berlin | It’s 4 a.m. at the KaterHolzig club and hundreds of beautiful young people are going crazy on the dance floor to the sound of heavy electronic beats.
To the casual clubber, it’s another ordinary night out in Europe’s hottest city. But this gathering is far from ordinary. Many of those dancing are immigrants from two countries whose ongoing tensions could erupt at any given moment.
Welcome to the first Iranian-Israeli techno party organized by the collective No Beef.
The scene is a natural fit for Berlin, where thousands of Iranian and Israeli immigrants live side by side. Tonight they are clubbing together inside a World War II–era German soap factory that now houses some of the city’s best parties, high, happy and sweaty, grinding to tunes spun by DJs from Tehran and Tel Aviv.
The air is filled with small talk in Hebrew, Farsi and everyone’s common language, German. Nobody discusses politics or nuclear bombs. It’s just a bunch of young people sitting together, enjoying the moment and connecting to each other through the music.
That’s what connected the party’s two organizers, Reza Khani and Roy Siny.
Khani, 36, is known in Berlin nightlife as the proprietor of a successful bar in the hip Kreuzberg neighborhood. Siny, 35, is a doctoral student at Potsdam University by day and a popular techno DJ by night.
The two met at Khani’s bar. Siny was having drinks with his girlfriend and ended up playing a spontaneous set. Few words were exchanged, but the pair connected again on Facebook, at the bottom of a long comment thread about the situation in the Middle East.
Siny was engaged in a heated discussion with radical German anti-Israel activists. Khani, who was tired of seeing the argument popping up on his feed, messaged him privately and told him to take it easy.
“I told him he’s wasting his energy on people who have no real understanding of our reality,” Khani said. “That these guys are only interested in arguing, not in finding solutions. We started talking, and it was very clear we have much more in common than just our love for music.”
Thus was born No Beef. Israeli Guy “Katzele” Kenneth and Iranians Namito Khalaj and Afagh Irandoost were the first to join. DJ Asaf Samuel (Michatronix) was hauled over from Tel Aviv to play the first party on Aug. 17. A line of hundreds of people stretched 300 feet down the block.
“We decided we don’t want any kind of brochures or political talk in our party, just good music and good vibes,” Siny said. “We wanted people coming to our party to feel at home and connect with each other, and I think we succeeded in that.”
After recovering from their first party, Siny and Khani sat down to plan a mutual trip to Israel — and another party. If someone had stumbled into the meeting, it would have been hard to tell who was the Israeli and who was the Iranian, except for the fact that Siny was wearing a Hapoel Tel Aviv F.C. soccer T-shirt. Germans can’t really tell them apart.
“We are similar in so many ways,” Khani said. “Iranians and Israelis have gone through a lot of tough experiences in their lives and it makes them, in a way, a bit melancholic. It’s something we don’t have in common with, let’s say, Canadians.”
Siny said Khani told him of his most vivid childhood memory: hiding from Iraqi bombers strafing Iran during the eight-year war between the countries. Siny had the same memory of running to the bomb shelter as Iraqi rockets fell on Israel during the 1991 Gulf War.
“Young Germans, for example, will never be able to understand that,” Siny said. “They lead very comfortable lives. They don’t know what war is. Many of them come to Berlin, they party, they sometimes study, they don’t really need to work, and they don’t even realize how privileged they are and always complain about the stupidest things. They’ve never had to struggle to survive like us.”
Both men say their parties are intended not only to bring together two peoples who have much in common, but also to show the rest of the world that the Iranian and Israeli people are not enemies — that there is, well, no beef.