Vince Fakhoury Horn reflects on his experiences within the Insight meditation tradition, as an authorized teacher in the lineage, arguing that its senior leaders have remained complicit, through their silence, on the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
đŹ Transcript
Vince: Today I want to speak to you as an authorized representative of the Insight meditation tradition. I was authorized to teachâempowered to teachâby Trudy Goodman and Jack Kornfield in a public ceremony in Los Angeles several years ago.
This is largely going to be a story about my experience with the Insight meditation tradition and a kind of out-loud contemplation and meditation on how this tradition, from my point of view, has ended up two-plus years into what I saw, and see still, as a genocide in Israel with the Gazansâthe Palestinians in Gazaâand how the Insight tradition has remained silent, largely silent, on such an important issue, one of the moral issues of our time, I think.
And of course, I have to acknowledge as a Palestinian American, my view is informed by my own history. But I also want to say most Americans have no clue what the history is here. And I run into this every single day as I talk to people, as I try to share my honest experienceânot hideâto be courageous and open about what itâs like to be a Palestinian living in America today, watching people that I care about be murdered, watching my family in the West Bank be terrified as they live in conditions which I could only describe as concentration-camp-like conditions.
Two of my close family members here in Western North Carolinaâtwo members who married into the larger clan of Fakhourys that live here. The last name of my grandfather was FakhouryâLatif Fakhoury. He raised me; he was my father basically; I called him Pops. A number of family members live here in this area who immigrated here so they could get support from each other.
Two of them have shared that theyâve both lost over 200 family members in Gaza. I want that to land with you for a second.
Two hundred. Thatâs a whole family tree. People are losing family trees.
So to me, as a Buddhist practitioner and as a Palestinian Americanâas someone who cares about things like thisâIâm just completely, utterly fucking heartbroken, and I have been for the last two years. And I feel like during that time Iâve waited, Iâve waited, Iâve waited for the leaders of my own lineageâfor my own teachersâto take a courageous moral stand. And the reality is they have not. And I donât think they will.
And so how in the world did we get here? Iâve been thinking about this a lot, and Iâve been looking at my own disappointment and disillusionment around it. And Iâve been disillusioned and disappointed before by teachersâyou know, Iâm not new to this game. Iâve been a teacher for 15 years. Iâve seen people get disillusioned and disappointed with me. Thatâs, in part, normal.
But this is not. I want to claim that this is not normal. This is an abdication of moral responsibility at the deepest level.
And I guess itâs not that surprising to me as I reflect back on my own experience with this tradition. When I first started engaging in the Insight tradition, around 2003, I went up for my first retreat at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts. It was with Joseph Goldstein and a number of other teachers, who themselves had just exited a six-week retreat with Sayadaw U Pandita, a famous Burmese meditation master who was christening the new Forest Refuge long-term retreat facility with a retreat for the teachers of the Insight tradition.
And for me, this was like falling in love. It was exactly what I was looking forâthe hardcore retreat experience. I had been reading Daniel Ingramâs work prior to thisâmy first teacherâand he advocated for this hardcore contemplative approach. So it was great. I fell in love. I loved the Buddhist tradition. I loved the teachings. I loved the opportunity to go deep and be hardcore in my practice.
But I noticed even thenâme, a millennial practicing in an almost completely Boomer cultureâthat the politics of the place were weird. I remember complaining about this many times to my partner and other friends: how we would go on these retreats and the teachers would act apolitical, but then they would proceed to share reams of political opinions in their Dharma talksâsome of which I agreed with and many of which I did not.
And I found their political views to be quite homogeneous and quite apparent, and yet somehow being couched in apolitical terms. That was the first thing I found odd.
So now when I look at it, this is a modernist movement. This is a modern movement. And part of what one does in the modern world, especially in the marketplace, is you depoliticize things. Itâs not smart business to bring politics into your product or your offering.
Rightâbut this isnât exactly a product, and this is, I think, one of the challenges of bringing Buddhism into the modern world, especially into America, the hyper-capitalist capital of the world. How do you not lose the spirit and essence of the Dharma when adapting to a new environment? How do you not leave something transformative and powerful on the table by not being willing to adapt to the new environment?
