Israel, one story goes, emerged through the darkness of the Nazi Holocaust; its people promised they would never again be perceived as weak. The nation of soldiers believed that there was blame to be placed on European Jewry themselves, for their failure to resist the Nazi death camps. Weakness—in mind or body—was not simply a physiological state; it would become a moral failing. Israel would be different, through its exercise of something called “muscular Judaism.” Current Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently argued, in a televised speech, that “Jesus had no advantage over Genghis Khan.” He’s been going at this for a while; in 2018 he tweeted, “the weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history while the strong, for good or for ill, survive. The strong are respected, and alliances are made with the strong, and in the end peace is made with the strong.”
Strength starts with the body. Today, Israel is known for its wellness culture. Enjoy its “Mediterranean” cuisine, among the healthiest in the world. Float in the Dead Sea or exfoliate and detoxify your skin with one of the many lines of scrubs made from the stolen minerals. Yoga, hike, spa, sun. There’s something here for everyone. For some, yoga is too flimsy. For the already-mentally strong, the fintechs and Netanyahus, Israel has something adjacent to yoga called the Feldenkrais Method, developed by an Israeli physicist and judo expert, that addresses not the mind but the nervous system. Between 1951 and 1953, Moshe Feldenkrais led the Israeli Army Department of Electronics. He played sports and suffered chronic knee pain; he found, one story goes, a way to avoid surgery—by controlling his brain. After his military service, he committed himself to developing his Method, to help others heal as he did. In 1957, he started giving lessons to Israel’s first prime and defense minister, David Ben Gurion, eventually teaching the founder of the Zionist state to, at age seventy, stand on his head.
[...] Mind-body, brain-body, however we do it, we do it to get to wellness, vitality, beauty—not in pursuit of vanity but for holistic reasons. Sexual fitness inevitably follows. “Why Are Israelis So Sexy?” reads a headline in the Times of Israel, published almost two years into the genocide. We start off strong, with farmers in South Africa. We learn about another love child, the zorse, from “the conjugals” of a zebra and horse, an animal that has “hybrid vigour.” So it goes for the Israelis, although there is more “to this sexiness than just the healthy cross-pollination of our genomic ingathering.” There are layers beyond eugenics: For example, Israelis “know how to get their hands dirty, do the hard work—clean the house, fix their own stuff, pull together as a unit, function in community. They help each other. This is native to the culture.” What else is “native” to the settler nation? Well, before they gave us the normalization of genocide, took pictures of themselves posing for dating apps next to lingerie, in the homes of women they displaced, there was a need to “direct all this sexiness somewhere.” So, the “Israelis basically birthed the trance music scene in the late 1980s in Goa, and it spread like oil on a suntanned back, the world over. They made the world party, and party hard.”
Goa is in India. We already talked about how Israelis got there. When they went back, they felt and looked good. Look at those Arabs, emaciated, mutilated. And now look at Israelis—if God controls the world, and the people of Israel are strong, beautiful, glowing, it must be that God made them so. Which means God is on Israel’s side. Basking in God’s favor, Israel ranks amongst the happiest countries in the world, according to the World Happiness Report. Still, even here it is difficult to feel happy all the time. Sometimes, things happen that make you feel less happy, less good. Things like Gaza—the settler soldier’s euphemism for what they did there.
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