How I Was Brainwashed

On institutional indoctrination

Indie Nile just released a video featuring my testimony about the Mechinot, the pre-military preparatory programs at the heart of the religious-Zionist project. I attended the first and most prominent one, Bnei David, and my family was deeply involved in funding, connecting, and strategically growing these institutions and the broader infrastructure of settlement and power.

In this conversation we go into how these institutions use religious texts and authority to fuse nationalism with religious identity and perpetuate the system. How a hierarchy of souls is taught from childhood and an entire people are classified as subhuman. How ancient scripture is weaponized for modern warfare. How Zionism is built to meet you wherever you are, religious or secular, and always arrives at the same supremacy. How critical thinking is broken down from birth through school through Mechina through military service until people outsource their conscience entirely. How fear keeps an entire nation’s nervous system dysregulated, and how violence becomes the only way to find coherence. How dissenters are hunted and how the system proves exactly what it is by how it punishes anyone who names it. And the complexities of navigating family when the ideology becomes more important than the bond between parent and child.

Link to video.

The point of sharing this is not to judge or condemn the people inside it. I was inside it. The point is to expose the mechanisms so they can be understood, so the shame of having been conditioned can be released, and so the cycle can finally break.

I was always taught that the other side brainwashes their children. But if I was willing to recognize another person’s capacity to be brainwashed, I had to be willing to recognize my own.

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