I want to hold this tension here between conserve and adapt throughout this monologue if I can, because I think itâs a really important generative tension.
But in my experience with the Insight tradition, when I first started engaging with it in the early aughts, they were caught in a kind of paradox around their own obvious political viewsâwhich were liberal, maybe progressive-leaning, leftish. Very Boomer-centric in terms of a particular kind of generational politics.
And I found it very awkward and weird practicing in those environments. But it was okay. I could deal with it. I could handle it.
Some ten years later, as the times changed and as the traditions changed, I noticed that increasingly the Insight traditionâstarting with Spirit Rock, the more liberal of the two major centers in California, and then following that, the Insight Meditation Societyâbegan making the politics more explicit. They started to own the values of inclusion and wanting to make this available not just to young people (which was kind of their initial politics of attracting the next generation), but also to people of color and the LGBTQI community and all of these different historically marginalized groups they wanted to explicitly include and make space for.
They began to examine some of the cultural conditions they have around the practice, to see the impact and influence of American WASP cultureâWhite Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture. And they started to realize, âOh, even though we went to Asia and did all this stuff, of course we still have this conditioning. And itâs fine for us, and itâs fine for anyone like us, but itâs potentially problematic for other people.â
An example of this: many people who are non-white come to meditation retreat centers and then are told to be silent. They hear that from a different point of view. They donât hear it from the perspective of members of the dominant culture, who can just be quiet and be okay. Rather, theyâre coming from a point of view of having felt like they were silencedâoften systematically silencedâand then theyâre entering into an environment where theyâre told to be quiet again.
This is an example where the Insight tradition, I thinkâand I want to praise the Insight tradition hereâhas done a good job of wrestling with these very challenging questions of how to teach Dharma in a multicultural, postmodern world. And this is a transition, I think, from modern to postmodern: when you start to actually include voices that have been historically marginalized; when you start to become aware of those power differentials and the history there; that is a kind of awakening to a new level of understanding.
In the developmental psychology world, they would call that Pluralism or Postmodernity. And I think itâs really important, because you can take a view on the modern meta-narrative, on the grand story of what modernity is. Itâs about progress and itâs for all people, etc., etc. Itâs like, âOh yeah, thatâs beautiful, but in reality, how does it actually work? Where did all this wealth come from that weâve accrued as modern people? Whoâs left out?â
These are the questions I think you have to start asking if you want to move past the modern mode.
And my teachers did that, and I learned a lot from them in the process. Not just from themâ from others as wellâ but I went through that journey with them as I was training very seriously. I watched their initiatives at their own retreat centers, and that informed how I taught. That informed my views. And I began to believe that, in fact, they were integrating this pluralistic wave of developmentâthis inclusive mindset that can include people regardless of their backgrounds and regardless of their histories: include them financially, include them culturally, etc.
Now, of course, in practice this has been a painful implementation. Iâve seen behind the scenes of that quite a bit, having been married to someone who has worked both inside the Insight tradition as a teacherâteaching at places like Spirit Rockâand who also trained for eight years as a mindfulness meditation mentor in Jack Kornfield and Tara Brachâs Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program. We just called it at home the âMMTCP,â because you couldnât repeat that many times.
So I very much got to see, from their point of view and my own, that the tradition has done a lot in its attempt to include these areas and topics which have historically been excluded.
I want to zoom into a particular time period now, which was the murder of George Floyd during COVID. I was leading, along with my wife and several colleagues, an online retreat just after George was murdered.
During that retreat, all of the people teaching presented as white and looked white. I probably was the only person on the teaching team who wasnât completely white. And we went in just teaching the standard retreat that we would. We would talk about politics and weâd talk about the world, but we did it in abstract and universal termsâtalking about the importance of connecting these things but in the abstract. And we didnât really know how to deal with this. Like, we honestly just were not prepared to be able to hold the pain and grief and anger that was triggered, rightly so, for many of the participantsâespecially the Black American participants.
