Nimrod Arnin. Photo: The Grayzone/File photo.
By Wyatt Reed · April 22, 2025
As Fox News seethes over pro-Palestine slogans at a California music festival, founders of the Israeli rave attacked on Oct 7 claim to be “deeply hurt” by the display. Yet one of the founders has openly bragged of serving as a top Israeli military intelligence asset involved in the Gaza genocide.
Amid a full-blown corporate media freakout over Irish hip hop trio Kneecap projecting “Fuck Israel – Free Palestine” during their set at the Southern California music festival Coachella, the founders of the Israeli Supernova Music festival issued a statement demanding the rappers make amends for having “deeply hurt many in our community” with their alleged “affront” against the Israeli rave community.
“The Nova community was built on the ideals of peace, freedom, and unity through music,” reads a solemn message from the Tribe of Nova Foundation, which was immediately re-broadcast on social media by at least one former official Israeli propagandist. “Our festival was a space where people came together – across cultures and beliefs – to celebrate life. That’s why we believe that even in the face of ignorance or provocation, our response must be rooted in empathy, not hate.”
A review of one of the group’s cofounder’s online activities, however, reveals that rather than the peace-loving hippie he purports to be, he’s taken an active and ambitious role in Israeli intelligence operations in the time since October 7.
As independent researcher “12 Ball” noted on Twitter/X, the day after concertgoers died amid Israel’s response to armed Hamas incursions, Nimrod Arnin – who helped organize the rave and is listed as a Tribe of Nova foundation co-founder – leapt into action to help Israel’s military unleash fire and fury on Gaza.
On Oct 8, Arnin co-founded “Cobalt Complex, an autonomous OSINT & civilian web intelligence (WEBINT) operations center that operated independently to support Israel’s intelligence apparatus at the outset of the Iron Swords War,” he wrote on his LinkedIn profile, using the official Israeli euphemism for its genocidal siege of Gaza.
The day after October 7th, one of the founders of Tribe of Nova (which ran the festival) founded an “an autonomous OSINT & civilian web intelligence…operations center…to support Israel's intelligence” which was within 4 months integrated directly into IDF military intelligence https://t.co/kHKhHn01zt pic.twitter.com/m0PKkf3Utj
— 12 Ball (@BoltzmannBooty) April 17, 2025
“The operations center provided an operational solution to a critical gap, as Israel lacked OSINT capabilities until that point,” Arnin continued.
The ad-hoc intelligence operation apparently proved such a success that within months, Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant “nationalized the complex, integrating it into Aman (IDF Intelligence Directorate) along with all its assets” – an action, Arnin wrote, “that continues to serve Israel’s national security to this day.” The description is accompanied by an undated photo of Arnin walking side-by-side with Gallant, deep in conversation.
Little information on Cobalt Complex’s activities is available online, and it’s unclear how large a role they may have played in terms of Israeli targeting in Gaza. But a little-viewed podcast a month and a half after Israel’s siege began gave possible hints about its origins. In the interview, Arnin claims to have “saved a hundred people that Sunday” by having rapidly “built databases” and “sent [Israeli] forces to locate people.”
The operation quickly morphed into an official missing persons database, according to the festival founder. “Along with the field teams, we managed an information file in cooperation with the technological war room.”
Arnin’s ties to the Israeli security state are extensive. Along with his role at Cobalt Complex, he serves on the advisory board of Tel Aviv-based tech startup Dot Saga, a company founded by a former Israeli intelligence officer which boasts of producing software capable of “transforming any phone into an elite communication handset.”
As The Grayzone has documented, as many as several hundred Israelis were killed across the southern Gaza envelope when Israeli military officials deployed the Hannibal Directive, which orders army assets to kill Israeli civilians and soldiers, rather than allowing them to be taken captive by Palestinian resistance groups. As Israel has sought to counter growing international anger over the horrific carnage in Gaza in the 18 months since, a cottage industry of heavily-subsidized Zionist opportunists has sprouted up to drown out the suffering of Palestinians with aggressive reminders that Israelis were once killed, too – though, naturally, without any mention of the Israeli army’s role.
The “unadulterated horror theater” of the Nova propaganda push
In cities including Tel Aviv, New York, Los Angeles, Miami, and Toronto, Israel’s hasbara industrial complex deployed a traveling carnival of horrors publicly exhibited by the Tribe of Nova foundation. Originally conceived as a somber 9/11 Museum-style spectacle, the Nova Exhibition’s official website describes it as “a carefully-crafted mosaic of information, evidence, and emotion” which “creates a sacred space echoing the weight of the victims’ and survivors’ memories, surrounded by remains salvaged from the festival grounds” – including a pile of shoes placed by curators in a cynical nod to the Holocaust. An April 19 Instagram post by the Nova Exhibition page boasted that over 300,000 people have observed the installation since its inception.
The Nova Exhibition in Toronto remembers one of the most depraved atrocities committed against the Jewish people on October 7, 2023.
378 festival attendees were brutally murdered at the hands of the genocidal death cult Hamas.
Conservatives honour their memories by standing… pic.twitter.com/jPlzSfq6cM
— Pierre Poilievre (@PierrePoilievre) April 22, 2025
A review of the New York showing by art critic Emily Colucci, however, described the exhibit as “pure, unadulterated, horror theater… closer to rubbernecking at a car crash or stomping through a recreation of Jonestown.” Nevertheless, it has succeeded in generating an emotional response, she wrote. While aware that the “elaborately staged, club-lit, Instagram museum aesthetics [were] being utilized for propaganda,” she noted that “it is possibly the most effectively convincing that I’ve ever experienced.” So much so, she wrote, that “I’m not sure how anyone could leave that exhibition without furiously feeling like, fuck it, nuke Gaza today,” noting, “That thought crossed my mind and I don’t even agree with that!!”
Frustrated by the displays of opposition to the Gaza genocide at Coachella, the Tribe of Nova issued plea for “members of Kneecap to visit the Nova Exhibition in Toronto and experience firsthand the stories of those who were murdered, those who survived, and those who are still being held hostage,” in order for the musicians “to connect. To witness. To understand.”
Yet Arnin, the founder of the Nova festival, has not undertaken any visible attempt to “connect” with the nightmare he unleashed on Gazan society through his collaboration with Israeli intelligence as it embarked on an industrial scale slaughter. Nor does he seem to understand that his orgiastic dance party — “a space where people came together – across cultures and beliefs” — was officially off limits to the inhabitants of Gaza languishing in a hyper-surveilled human warehouse just a kilometer or two away.
Every Day the Gaza Holocaust Continues, the Empire Tells the Truth About Itself
In his podcast interview a month and a half after Oct 7, Arnin declared that during the festival, “our initial goal was to save as many lives as possible,” adding, “I only recently realized that we are now saving lives as well.” If he was working as closely with Israeli intelligence as he claims, it’s likely he was taking away droves of lives as well – and is at peace with his decision.
“What motivates me is the focus on good and evil, light and darkness,” Arnin stated. Likening the killings at the Supernova festival to the galactic phenomenon for which the rave was named, he explained, “it’s very symbolic that darkness and light meet so fiercely… A supernova isn’t an explosion, but a collision between two forces that can’t be contained. “
Instead, “their energetic combination explodes because they can’t connect to one another… That’s exactly what happened at the Supernova party. Light and darkness, good and evil, could not live together even for a minute.”
Wyatt Reed
Wyatt Reed is a Blacksburg, Virginia-based writer and activist who spent several years in Latin America.
