Em Hilton
+972 Magazine / August 4, 2026
Borrowing heavily from Holocaust memorialization, the mobile exhibit wants visitors to identify with Israeli festivalgoers and forget everything else.
I have a standout memory from March of the Living, the educational program that brings thousands of young Jews to Poland each year to learn about the Holocaust, which I attended as a 16-year-old in 2008. At the museum on the site of the Belzec extermination camp, we were made to walk down a ramp into the “Contemplation Room,” a structure modelled on the camp’s gas chamber which was blown up by the Nazis as the Allies closed in.
Once inside, packed into that dark, windowless room, the rabbi accompanying us broke the silence: “Kol od balevav penimah …”
That memory — of a rabbi leading a rendition of Israel’s national anthem at the site where the Nazis murdered almost 500,000 Jews — returned to me during a recent visit to the Nova Exhibition. According to its website, the traveling installation aims to place visitors “on a timeline” of the Nova music festival, the site of Hamas’ largest massacre on October 7, through a “carefully crafted mosaic of information, evidence, and emotion.”
The exhibition opened in London in May, after traveling across North America and Europe over the past two years. Funded through the Israeli nonprofit The Tribe of Nova Foundation and prominent donors including music executive Scooter Braun, its charitable sponsor for the London leg of the tour was the Jewish National Fund UK. Its London advisory board included representatives of the Community Security Trust, former Labour MP Lord Austin of Dudley, and Lord Stuart Polak, honorary president of Conservative Friends of Israel.
Yet while the exhibition — which claims to have received over 600,000 visitors so far — prompted significant protest and pushback in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto, in Britain it was largely treated as apolitical. Its arrival was met with a flurry of tepidly sympathetic reviews in liberal publications and visits from politicians across the political spectrum, including London Mayor Sadiq Khan and former Prime Minister Boris Johnson. The British Jewish communal establishment — from synagogues to the ostensibly progressive New Israel Fund — has enthusiastically supported the initiative and organized visits for their congregants and communities.
For all its variations in tone, much of the liberal response to the Nova Exhibition rests on the same assumption: that it exists outside politics. “This … could happen to any single one of us and our children, so it’s on all of us to make sure that people understand that, see it, witness it, and then do everything in their power to prevent it from ever happening again,” former Labour Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner said after her visit.
But this decontextualization is precisely the exhibition’s political function. It asks visitors to see themselves in the festivalgoers — young people seeking to experience music, freedom, and community. And through that identification, it aims to shore up sympathy and support for Israel amid its ongoing genocide in Gaza.
A deliberate resemblance
The exhibition is divided into three sections: “Before,” “During,” and “After.” It begins with a written description of “thousands of radiant souls” gathering for “a celebration of unconditional love and the spreading of light.” Then, the narrative continues, the “Angel of Death” descends, firing “a hateful barrage of missiles” that cuts through the joy “like an icy wind.”
Visitors are next directed down a corridor to watch a film presenting Israeli trance music festivals such as Nova as spaces of “love and light,” where “anyone can feel at home.” Interviews with festivalgoers and apparent survivors are interspersed with silent footage of young people dancing and laughing.
At the end of the corridor lies the exhibition’s centerpiece: an immersive simulation of the attack. Visitors move through a hall filled with burned-out cars and abandoned festival tents. Overhead, recordings of men shouting in Arabic are juxtaposed with signs reading “Peace” and “All welcome here.”
Scattered across the room among the belongings repurposed for the exhibit are smartphones playing footage filmed by Palestinian militants who entered southern Israel that day, although much of it does not appear to depict the attack on the festival itself. Visitors can also step inside a reconstruction of a roadside bomb shelter where festivalgoers hid, while recorded testimonies of their attempts to evade the attackers reverberate from the walls.
The sequence immediately reminded me of walking through Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. There, visitors encounter a silent film depicting a street in Eastern Europe as an emblem of Jewish life before the Holocaust, before passing through a curtain and descending into darkness. The resemblance is no accident. As academics and commentators including Ben Ratskoff and Naomi Klein have argued, the Nova Exhibition adopts a narrative structure that is familiar from mainstream Holocaust education.
After the simulation room, there is a memorial wall displaying photographs of those killed, followed by a room of artifacts. These include a replica of the bar at Nova (with a dedication to those who helped make it a “plastic-free” festival); a tribute to a British Jewish man who moved to Israel and was working at Nova as a security guard; and, strikingly, tables covered with abandoned shoes — a not-so-subtle reference to the piles of victims’ shoes displayed at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum.