And I remember in one groupâ a private group that I was holding with like 10 or 15 peopleâ one of the participants, African American, completely lost their shit on me, in the most righteously good way possible. It was just like, âHow can you be teaching this stuff and not speaking directly to the issue of George Floyd?â
To which I did not have an answer. Because I was scaredâthat was the true answer.
As I sat there for an hour in this group, unable to pretend that I was the authority in the room anymore but also responsible for this retreat, I sat there basically listening and feeling incredible anxiety. Afterwards, that experience really helped shift the balance for me. It tipped me over into a deep inquiry about the racialized harms that I had experienced myself as a Palestinian Americanâand that were happening for others continuously, beyond my view.
Itâs not like I didnât know this was happening. I just wasnât looking at it. And I didnât have to look at it in the same way some of these folks do, because it wasnât my lived experience. But that was no longer sufficient. I had to come to terms with the complexity of ethnic and racial identity, the complexity of racialization, the way that we racialize each other.
One of the reasons Iâve always been resistant to the whole pluralistic âwokeâ movement is because Iâve spent time in those spacesâlike at Naropa University, where I did my undergrad; at Spirit Rock; and a number of other institutions that were, I would say, largely pluralistic. And what I found wasâparticularly from my white colleaguesâthat they would almost invariably start white-bashing and male-bashing both. And they would assume that I was white and then include me in the bashing, expecting me to jump in and sort of join.
And Iâd get upset, because I was being âmisracialized.â They didnât know who I was. They were looking at me, looking at my skin color, whatever, and they were assuming stuff about me. And then they were using that to attack me. That was how it felt. And I think thatâs how a lot of people feel in America, to be honest with you. And itâs challenging. And itâs problematic in so many ways when we judge each other on such a superficial basisâthatâs racialization. We donât know each otherâs backgrounds. We donât know each otherâs cultural or ethnic histories. We just assume, based on superficial characteristics, âI know this person. I know their history.â
Okayâthatâs problematic.
So I was always averse to that kind of culture because I saw it being largely toxic in practice. But it also seemed like there were some important points, you know? It wasnât completely wrong.
And I realized that in a lot of ways I had been hiding behind my own privileged positionâwhere I could actually hide. I could âpassâ as white. Passing is a known phenomenon: if you appear racially one way and arenât, then you can hide. And hereâs the thingâit makes sense. It makes sense to hide if youâre actually in a culture where itâs unsafe to be that part of you.
As an Arabâethnically Arab American, Caucasian ArabâI knew it was unsafe to be Arab since September 11th, 2001. Since I was a teenager I saw people in my own family targeted, and systematically targeted. So it really makes sense, I think, on a personal level, when people can pass a certain way, to do so.
But what I realized was: I had been passing. I had been hiding. And then I was angry and upset when people didnât see who I was. You canât be angry and upset if people donât see who you are, if youâre not telling them who you are. So I realized I had been a coward. I had not been being who I am, and Iâd not been standing for my own peopleâthe people who were part of my heritage: my grandfather and his lineage. I had not been ashamed, but I had not been courageous or willing to own that part of my identity.
So I started, from that point onâthis was several years agoâowning more explicitly that part of who I am, talking about it more openly, going by Fakhoury in my name, presenting myself with that name. For me that was a huge deal. And I felt that I had the support of my teachers to do that because of the pioneering work they were doingâpushing into those areas.
And overall, I think there was a lot of alignment at that time with the Insight tradition.
Now, I want to actually go back in time a little bit, because the way that I was authorized to teach is maybe a little unusual. Initially, I was invited by Jack Kornfield and Trudy Goodman, two of my close teachers. I was living in Los Angeles at the timeâthis was in 2011âand I was invited to apply to the next Insight meditation retreat teacher program.
This is a four-year retreat teacher training. Some 20 or so people are typically in each cohort. Itâs considered to be the highest level of training in that tradition. My wife and I were both invited to itâEmily and I were both invited. I filled out an application, and I was told the context was: âWeâre inviting 20 or so people to apply, and weâre going to accept 20 or so people.â So the application processâthey said they would consider the applications, but it didnât seem like many people were going to be cut.
