Komunitas
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Ben Gurion does yoga on the beach. | Wikimedia Commons ::: spoiler [2026-06-12] The Baffler Breathe in. Notice your chest rise. Notice a photo showing several people inside a poorly lit space with arms reaching for the sky. Foam mats separate their bare feet from uneven concrete. They gather in what appears to be the fourth level of a parking garage in, according to the caption, central Israel. Exhale. Note that these people are underground, where they “practice yoga as the Iranian regime continues to fire ballistic missiles at Israel.” The ballistic missiles from the Islamic Republic did for some time “continue,” but there were several intervening months between the Twelve-Day War—the U.S.-Israeli assault on Iran last year—and March 18 of this year, when these scenes were captured. What happened? According to StandWithUs, the U.S.-based nonprofit behind the photo caption, the answer is Arab (and Arab-adjacent, we’re all approximately the same) violence, definitionally illogical and aggressive. For us, what happened is that the United States and Israel resumed their war of aggression against Iran, starting with a wave of attacks that included the assassination of Iran’s head of state—and a religious leader for millions of Shia Muslims around the world—and the targeting of an elementary school not once but three times, resulting in the killing of at least 120 school children. Pause. The yogi closes their eyes. Against the madness, Israelis reach for equanimity through their bodies. They control their breathing to control their persons; the body is the first site of control. The colonizer understands this better than most. Israelis claim they’ve been doing yoga for about as long as their country’s been around. Some have condemned the practice, given its historical association with Hinduism. According to the Gal Einai Institute, which is committed to Torah study, yoga “has negative energy which is connected to Avodah Zarah, idol worship, and is thus unacceptable, even if the person practicing does not have these negative thoughts.” Gutman Locks, a yogi-turned-rabbi, similarly claims that the sun salutation pose was intended for sun worship, and in the words of an article for the Jerusalem Post believes “that these elements are still deeply embedded in yoga practice and they are a form of deity worship that contaminates Jews.” He has, since his turn to orthodoxy, penned multiple books, including an autobiography titled Coming Down to Earth. According to Chabad’s magazine, it’s “especially informative for seekers ensconced or entranced by Eastern paths.” Today, he supports Western Wall goers through prayer, encouraging them to remember the sick and the soldiers. Against the madness, Israelis reach for equanimity through their bodies. They control their breathing to control their persons; the body is the first site of control. The colonizer understands this better than most. Despite the practice’s unfavorable origins, a version of yoga ethnographer Celia Rothenberg calls “Jewish yoga” remains for its practitioners “a promising tool that can be used to increase spirituality, bodily strength, and flexibility,” without relying “on Hinduism’s religious belief system for meaning.” Here, yoga is not a practice in its own right but a scaffolding, a terra nullius fertile—like Palestine, like hummus—for the taking. Rothenberg sources the rise of Jewish yoga to the Jewish Renewal movement that emerged in the United States in the 1960s, and which worked to “reinvigorate and reinterpret ‘traditional Judaism’ in innovative and often controversial ways,” including “Torah raves” (in Berkeley). Her ethnographic research includes participant-observation in Jewish yoga classes in Canada, where, she notes, yogis were generally either Canadian or Israeli middle-aged professionals from Ashkenazi backgrounds. As in American yoga circles, there’s a race-class element here, overshadowed in Israel by the state’s foremost binding supremacy: religion. For others, the connection between Israel and yoga is not controversial but fated: It is only “natural for an ancient people to be drawn to an ancient practice,” reads a 2019 article in the Jerusalem Post. Another article from that year, in the Times of Israel, called “Om or Shalom?: Judaism’s integration of East and West,” opens with this set of observations: The word “yoga” means “to unite.” Among practitioners, there is a custom to end each session by chanting “Om,” a sacred Indian mantra that connotes an infinitely expanding, ultimate unity. I had a Jewish yoga teacher who would conclude each lesson with “shalom,” the Hebrew word for “peace.” Unwittingly, he touched upon a profound idea: that “Om” and “shalom” rhyme is no accident, and the relation between the two words reflects both the similarities and the differences between Judaism and Eastern spiritual traditions. That two words from two different languages with no known etymological overlap share a sound may in fact be a coincidence. This is okay. Meaning can be forged. Our author’s argument does not gain rigor. We read on to learn that the East is water and the West is fire. We proceed from these ontological assumptions to create a world within a