Three days before the start of the Loop trance festival in Thailand, its Israeli organizers discovered that the site they had been working on for more than a year had been set on fire, equipment had been stolen, and the stage and décor had gone up in flames. Days earlier, a post circulated online that sparked a wave of incitement as part of an anti-Israel campaign, joined by BDS organizations.
Behind the festival are young Israelis living in Thailand, who say the online incitement and physical damage to the site, alongside pressure directed at local authorities, ultimately led to the shutdown of the event they had planned. The three founders, Eliad Yehuda, Daniel Keizman and Avihu Reuven, spoke on Sunday in the ynet studio about their love of music, the destruction and their thoughts about what comes next.
“Loop Festival is a group of young people in their twenties and thirties from around the world, founded out of a love for trance and music. I myself am a DJ and music producer, and the festival was born from a vision to create something big and international here in Pai, Thailand,” Yehuda said in the interview. “After a year of planning and a year of physical work on the ground, we began to build this idea together. We held a first event that was amazing after a lot of effort and work with the authorities here and everyone involved. We received all the required permits and got through the first event, and after that we started to face opposition. A Facebook post appeared calling it a production by child murderers and inciting against us to force us to shut this down.”
“It’s important to say that the people who started attacking us are not Thai, they’re people who aren’t even here,” Keizman added. “In the end, we acted very straightforwardly to get support. I’ve lived here for two years, we understand how things work here properly. But a targeted campaign emerged to destroy every trace of this festival, which is based entirely on the same values as the place we live in. Pai is a place of freedom and love.”
A lot of Israelis are in Pai, as we know
“A lot, and our audience isn’t only Israeli. There was very focused incitement, with a lot of energy from people who aren’t here, and then BDS joined in along with other organizations,” Keizman explained. “They gathered a lot of support that caused people around us to feel afraid to continue with this.”
So essentially there was a remote influence campaign against you, and then gradually the authorities also began to put obstacles in your way? “
It started as an innocent post online, nothing we aren’t familiar with,” Reuven replied. “Slowly the post gained momentum, and then everything moved from social media into the physical space. A few days before the second event, unfortunately, we discovered that our site had been set on fire. They broke into the compound, stole goods, burned the infrastructure, the décor and the stage. And little by little we also stopped receiving support from the authorities, sadly.”
Who were the people who actually came and burned, torched and destroyed your major investment? “Honestly, we didn’t receive any update on that. It was probably very difficult to find them, and in the end the police here have limited means. We’re in a picturesque town in the mountains of northern Thailand,” Keizman said. “I think in the end we managed to get out with as little damage as possible and they didn’t burn more things. But it was obviously a very unpleasant experience, because we invested a lot of energy, love, creativity and a lot of money into this.”
We’ve seen criticism in recent years of tourist behavior, but not antisemitism per se. The question is whether that antisemitism is now reaching there as well.
“The Thai people themselves are not political. Their difficulty with Israelis doesn’t stem from the war itself but from the campaign that targeted them,” Keizman said. “I think the locals themselves began to feel threatened by all the campaign that formed around and against us, and that caused us to lose support. We don’t blame them. Ultimately, coming to Pai is usually a very pleasant experience for most Israeli tourists. It’s just that when we started to raise our heads a bit and become more public and gain momentum, once again we were targeted by people who are not actually here.”
So you were essentially blocked immediately, and the entire investment in the site was lost, even though you planned to hold many more events there.
“That’s right. This site was supposed to serve us for the next five years. Essentially, every month there was supposed to be a large-scale event. A lot of love and desire was invested in it,” Yehuda agreed.
Reuven added: “We’re in a period of weighing things and understanding how we come out of this stronger. We have an amazing audience behind us and an incredible community that supports us. I assume we’ll come to Israel as well, and maybe continue doing events in the East. In the coming days things will become clearer.”
“Our message in the end is that we don’t surrender to antisemitism. On the contrary, we’re asking those watching us, our people and our audience, to stand together against this,” Keizman stressed. “We’ll create something together, a project against this antisemitism, so these organizations understand that if they try to wipe us out, we’ll grow fourfold, because we have support and we’re united. We stand together.”