The world looked on as Israeli politicians unleashed a torrent of incendiary rhetoric calling for the complete destruction of Gaza, immediately after Hamas’s cross-border operation on October 7, 2023.

They called for the destruction of the Palestinian enclave, and for no limits to achieve that.

“There is no such thing as uninvolved civilians in Gaza,” Amihai Eliyahu, the country’s Minister of Heritage said in November, barely a month after the attack, in describing those he believed “should not continue living on the face of Earth”.

The idea of wiping Gaza off the map had taken hold by then, but some even went as far as describing the magnitude of force it demanded.

“Jewish wrath should shake the foundations of the world,” said Galit Distel Atbaryan, an Israeli member of Knesset. “Anything less is immoral.”

That understanding of “morality” did not remain in the realm of politics. The message quickly seeped into Israel’s peace-loving, spiritual circles.

The message, which was once shouted by Knesset members on TV segments, began to be voiced by yoga instructors, spiritual influencers as well as those in the entertainment industry.

So much so that a Haaretz columnist coined a term to describe them.

In an opinion piece published this month, Haaretz columnist Alon Idan coined the term “YogiNazis” to refer to a segment of Israeli society that combines spiritual or wellness practices with support for genocidal actions.

The term combines the word Nazi and ‘yogi’, Indian mystics who mastered the ancient form of yoga exercise. 

For her, the contradiction doesn’t exist. “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,” she reportedly says in one of her videos.

To justify her stance, Lafair turned to scripture in one of her posts where she quoted the biblical command: “Blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; thou shalt not forget,” the article notes.

In Jewish tradition, Amalek is believed to be an ancient tribe said to have attacked the Israelites during their exodus from Egypt, later immortalised as a stand-in for its existential enemies.

Yet, Lafair wasn’t the first to invoke Amalek in the context of Gaza. That correlation had already been drawn from the very top.

On October 28, 2023, as Israeli air strikes pounded Gaza and the death toll mounted, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that Israelis “must remember what Amalek has done to you,” quoting the same verse.

Currently, the moral behaviour of Israel stands condemned at the ICJ, the ICC, in the media, in politics as well as the court of public opinion.

But that does little for contemporary figures such as Shlomo Brody, a Rabbi and columnist for the Jerusalem Post.

“The deaths of noncombatants are regrettable and tragic, but they are not immoral,” he insists.

Brody even appears dissatisfied with what he perceives as excessive caution on the part of Israeli forces.