world. “The sound of the ‘Om’ rises up from the water,” he writes. He raises the Tao—the East is fluid, after all—which “offers a passive approach to reality,” “accepting” it and “flowing” through it. Inhale racist supremacy, exhale Dunning-Krugerite confidence. “Fire symbolizes the active principle, that which imposes its will upon reality.” Israel is nothing if not an imposition. “Dynamism,” which he defines as “the will to effect change in the world, and the desire for progress—these are the foundations of Western society.” And this is Orientalist garbage with gendered echoes of anthropologist Sherry Ortner’s woman-is-to-man-as-nature-is-to-culture; fitting for a desperate-to-dominate society that recognizes raping natives as among the settler-soldier’s rights. By the 1970s, thanks in part to the arrival of settlers inspired by the Jewish renewal movement, yoga was around in Israel, although it didn’t get big until the 1990s. The 1990s also saw blooming diplomatic relations between India and the Zionist state, after which more Israelis started traveling east. In 2008, upwards of forty thousand Israelis visited the country. In the years since, this number has expanded, alongside the settler state’s territorial claims—and the stress of staking these out. Colonial soldiers need a break. Owing to Israel’s emergence “as a backyard of Israeli military forces”—a glorified military base—it’s “almost [become] a tradition [for soldiers] to have a post-military tenure in India to de-stress themselves,” according to the Times of Israel. Ten years later, around eighty thousand visited annually. Historically, colonial forces had their motherland to return to. In Israel, however, home is the colony or, in the words of one Times of Israel blogger, “the natives of the state of Israel were essentially immigrants.” (If the immigrants are natives, it follows that the natives can be immigrants, as to Israelis these are creatures of no particular place.) If home is the colony, where does one go to escape? Israelis have two options: Retreat via mind or body. Why choose? Yoga is both/and. 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. According to the Feldenkrais website, the practice is “based on principles of physics, biomechanics, and an empirical understanding of learning and human development.” Less east, more facts. All vibes. Someone on the website calls it “movement medicine”—a borrowing of medical language, for legitimacy and originality. The Method is like if “exercise and meditation had a love child.” What could be more Israeli? 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. Life in Israel is, I hear, very difficult these days. Former and current soldiers, especially, are overwhelmed. I search “soldier yoga Israeli” and click on a news segment that opens with people downward-dogging in a circle. Birds chirp and a woman who sounds like AI announces, “they say yoga is a way of life. But for some, yoga, post-October 7, is a matter of life and death.” Now we’re talking to a yoga instructor-soldier: He meditated, he says, early on the morning of October 7th. He was drinking his tea when “all the craziness started happening . . . I thought to myself, where is my place on this day?” His place, it turns out, was in a combat unit. He’d served his country before. This time, though, was different: The fighting in Gaza “re-triggered his post-trauma.” In the video, a woman is asked if she feels mental health in Israel is “in crisis” today. “Oh, completely a crisis. . . . Tens of thousands of people are dealing with PTSD but no one talks about it.” A Reuters report from January 2026 shares that the incidence of PTSD among soldiers is up by almost 40 percent since September 2023. They are traumatized, allegedly, over fear of death and what they did to others, suffering “moral injury over accidental killing of innocents,” according to a clinical expert. Setting “accidental” to the side, nationally, the prevalence of PTSD could be as high as 30 percent, double that of pre-October 7, with 42 percent of young adults—many of whom have or will serve in the military—meeting criteria for the diagnosis, according to one study. The diagnosis as we know it emerged largely through the consequences of an American war of aggression. Soldiers coming home from Vietnam struggled to metabolize the immense harm they had witnessed and caused to others. PTSD, in line with the rest of the DSM, concerned itself with symptoms rather than cause, and the doctor’s job was to focus on the patient. Original sin could be displaced. What mattered instead was feelings, flashbacks, burdens limited to the space of a single body. By medicalizing the consequences of murder, the issue was no longer sin at all—medicine veers away from moral language, from a world beyond the therapeutic encounter. A doctor knows better than to blame a diabetic for their poorly controlled blood sugar or a soldier who looks down the barrel of their gun, locks in on a woman older than the Zionist state, pulls the trigger, then, months later, wets his bed or abuses his partner. Through yoga, therapy, surfing, self-affirmation, the threat can be eliminated, and the integrity of the self reconstituted. Today psychologists in Israel are clarifying their nomenclature, to