It’s just past midnight on New Year’s Eve and West Jerusalem is buzzing with end-of-year celebrations. The streets are lit up and the bars are full, music blasting from each of them. A gaggle of young Israeli men wearing skinny jeans and kippot wander up Jaffa Road, past a cluster of Border Police officers. Some lean against the stone walls, others stand with their legs apart, all with one hand resting on their M16s.
Just around the corner, a line forms outside Pergamon Club. A bouncer wearing mascara and a sparkly jacket checks tickets, puts a sticker over attendees’ phone cameras, then ushers them into the subterranean nightclub below.
It’s only been open for 30 minutes, but the club has almost reached its 340-person capacity, the first hour of 2026 spent in a blur of tattooed arms, long hair, whistles, and screams. The thump of techno pounds from the speakers of the cave-like room downstairs, which fills up so fast that the organizers open the upstairs room two hours earlier than planned.
That’s where Haifa-based DJ Mah Mood takes the reins: black cap on, dressed entirely in Nike, playing high-energy bass music to a room set to explode. He invites a rotation of friends to DJ alongside him, opening up the decks to rising Palestinian talent and vogueing while he does it. Disco balls hang from the ceiling, red and blue lights flash, and in the center of the dance floor a small dabke circle breaks out.
“I’m in shock,” says a blonde Palestinian woman from East Jerusalem who is visiting from her current home in London. “Nothing like this ever happens here. Nothing.”
When Daraq Crew were pondering whether to throw a New Year’s Eve party in West Jerusalem, they had some concerns. “In Jerusalem there’s always tension, there’s the [Israeli] military, there’s borders, you can feel the checkpoints between people,” Humam Attoun, head of Daraq’s awareness team, tells +972 Magazine. “It’s not that we shouldn’t be partying in Jerusalem; it’s about whether it’s safe.”
Founded by Sari Mansur, Ashraf Mitanis, and Fadi Aneq in November 2024, Daraq is filling the black hole in Palestinian nightlife left behind by the closing of legendary Haifa nightclub Kabareet in 2024. The three friends from Haifa wanted to create a space where Palestinians inside Israel can fully express themselves without external pressure. As queer Palestinian creatives with Israeli citizenship, every existing scene was demanding they be someone else. So the only option was to build their own.
Their first event was held in an abandoned building in Haifa’s Wadi Salib, whose Palestinian owners were forced out during the Nakba of 1948. They spent days cleaning out the trash and poured all of their money and energy into building the sound system, decorating the space, and creating a safe, welcoming environment for attendees.
“300 people came,” says founder Aneq, wearing a tight, long-sleeve black shirt and khaki parachute trousers with comically large sneakers. “We made history.”
People traveled from all over the land — Palestinian villages in the north, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Jaffa — and Aneq noticed they weren’t just dancing. They were having conversations that weren’t possible elsewhere, speaking in their native tongue without fear and connecting the fragmented community.
Since then, Daraq has thrown events in Jaffa’s Soho House, in Kabareet’s empty shell in Haifa, and in abandoned buildings on the outskirts of both cities. They host art exhibitions , album and EP release parties, and debut shows. Their social media channels combine traditional Arabic aesthetics and the tropes of European club culture with a sense of playfulness, something that is often lost in the stifling and persecutory environment for Palestinians inside Israel.
But it isn’t easy. Every venue must have three rooms to emulate the European club experience, and they never set up in the same spot twice to keep the concept fresh. A few days before their one-year anniversary party in November, the venue in Haifa cancelled; it didn’t give an exact reason, but Aneq suspects management felt uncomfortable with their Palestinian identity.
“Every event is a different story, a different concept, and often different people,” Aneq says ahead of the New Year’s Eve event. “It’s amazing how the scene can be opened up. But we never had a party here in Jerusalem, so we have to be more careful. We don’t know how people are going to react. It’s a big test for us.”
Challenging the system
At 3:30 a.m., Geisha Mars (whose real name is Maram) finishes her psychedelic techno set in the downstairs club room to a packed floor of close-eyed dancers.
The Jerusalem-based DJ attended Nour Palestina’s 2023 DJ workshop in Sheikh Jarrah, and at the time she told +972 that Palestinian club culture in Jerusalem was non-existent. Now she’s at the forefront of it.
“I love Daraq,” Maram tells me. “It was needed to bring Palestinians into a safe space where we are allowed to be Palestinian, full of beautiful colours, where we can be free.”
Daraq Crew had long been eager to host an event in Jerusalem because so many of their community are based here, but it never felt like the right time — until John Emerezian took over as the new co-owner of Pergamon three months ago.
Born and raised in Jerusalem to an Armenian father and a Palestinian mother, Emerezian is open-hearted and loves a good party. “After October 7, the Arab community [in Jerusalem] stopped doing events,” Emerezian explains. “They didn’t go to Israeli places, so me being here gives a chance and opportunity for Palestinians to share their art.”
Emerezian has been throwing weekly pop-up events at Pergamon — often booking Maram and other DJs — to open up the cultural scene to those historically excluded from it and connecting people far outside the traditional club community. “At their events, everyone is dancing — not just young people but uncles and aunties, everyone,” Maram says. To her, it feels like Palestinian culture in Jerusalem has been unlocked, and Emerezian is the key.
Still, this is extremely novel to everybody, which explains why many of the people attending Daraq tonight seem slightly shell-shocked. At 4 a.m., the doorman in the sparkly jacket turns away groups of young men who aren’t likely to enjoy the vibe of this party. This is a balancing act that Daraq are used to, and the doorman performs this duty in a manner so charming that the men leave with smiles on their faces.
For Maria Rashed, a TV producer and nightlife curator from Nazareth, Daraq offers proof that it’s still possible to build Palestinian community within and across Israel’s borders, reframing nightlife as a form of collective care and not just entertainment. “Palestinians need their own space without having to explain themselves and their pain,” she tells +972.
“What feels special about Daraq is the intention behind it: creating a space where people can recognize themselves in one another and come together as a community,” Rashed continues. “That in itself becomes a way of challenging the system.”
Perhaps that’s Daraq’s greatest achievement: their ability to champion Palestinian joy, even just for a few hours, at a time of such acute suffering.
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At 5:45 a.m., as if to make this point, the DJ plays a UK Garage remix of Palestinian rap track “Inn Ann” by Daboor & Shabjdeed, a song that became an anthem of Palestinian resistance during the 2021 Unity Intifada. The crowd screams the Arabic lyrics, jumping up and down, hugging one another, filming despite the no-phone policy. Geisha Mars and the sparkly-jacketed bouncer join the DJ behind the decks, and a sense of freedom, unity, and identity pervades. It’s a high-point of an already euphoric and defiant evening.
As the party wraps up and attendees dissipate into the quiet Jerusalem streets, a large, yellow Hyundai bulldozer rolls past — a reminder of the precarious reality in which this beautiful community is trying to flourish.
