“May Your Village Burn”: Inside Israel’s Wellness Industry by Fariha Róisín

In November 2023, Israeli influencer and fitness trainer Hen Ben Moha shared a viral video of an aerobics class. In it, rows of Lululemon-clad Israeli women bounced up and down in unison, their bodies synchronized, voices unified in a chant: “May your village burn.”

You can see their faces agitated by sweat, their certainty, the way the rhythm of the words becomes ritual itself, a one-two-kick, a one-two-bounce, as they repeat, “May your village burn.” It’s the casualness of it that haunts—not the sociopathy expressed, but the ordinariness with which it is stated. The banality of evil is astonishing, as Hannah Arendt knew, because of the ease of the villainy. This was not a military parade or a political speech; it was a fitness class. Genocide as aerobics routine.