Dance Dance

So, I've been stuck in Eilat, Israel, for the past two days, waiting for the Egyptian Consulate to open up.

At first, I was pissed. But, as it so often happens, the Good Lord reached down and threw me a bone.

It turns out that Armin Van Buuren, voted in 2007 as the best trance DJ on the planet, was in town. Big-time party on the beach; and half of Eilat was going.

After months of Lonely Planet travel, I'd been itching to see a bit of Israel's youth culture in action. Do something local, but not something mundane.

I didn't know who the fuck Van Buuren was. (I had to Wiki-research him.) And the music was alright... I've heard better tunes from Ryland Clarence's iPod at the Moby Dick. And techno (or house, or trance, or electronica, or whatthefuckever) isn't my scene.

But I wasn't there to party. I was there to watch Israelis party.

At the same time, there's been a bit of a dust-up between the IDF and Hamas. Israel has been squeezing the Gaza Strip: refusing to recognize the Hamas government, freezing funds, blockading supplies of fuel, sealing the borders, and allying itself with Hamas' rivals Fatah, who are given both political and financial resources.

In return, Hamas has been dropping rockets on Sderot, Ashkelon, and other southern towns.

It all reached a head (or the beginning of one) yesterday, when 60+ Palestinians (civilians included, as always) and two Israeli soldiers were killed in a huge military operation. It's all over the papers, with pictures of the dead boys, one with his girlfriend, and pictures of rocket damage in the south.

There's talk of reoccupying Gaza. Israelis under rocket fire in Sderot and Ashkelon are calling for blood. And whatever restraint Hamas has been exercising on its militants is about to reach its limit.

I'm getting on a bus to Cairo either today or tomorrow. I'm not too worried about bombs going off in the Sinai. There aren't any Israelis there to bomb.

But first, the party.

It started at 2pm, but I arrived fashionably late. By the time I got there, the beachside venue was packed with over a thousand tranced-out, trainwrecked Jews.

I managed to share a joint with a kid named Lidor, who was about to be drafted into the army. "I'm want to be a paratrooper!" he announced. He'd apparently taken the test for admission into the pilot program of the Israeli Air Force, and had passed every portion but the psych evaluation. "It said I was, ah, 'unsuitable'."

The hash was terrible, though it did Lidor in right and proper. The hash came, apparently, from Lebanon. And who in Lebanon grows pot? The Shi'ites in the south. Hezbollah- at war with Israel for two decades- makes and sells the hash that Israeli soldiers smoke at raves and porch parties.

Israelis also get their drugs from Bedouin in the Sinai, who smuggle it in on their camels. (This sounds ridiculous, but I'm going on Lidor's word.) But because of the situation with Hamas in Gaza, and the possibility of Hamas militants loose in Sinai, the border with Egypt has been sealed airtight.

"I don't like Arabs," said Lidor, hauling back on his joint. "But they do some things right."

The man himself, Armin Van Buuren. He played four hours of bread-and-butter trance, set off sparks from his stage equipment, and all in all, put on a good show.

I won't lie... I did dance. But only a little.

Everyone was on drugs. There were hash joints everywhere, and people slugging back booze. And of course, the kids on E, who were easy to pick out: they were the ones flailing about with spasmodic, mile-a-minute gyrations, with their eyes rolled into their heads and shit-eating grins pasted on their faces.

My camera sucks, hence the blurriness. But I was so blasted by this point that this is probably what the scene looked like to my naked eye. I don't remember.

The Egyptian Consulate is a small, unimposing bungalow tucked away into a small suburb of Eilat. You could only tell what it was from the Egyptian flag flying from the pole. Almost as if in response, most of the Jewish houses nearby hung Israeli flags from their gates and doorways.

It was 100 shekels for a visa. But for Americans, Germans, Russians, and a few other European nations, it was only 65 shekels. Their governments must sell weapons to Egypt.

The Germans who were there with me chuckled gleefully, while I cursed Canada and its wanky, pacifist scruples.