This collapsing of October 7 into Holocaust memory has been a central feature of Israeli state propaganda since the attack, wrenching the events of that day from their political context and folding them into a continuous narrative of Jewish persecution.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, meeting the German chancellor shortly after the attack, invoked a “savagery that we only remember from the Nazi crimes [of] the Holocaust.” A few days later, Israel’s UN ambassador Gilad Erdan declared at the Security Council that he would wear a yellow star “until you condemn the atrocities of Hamas.”
Suspending time
There is, of course, nothing wrong with responding to the atrocities of October 7 with compassion and distress. Nor is it inherently problematic to commemorate or memorialize the Nova attack specifically.
The moral failure lies in the refusal of the press, politicians, and the Jewish communal mainstream to acknowledge how overtly this exhibition instrumentalizes those horrors in the service of Israeli state violence and the dehumanization of Palestinians. In doing so, it also degrades the memory of those who were killed that day, including the victims of sexual violence.
The repeated displays of footage showing Shani Louk and other women being abducted is itself a crass form of gendered objectification, conscripting their pain and sexual violation as moral ammunition for the destruction Israel has wrought on Gaza. It can be true both that these women endured unspeakable violence and that the exhibition mobilizes their suffering through racist tropes about Arab men’s supposed sexual aggression.
Nor can we ignore the context of the Israeli government’s broadbrush criticism of any reporting on the rampant sexual abuse and torture of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers in Sde Teiman and other prisons and detention centers. These rebuttals, and the silence of organizations like the Dinah Project in the face of overwhelming evidence, only serves to reinforce how this advocacy is being used as a cudgel against those demanding justice for Israel’s crimes — rather than reflecting actual concern for the safety and wellbeing of survivors of sexual violence and abuse.
In the UK, there is an additional layer to this hypocrisy. How should we assess the value of such an exhibition at a time when Palestine solidarity activists are facing the full force of the British state?
Arrests, surveillance, and terrorism charges have become a near-constant feature of British public life. Pro-Israel groups such as UK Lawyers for Israel remain relentless in their efforts to turn public expressions of solidarity with Palestinians into legal disputes; just recently, a newly elected councillor in East London had her photograph removed from the council website after UKLFI complained that her keffiyeh violated equality law and “caused distress” to Jewish constituents.
To treat the Nova exhibition as apolitical is therefore a fundamental mischaracterization. It relies on the dehumanization and racism that already shape much of the West’s perception of Palestinians and Arabs, allowing visitors to feel as though they are inhabiting the violence endured by Nova festivalgoers while obscuring everything that came before October 7 and everything that followed.
This is precisely the point. The exhibition’s overwhelming sensory assault is designed to hold visitors in a state of horror and trauma, impeding critical thought and rendering any interest about what preceded the attack, and empathy for what came after it, improper or irrelevant.
Let us pay no attention to the fact that the festival took place mere kilometers from the fence that has encaged Gaza for almost two decades, keeping 2 million Palestinians under siege and remote occupation and preventing them from returning to their destroyed towns and villages inside Israel. Let us forget that the number of Israelis killed at Nova was surpassed within 24 hours by the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza.
Perhaps the bleakest element of this pageantry of trauma is the knowledge that any attempt to create a comparable exhibition about more than 1,000 days of genocide in Gaza — whether in London or anywhere else in the Western world — would almost certainly be met with immediate and harsh repression. A display reconstructing Hind Rajab’s last moments, parents carrying their children’s remains in plastic bags, or Mohammad Bhar being left to die after he was mauled by an Israeli army dog would simply not be granted the same presumption of apolitical mourning.
To see the Nova Exhibition as apolitical also requires accepting the assumption that its purpose is merely educational: that people simply don’t know enough about what happened that day, and this exhibition is here to tell them. But people do know — it led every mainstream news outlet for months, long after Israel had killed many thousands more Gazans.
Instead, the exhibition seeks to return visitors to October 7 and to suspend them there in perpetuity. By reinforcing the inherent evil of Hamas over and over again, it aims to justify Israel’s subsequent slaughter of well over 70,000 Palestinians in Gaza, which continues three years later unabated.
The exhibition did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Em Hilton is the International Policy Director at Diaspora Alliance, and a co-founder of Na’amod: British Jews Against Occupation and Apartheid