So I filled out the application. I shared about my Dharma background, about my history, who Iâd trained with, and what I was interested in. And I shared my ethnic background. I talked about my Palestinian family. This was really important to share at the time, because this was the time in which that lineage was really pushing hard into the pluralistic space. And so I felt like I really should share that this is part of who I am, and I thought that would be considered welcome.
Then after I applied, I got a call from Jack, and he said, âYour application to this training has been rejected.â And the reasoning he gaveâhe said it wasnât him; it was other teachersâand Iâll let you figure out who the other teachers were. âThese other teachers donât like your association with Daniel Ingram,â he said. That was the primary reason they didnât want me in this training.
Daniel had been quite critical of teachers at the Insight Meditation Society, and particularly he had been critical of Joseph Goldstein publicly. And I was kind of shocked by this, because I myself had never been publicly critical of these teachers in that wayâalthough I still was associated with Daniel and Iâd even give him a place to air his opinions and perspectives. I also was recording with teachers like Jack and Joseph and Sharon. I was giving them a lot of airtime on the Buddhist Geeks Podcast, and I was really interested in their perspectives.
So I felt like I had a foot in both worlds. I was holding both the Insight tradition and the Pragmatic Dharma traditionâboth of which originally have connections to the Mahasi Sayadaw tradition, the Burmese tradition I mentioned earlier. So for me it was just like, âOkay, these are two squabbling cousins, and I find value in both of them, and Iâm not going to let go of either of them because I get different things from each. And I think theyâre both important. And together, when you hold both of them, you get a bigger and more inclusive and more integrated whole.â
So I was kind of surprised at how petty that reasoning wasâhow egoic. This was one of my first bigger disillusionments with teachers: realizing, âOh yeah, theyâre human.â Yeah, totally. But at the time it was really disturbing. I got extremely upset.
I remember talking to Trudy. At the time, Trudy and Jack were datingâthey later became marriedâbut they were dating; they were close. Trudy was definitely more of a close teacher than Jack in terms of access and time Iâd spent with her. And sheâvery much to her creditâwent to battle for me with Jack, with the other teachers. She was like, âThis is ridiculous.â And she was right. It was ridiculous.
And Jack later came back to me and said, âOkay, well, you have a spot if you want it now.â So I was accepted into the program. But at that point I was so upset that I was like, âNo. Fuck you.â Basically. Like, why would I want to be participating in a program with people who are offering up these reasons? If my association with Daniel Ingram makes me unqualified to be a teacherâokay.
And I felt like at the time Buddhist Geeks was sufficiently big of a thing that I didnât have to have that reputation or credibility derived from this training.
Now, my wife on the other hand didnât have the same situation. And I encouraged her to do the training. She did the training; she completed it. Later, some years laterâprobably 2017, somewhere around thereâwe got a call from Trudy and Jack. We talked to them, and they invited Emily to a lineage authorization ceremony that was happening in LA, and then almost, âOh yeah, Vince, you should come too.â
It was a little awkward in that it was clear to me they hadnât planned on inviting me until we were all talking. And then it was like, âWell, I guess weâre excluding you, and that doesnât make sense.â And they didâthey invited me to become authorized as a teacher in their lineage.
So I accepted. And at that time I had kind of worked through my frustration and angerâthis had been years laterâand became authorized in that tradition. Iâm now part of that lineage. Thatâs the truth.
Iâve looked backâeven at the time, but now especiallyâover that whole situation, where I had a couple of teachers who I had a close relationship with and who were willing to fight for me. Otherwise, that entire tradition did not want my kind of person in the tradition.
What kind of person? Loud, outspoken, opinionated, not toeing the party line on a number of issues.
And furthermore, I wondered: to what degree was my Palestinianness an issue? Now, it was never brought up. It was never like, âOh, thatâs an issue for us.â But from the very moment that my application was rejected, I had to ask the question: Was that a factor? You know, this is largely a Jewish group of teachersâcould they be biased against Palestinians?
