The unforgivable betrayal of the Nova Festival victims

‘How much evil?’

That was the question asked by Ayala Avraham, reflecting on her experience at the Nova Music Festival on 7 October 2023. No three words do a better job of summarising the terror, disgust and heartbreak one can’t help but share as you walk through the new London exhibition that bears witness to the events of that morning.

Avraham was an unlikely survivor of the terror unleashed by Hamas at the gathering of music-lovers, near Kibbutz Re’im in southern Israel. She was abducted along with her husband, Ilan Avraham, whose birthday they were celebrating. Ayala fled, but Ilan could not. His captors demanded he call out to her, hoping that in doing so she would be lured back to them. His refusal saved her life and ended his. Ilan was shot in the head, before an entire magazine was expended into his lifeless body. He was then ‘unrecognisable’, according to his wife.

The events that Ayala’s short monologue conveys a small part of began at 6.29am, as the sunrise was breaking out across the desert landscape. The music abruptly stopped when an organiser of the festival appeared on the main stage, issuing a ‘red alert’ to the crowd of 3,500. A short distance away, 3,000 terrorists were flooding across the border that separates Gaza and Israel. About one in 10 – 378 people – listening to the announcement would not survive. In the following hours Hamas expanded its attack across neighbouring kibbutzim, killing a total of 1,200 civilians, 310 Israeli soldiers and 58 police. No greater loss of Jewish life had occurred in a day since the Holocaust.

The Nova Exhibition lets the horror speak for itself. You can look at and touch the tents, the shoes, the water bottles and the iPhones. They carry a simple and poignant message – does any of this look and feel familiar to you? Does it remind you of the sweat, the dust, the hangover? To everyone there, the answer is probably yes, it does – we’ve all been there. Until you remember that the sneakers in your hands quite possibly belonged to someone who was raped, then shot, then dragged into Gaza and paraded before an ecstatic crowd of young men. Perhaps his or her lifeless body was returned, months after a traumatised family had to witness it being used as a bartering chip by the terrorists. Or perhaps it wasn’t returned at all.

Fast forward to June 2025. It’s the annual Glastonbury Festival, in a sunny field in Somerset. Here, tens of thousands of predominantly young people have gathered to do the very same thing that, less than two years earlier, the revellers at Nova had done. To listen to music, to dance with their friends until sunrise – to be swept up in the intoxicating feeling of common humanity that draws people to music festivals from across the world.

You might expect such people to feel an affinity for the victims of Nova. But instead, there was the opposite. Glastonbury 2025 was effectively a Palestine Action rally, a celebration of the ‘resistance’ that began when the first shots were fired by Hamas at the defenceless attendees of the Nova festival. Irish rap trio Kneecap – one of whose members had publicly praised Hamas – performed in front of a sea of Palestinian flags and led the crowd in a chant of ‘Free Palestine’. Bob Vylan frontman Pascal Robinson-Foster took things further, leading the crowd in chants ‘Death to the IDF (Israel Defence Forces)’. ‘Widespread support for Palestine was evident in every bar, audience and campsite’, wrote one journalist in glowing approval.

Despite having everything in common with those at the Nova festival, there was a collective refusal on behalf of everyone at Glastonbury to acknowledge it. The same thing could be said for Coachella in the US, or just about any music festival in the West.

Why? Because most of those at the Nova festival were Israelis, and very likely Jewish. And if there is one unquestionable progressive doctrine of our times, it is that Israelis can never – under any circumstances – be seen as ‘people like us’, let alone as victims.

The ‘radicals’ who spent Glastonbury denigrating Israel and praising its enemies would do well to spare an hour at the Nova exhibition in Shoreditch, east London – no doubt it is a short distance from where many of them work or live. But I wouldn’t hold my breath. Because Ayala Avraham’s question – ‘How much evil?’ – might not be the only one troubling their conscience. It will be replaced by something possibly worse: ‘How could we have betrayed you?’

The Nova Exhibition in London is now open to the public. Book tickets and find out more here.

Hugo Timms is a staff writer at spiked.