any faith. This is not helping the Palestinian people get their freedom.”
Seeing the stark brutality of Hamas’ pogrom drives home that the group has nothing to do with “national liberation” or defending Palestinian rights. “It’s the consequence of the Jew-hatred that’s at the heart of Hamas’ founding covenant — which explains its continuity with Nazism — and its course ever since,” Fruit said.
Amid the horror shown, the courage and resilience of working people in Israel shows through in the exhibit. In the absence of an immediate response by the Israel Defense Forces, some rave participants, area residents, retired soldiers, reservists, farmers and Bedouin Arab citizens of Israel rushed to help rescue as many people as they could and to confront and drive back the assassins. Without that, the toll would have been much higher.
“That spirit is captured by the slogan of the survivors: ‘We will dance again. And we will invite all of you,’” Fruit said.