Now, I had no direct evidence or reason to think that they were, but I had this sort of felt sense of like, âOh⌠could be.â And maybe, if theyâre biased about my associating with Daniel Ingram, why wouldnât they be biased about my being Arabic or Palestinian? Quite possibly, given the history.
So that planted a seed of doubtâof questioningâin my mind about where people are coming from.
Fast-forward now to 2023, October 7th. Of course we know the history. And one thing that I felt like I had always been able to rely on were my teachers. And that stopped being true. And not just with Jack and Trudy. It stopped being true also with other teachers.
I suddenly found the entire American Buddhist Dharma scene was progressive on everything but Israel. I felt alone, largely. And I spent the first year after October 7th alone, feeling alone. I didnât receive contact from any of my teachersâno one reached out to see how I was doing, to see how my family was doing. And I didnât reach out to them. I felt like it was not appropriate. I felt like as teachers, and as Jewish Americans, and given the context and the situation, it was appropriate for them to make first contact. But they never did.
I lost a number of Israeli students as wellâstudents I had been in contact withâwho I had personally reached out to after October 7th to check in on them, to see how they were doing, to see if they were safe, if their families were safe. And then all of them vanished afterward. I havenât heard from them since. And it was just so obvious to me: no one wants to touch this. This breaks the whole fucking paradigm. The whole pluralistic thing. All of this attempting to include all these different groupsâthis issue breaks that. Itâs too complex. Itâs too close to home. Itâs too real.
And what Iâve seen is that, by and large, the leaders of the Insight traditionâJoseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, Jack Kornfield; Iâll include Trudy Goodman too, to more or less degreesâhave remained silent on the genocide in Gaza.
In Jack and Trudyâs case, I think theyâve made some very minimal, performative attempts to include it. In Jackâs case, apparently he referenced it somewhere in an email. I didnât get this email; I havenât seen the email; I donât know what was said in the email. But that was the sort of defensive position that I heard from them. That was their justification for how they had âtaken a stand.â
And in Trudyâs case, Iâve been following her closely online. You know, we had a very difficult private conversation around this a few months ago when I finally reached out. I was like, âHey, what the fuck? Why are you completely not showing up for me, or for people who are being genocided in Palestine?â
And in her reply⌠it was something. She talked about Sudan and her closeness to the genocide in Sudan and how much she cared about that. And she has been vocal about that.
And I just didnât understand how that related to anything at all. It was like, âOkay, great. I think thatâs awesome. I really admire that you care about the people in Sudan, and that you care about the horrendous genocide thatâs happening there. Thatâs important. You should care. We should care. This does matter.â
At the same timeâand I pointed this outâthe United Statesâ involvement in that conflict and that genocide is very different from the United Statesâ involvement in whatâs happening in Gaza. The United States is a direct enabler in the case of Gaza. It is sending bombs. It is sending weapons. It is providing political cover for the situation.
And not only thatâIsrael is using Jewish identity as a shield for committing genocide.
And so I told her: âAs a Jewish American, you have a unique responsibility to speak up against this atrocity. And you have a unique amount of leverage. Your identity is being leveraged as a weapon, and you can fight against that. You are an American; you have influence.â
Trudy responded, âI donât have as much influence as Jack.â Thatâs bullshit. I told her thatâs bullshit. Of course you donât have as much influence, but you have way more influence than I do. You reach a lot more people than I do. You have a reach. I remember Alexander Bard, the Swedish internet philosopher, said: Reputation equals credibility multiplied by reach.
Trudy has a stellar reputation. And so I just didnât buy that. I thought that was completely an excuseâa defense. And this is not how Iâve experienced Trudy. The conversation and the tenor, the kinds of things she was sayingâtotally not typical for the kinds of conversations weâd had over the last almost 20 years.
I remember at one point she raised this pointâshe didnât argue that it wasnât a genocideâbut she did raise this point. She said, âWell, yeah, but in Germany, with the Jews in the Holocaust, you know, they werenât going and killing Germans.â
I said, âWhoa. Okay. Well, yeah. But they also didnât live in 75 years of apartheid.â
She acknowledged that was true.
Iâm pointing these things out because this is the kind of argumentationâafter two years of genocideâthat was being used to defend silence.
