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Who said spirituality and ethnic cleansing don't go together? Israel is full of spiritual types who view the annihilation of the other as a form of personal growth
Alon Idan (Haaretz)
May 18, 2025 (Leer en castellano)
Rivka Lafair is a "facilitator of workshops, meet-ups and group sessions
on yoga themes, teacher of feminine yoga and personal development." She
lives in the settlement of Shiloh in the southern West Bank and terms
herself a "proud Jew" who "thinks outside the box." Lovely. Also, she
also wants to annihilate and expel two million human beings in the Gaza
Strip.
Lafair belongs to a stream within Israeli Judaism that can
be described as "YogiNazis": people whose spiritualism underpins their
Nazism. They are a relatively new sub-stratum – albeit with deep roots
in the local culture – that has gained popularity since October 7,
largely because of its ability to weld together concepts that, on the
surface, seem like polar opposites: spirituality and annihilation,
empowerment and expulsion, yoga and starvation, retreats and carpet
bombing.
Lafair is a person who believes that "music has the
power to alter our consciousness," but also that expelling and
annihilating two million Gazans begins with "altering one's
consciousness." In order to succeed in this important cognitive switch,
we have to understand that "we have an enemy here – whom we look in the
eyes and eliminate." Yes, look them in the eyes – don't do it behind
their backs, because we must be in direct and unmediated contact with
those we're annihilating.
And to make it clear that by "enemy"
she doesn't mean only Hamas terrorists, she clarifies: "We are committed
to take revenge and destroy Gaza. From infant to old woman." She tops
it off with an appropriate Bible verse: "Thou shalt blot out the
remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; thou shalt not forget."
Lafair
understands that people tend to be puzzled when facing this dissonance
between spirituality and annihilation. So she in one of her videos, she
has "a message to everyone who doesn't understand how it's possible to
be spiritual, to teach yoga and hold retreats, whilst calling for the
expulsion and annihilaSHon [sic] of your enemy."
Indeed, her
answer is simple: "I love my people with an undying love, and I hate my
enemy with an undying hatred… One does not contradict the other. One can
be a person filled with values and love, and at the same time… you also
know what is right and what is wrong, you stand firm against your enemy
and you know what must be done with them."
So, what must be done with them? (SHSHSH… don't tell anyone.)
And
if Lafair's Nazi-spiritualism can be written off because she's a
settler who's found an efficient solution for realizing the idea of
Greater Israel, it's worth noting that this is a far broader phenomenon
that isn't limited to the occupied territories.
One day before
Holocaust Remembrance Day, for example, standup comedian and satirist
Gil Kopatz, who has been flirting with spirituality and religion for
years, posted the following: "If you feed sharks, they eventually eat
you. If you feed Gazans, they eventually eat you. I support making
sharks extinct and exterminating Gazans. Reflections for Holocaust
Remembrance Day 2025."
After the post generated a "storm," Kopatz
posted a clarification: "I don't have an ounce of compassion for the
Gazans. For Arabs as a whole, yes, for human beings as a whole, yes, for
sharks – no, and not for human beasts." Of course, his desire to
eradicate millions of people doesn't imply he's a bad person. Indeed, "I
consider myself to be a humane, liberal and moral person," he writes.
To top it off, he ends the post with a bit of dark humor: "It's not
genocide, it's pesticide, and its essential." A regular riot that one,
eh?
In fact, most of the spiritual vocabulary in Israel has been
mobilized in service of YogiNazism. Take M., for example, a woman from a
large well-to-do city a few kilometers north of Tel Aviv. She runs a
studio described as "a pleasant space, filled with inspiration," which
espouses three values: "Creativity. Emotion. Experience."
In this
pleasant space she facilitates "creativity groups for children – from
the age of four and up; personal emotional guidance for children and
youth – with a gentle, connecting and nurturing approach." All of this
happens, of course, in "a homey, warm and professional atmosphere"
(those interested are "lovingly invited").
Yet, when this same M.
is shown a video showing a hungry child in the Gaza Strip, she asserts
immediately: "Not credible. Sorry. I've seen how clips are staged –
positioning, applying makeup, putting together a script." Never mind not
credible, but the same woman who cares for children "with a gentle,
connecting and nurturing approach" explains, "You know what? Even if it
is real, after October 7, I don't have an ounce of compassion for anyone
there. Not even for children." Furthermore: "It saddens me to see
people among us actually sharing this s**t, and worse, identifying with
it and expressing pain."
To make it clear that she's not a
callous person, she sums up: "The writer is a mother, a lover of
humanity and an all around great person." It's just that "October 7 took
away my innocence." Poor woman, she's really struggling.
A.,
too, is not a settler. She lives in a well-established city in Israel
and is simply looking to find a new home for "an amazing dog!! !! She's
fully house-trained, a dog filled with love who needs a warm, loving
home."
So much caring, so much love, so much compassion. And yet,
when she encounters a photograph of a Gazan child who was killed in an
Israeli bombing, she instantly grasps that someone is trying to confuse
her, and posts: "Let's make things clear. If there had been no massacre
here, there would be no massacre there!! It's not the chicken-and-egg
case!! !"
Afterwards, when the chicken and egg can't seem to
figure out what she meant, she resorts to some of the "best" debunked
calumnies spread in the wake of the horrific massacre – "after babies
here were burned, their heads chopped off, put into an oven" – and
concludes resoundingly: "There was no reason to send in a container of
clothes for their children."
Of course, she too was once a
compassionate, sensitive person – "Don't get me wrong, I thought exactly
like you until October 6, but if someone comes to kill you… it's case
closed. They started and we will finish!! !" (don't you mean 'finiSH?')
There
are many of these in present-day Israel. Spiritual people who view the
annihilation of the other as a form of personal growth and the
eradication of the enemy as empowerment. They live in one big retreat,
where consciousness is so finely tuned that all noise disappears, all
disturbances are muted, so that they are left with only themselves, them
and their inner being – pure, compassionate, unsullied – and finally
able to connect with what resided there all along, waiting to be
revealed: The desire to annihilate and destroy millions of people,
including children, women and the elderly. With great love.
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