Destroying Gaza 'With Love': Israel's New YogiNazis

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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.