better capture what their soldiers are facing since Gaza. An article in Haaretz from April 2026 distinguishes between PTSD and moral injury, conflated or combined just the year prior, in the combat setting. PTSD, we learn, is “a fear-based reaction,” whereas moral injury arises when “someone does something, or witnesses something, that flagrantly violates his or her moral code. ” PTSD through medicalization sidesteps the moral question, presumably because murder and its afterlives reflect poorly on the killer. In comes moral injury with a work-around: It faces the moral question directly by making its very articulation a reflection of one’s moral integrity, a sign of redeemability. Where PTSD conjures a weakness of mind, weakness here a lesser evil than guilt, moral injury allows for a semantic and psychic preservation of ego. One’s morals remain strong; their strength is what causes the wounding, a need for _re_alignment. Today, the Israeli soldier we met in the post-October 7 yoga video is part of an organization called Brothers in Yoga (there’s a Sisters in Yoga, too) to help soldiers on their “path towards healing” after “going through” fighting in Gaza. When they return and turn to yoga, it is “amazing beyond words . . . when someone who is dealing with PTSD and is a model for participants.” Through this, “they see the growth, they see the opportunity to heal very, very deeply, and to help others” modeled; they find the permission to do the same. Similarly, healing from moral injury requires “work on acceptance and making peace with the deed that caused the crisis. In other words, the person needs to learn to forgive himself.” In other words, a person must learn to disregard the consequences of their actions, disregard the people they harm. Good news, Israelis are well-equipped, their entire sense of self premised on a twinned supremacy and erasure. A person who acts in violation of their moral world has the good fortune of keeping that world intact; it remains a place they return to. For many Israelis, Gaza breached the border. Psychic threats are no match for the world’s most moral army; through yoga, therapy, surfing, self-affirmation (saying “we’re the most moral army” over and over), the threat can be eliminated, and the integrity of the self reconstituted. It starts by acknowledging the breach. Delicately, without losing sight of one’s why, oneself, one’s people: You feel like a bad person because you’re actually a good person who did bad things and the fact that you feel bad about it is an indication of your goodness. Doing the bad things actually helps you realize you’re a good person. The people you killed? They started you along your healing journey. Notice that, up until this point, there has been no mention of the word Palestinian. Supremacy requires attention steadied on the self. Through yoga—by which I mean its commodified western mutation—this trained inward attention is not narcissism but a means to its opposite, extending one’s consciousness beyond the self. Never, of course, to get to the material world but something more convenient, the universe, far enough away from the ground that the dead children are out of view. Moral injury looks the same way, from self to values, to get to well again. The Palestinian perspective is neither encountered nor relevant. Balance: While some Israelis, in their HIIT classes, release endorphins to chants like “May Their Village Burn,” others offer yoga as a way to end suffering for all. One Israeli yogi, before October 2023, presented this olive branch of an idea: Last year in India, I taught yoga in schools and saw beauty and positive energy flow and emanate outward. I wonder if we, Palestinians and Israelis, can relax and create goodness together to share with our neighbors? If we can plant seeds for a new, brighter reality in this region through yoga? An essay in the Forward called “Can Yoga Fix the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict?” from 2015 opens with our Israeli narrator in warrior’s pose. She reaches out to a Palestinian yoga institute in the West Bank called Farashe, Arabic for “butterfly,” requesting an interview, and is told no because the studio adheres to BDS. “Knowing I was not welcome,” our tenacious author, here to attend a class, keeps “a low profile.” Over the course of the session, she starts feeling more “at ease.” Apparently worth mentioning is that the women here do not cover their hair. We finish with our narrator in her yoga class, “with the instructor calling for Shavasana, or the ‘corpse pose.’” She shares with us this profundity: “As I lay there, I found myself wishing for fewer corpses in this troubled land, and for warriors on both sides of the checkpoint to reverse direction and find a new practice.” Peace inside of us to radiate peace outward. If only imperialism could be worked out through breath work. Peace beyond the body is impossible, for Israelis, because the Arabs are stubborn in their antisemitic unwillingness to make peace with the Jews. Peace is impossible, for the people Israel occupies, because peace and occupation are mutually exclusive. For Israelis this can be achieved through total annihilation of those capable of making any unwelcome noise. Most Israelis are, since the start of the genocide, honest about what they’re up to: Killing is the means and the cost of the Zionist state, its strength. Strong is good. The state is good. Here, practicing one’s aim is, in the words of one settler, “like yoga.” ::: ::: spoiler Editor’s note: due to WebP bs I discovered this image was posted to /r/OldSchoolCool, not all hot grandmas I guess. Also, this article is good despite it being The Baffler. All of the articles are good. That’s why I post them. :::