Why am I calling it out now? Because months after having these conversations, nothing has changed. Not with Trudyâs view. Not with what sheâs said publicly. Not with Jack. Nothing has changed.
Sharon and Josephâaside from the most anemic, apolitical, both-sideist message Iâve ever seen, that was published by the Insight Meditation Society eight months after the⌠Iâll call it the genocide startedâthey put out this letter. And Sharonâs name was penned to it. Okay, so she made a comment. But thatâs the only comment sheâs made. Otherwise, itâs nothing. Thereâs nothing said.
And nowâis this an issue? Should all teachers be talking about this stuff? People ask me this regularly: what am I expecting from people?
I donât expect everyone to be a social activist. I wasnât an activist prior to this. This situation warranted that for me. I needed to become an activist for Palestinians because I didnât feel like they have a voice. And if I donât use my voice on their behalf, whoâs going to? It feels like a moral responsibility.
Does everyone share that moral responsibility? No. Not everyoneâs Palestinianâfair. But everyone, I think, who is training in and particularly teaching in a religious âwisdom traditionâ that has, as one of its core pillarsâcore foundational areas of trainingâethics, morality, virtue, silaâŚ
If youâre teaching as a Dharma teacher, you are also claiming to be a teacher of morality, of ethics, of virtue. And I think that is one thing to consider: What do teachers actually say or not say about the moral issues of our time? How inclusive are they? How deep and wide is their understanding of the problemâor problems? What kinds of solutions do they seem to support? How does that filter into the way that we practice and what we focus on in our practice, and how we build community? How do we balance contemplation and action?
I think all of these are really valid questions. And what I saw happen in the Insight tradition is I saw it contract back to its previous apolitical stance. And I saw these teachersâwho are, in pretty much virtually every way other than this topic, progressive on everything but Israelâconsistently progressive or at least liberal in their orientation to social issues.
But on this, they have not been. On this theyâve remained silent, and thus have remained complicit.
If we didnât live in the United States, would they be complicit by not saying anything? Maybe not. If they werenât Jewish, would they be complicit in not speaking out against their identity being weaponized?
âNever again.â Who does ânever againâ apply to?
What Iâve come to realize is that there are different stages or levels of âNever Again.â Thereâs the egocentric Never Again: âNever again for me. Iâm never going to be put in that position.â Thereâs the ethnocentric Never Again: âNever again for usâfor our group, for our tribe, for our ethnic crew. Never again. Never again will Jews be subjected to this kind of horrendous treatment.â And then thereâs the world-centric: âNever again for all of us. No human should ever have to go through this again.â And then the all-beings-centric: âNever again for all beings.â
The issue here is that the âNever Againâ is primarily ethnocentric, in reality. Itâs ânever again for our people.â
And I also want to acknowledge, with as much compassion as I can muster: people are traumatizedâpeople who have come from a Jewish background, who have ties to the Holocaust. Theyâre traumatized, and theyâre activated. And I get that. I get that better than most.
But does being traumatized and activated make it okay to turn your back on the murder of innocent peopleâon the intentional starvation of innocent people? Does it? No.
Especially when you present yourself not only as a religious teacher but now also as someone whoâs trained at the highest level as a clinical psychologistâboth of my teachers, Jack and Trudy, are clinical psychologists. Both are familiar with the language and experience of trauma. Both have incredible resources at their disposal to be able to work at that level.
Who needs to be speaking up? Well, Iâm defining what I think are the characteristics of someone who reallyâif they donât say somethingâthen you really have to wonder whatâs going on.
I think the other very important thing is when someone presents themselves as being a social activist or as having that flavor to their Dharmaâas an Engaged Buddhist. When they demonstrate a lack of engagement or a lack of care on something that they could influence, then it really highlights the ethnocentrism of the activism.
Am I claiming to be beyond that? No. Actually, I think thatâs partially normal. But are we all aspiringâare we saying that weâre aspiringâtoward being universal in our compassion as Buddhists? Yes. We are saying that. Weâre saying that we want to treat the suffering of all beings equally. We want to respond to the suffering of all beings instantly. Thatâs what weâre training in. Thatâs the Bodhisattva vow. And thatâs the frame that my teachers taught under and taught in, largely.