Komunitas
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Four migrant workers – Ullah Ismat Qiemi, Safi Iayjad, Amin Fazal Khogjani, and Waseem Khan – were burned alive in a car for demanding the regularization of their work at the beginning of June in Amendolara, Italy. “They were farmhands working in our fruit and vegetable harvests, exploited like slaves,” the Calabria chapter of left party Potere al Popolo stated. “When they found the courage to rebel and demand a proper contract, they were punished in a horrific manner: the gangmasters trapped them inside a car at a rest stop near Cosenza and set it on fire.” The event was caught on camera and expanded upon by Mohammad Taj Alamyar, a fifth worker who survived the attack. In his testimony, he described the coercive conditions in which he and his comrades were forced to live, including unstable housing, delayed payments, and the absence of working contracts. According to the trade union confederation CGIL, up to 12,000 farm workers in the region of Calabria alone might be exposed to similar treatment – which allows large companies to save on labor costs and increase profits. Read more: Outrage in Ireland after Congolese man Yves Sakila killed as guards kneel on his neck The five workers operated under the caporalato system, an illegal form of labor organization where intermediaries (caporali) hire temporary laborers on behalf of employers, often gaining control over all aspects of their lives. These gangmasters can deduct rent and transportation costs from the workers’ already low daily wage, keeping them in a constant state of need, CGIL warned. Potere al Popolo’s Giuliano Granato emphasizes the model is present not only in agriculture, where it is perhaps most notorious, but also in sectors like construction and textile production, spanning across the whole country. While the workforce used to comprise Italian workers, it now consists largely of migrants from countries including India, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan. While technically workers arrive in Italy legally, Granato told BreakThrough News, they are exploited from their very first moments there. “To reach Italy in the first place, workers and their families are forced to take on debts. When they arrive here, they have to pay off these debts – only to often discover that the companies they were told about may not even exist or do not want to employ them, and they end up in a slavery-like situation.” The caporalato system is illegal in Italy, but trade unions warn that the implementation of legislation remains lacking. And when cases of extreme violence turn public attention to specific workers exploited under this model, rarely does the discussion address responsibility beyond the gangmaster level. Potere al Popolo insists it is crucial to move beyond this as the investigation of Qiemi, Iayjad, Khogjani, and Khan’s murder unfolds. “The two men who murdered the four farmhands were gangmasters who profited at the expense of these workers, but they were the second-to-last link in the chain,” Granato says. “Who is above them? Which companies did they work for? Which farms did they harvest strawberries on? We need to go all the way up the chain.” Read more: Thousands protest against war and cost of living crisis in Italy The response to the murder has also unmasked institutional duplicity, Granato points out. “I’m comparing the institutional reaction to the one we observed in Modena, when a 31-year-old man, an Italian citizen born to a Moroccan family, drove his car into a crowd, sending several people to the hospital. Both Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and President Sergio Mattarella rushed to the city.” “In the case of Amendolara, no one went. These four murdered farmworkers clearly do not deserve institutional outrage.” The popular response differed from the institutional one, although anti-migrant narratives and the short time allocated to organizing a local demonstration on June 6 likely impacted participation. However, in the general population “there was a great deal of outrage over this murder, over this barbarity – because not only were four people killed, but they were killed in a barbaric manner, burned alive and locked up,” Granato says. In the aftermath of the workers’ murder, Potere al Popolo and other progressive organizations are demanding a comprehensive response to the system enabling this type of crime. “Calabria cannot continue to be plagued by these atrocities as if they were natural, inevitable occurrences unrelated to politics,” Potere al Popolo Calabria wrote ahead of the protest. “They are not. They have a name: caporalato, institutional racism, class exploitation.” Ana Vračar , June 12, 2026 From BT News via This RSS Feed.