I feel like itâs okay, and appropriate, to hold people to their own stated public values, and to call them out when they fail to live up to those valuesâeven after theyâve been challenged in private and given an opportunity to change.
Gabor MatĂŠ, who I think has been one of the most illuminating and courageous voices on this issueâDr. Gabor MatĂŠâhe himself was born in the Holocaust. He was a baby in the Holocaust. His whole family was murdered in the Holocaust. And he was a Zionist as a young manâunderstandably, wanting a place for Jews to be safe. And he pointed out that there was this common phrase used at the time: âA land without people for a people without a land.â This was one of the Zionist catchphrases.
And he realizedâespecially after he went to Palestine during the late â60sâthat this was not true. This simply was not true. There were people on the land. And those peopleâincluding my grandfather and his whole familyâthey were ethnically cleansed from that land, most of them. Many of them. Almost a million Palestinians were driven out of their homes and out of the country. The ones that stayed are the ones who were in Gaza and the West Bank.
And of course thereâs a huge history here; Iâm not going to get into the detailed history. But if you donât know the history, itâs a good thing to know at this pointâthe basics of it.
But what Gabor realized was that this was completely unethical. It was completely a case ofâif you know the Karpman Drama Triangleâthe victim-rescuer-persecutor triangle that describes the roles people tend to cycle through when theyâre in an ego-contracted state: the victim, the person who feels like the world is against them; the rescuer, the person who tries to rescue the victim; and the persecutor, the one who persecutes the victim.
It was so obvious to meâon a collective levelâthat this is a clear example, and Gabor MatĂŠ points this out as well, of a group of people who experienced genuine, true victimization and harm; who then, out of the undigested traumaâcollective traumaâof that harm, are now in the persecution role.
And you can see it with the Palestinians as well. And this was the point I made to Trudy. After 75 years of apartheid, you get Hamas. You get people who are tired of being oppressed and whoâhaving tried many times to use nonviolent means and to negotiateâhave not been able to get their needs met, because the international community does not support them, and thus feel like thereâs no other alternative but to resort to violence against innocent people.
Now, is that ethically okay? On one level, itâs not. On another level, you can understand why it happens. I can. And thatâs the weird thing about looking at history: everyone, you can look at their position and their behavior, and you can understand why itâs justified. You can understand where it comes from. You can even be compassionate toward it if you really deeply understand.
But that doesnât change the cycle of harm. People actually have to be stopped from harming others. And thatâs where the rest of the worldâand America in particularâI think has totally failed.
And I think this is complex. The reasoning for thisâI think some of it is actually explainable by, on a collective level, white guilt.
When I look at the Jewish people in terms of this larger racial category of âwhitenessââthat Jews in America are considered white, right? Theyâre part of that category, that group of people. And yet, if you look at it in a hierarchical wayâwhich is the reality of how race is heldârace is hierarchical, and people often hold it that way.
You could say the Jewish people are among the lowest caste of white peopleâtheyâve been treated the worst in Europe. Look what happened. And so Zionism was born out of that. That ideology was born out of abuse at the hands of Western powers. It was enabled by the British and their own Christian Zionists, who would rather have the Jews be elsewhere.
That, I think, is known. Our role in this is known. We know what we did. We know what we supported. We know that weâre responsible, in large part, for this. America and the United Kingdom, in particular, held a lot of responsibility postâWorld War II for this order emerging, and for the seeds of this conflict being planted.
So I think weâre guiltyâcollectively. Weâre guilty in the same way that weâre guilty that we took the land from the people who lived here, the Indigenous people of the Americas. Thereâs still that guilt. And you can deal with it either by being defensive or by making it a constructive tensionâas I started to that day in the retreat when I was being called to task for my lack of compassion toward Black Americans.
Itâs not that I didnât feel compassionâitâs that I was scared to become oppressed like them. I didnât want to be in that group. I didnât show solidarity with them. I was ashamed when I really got connected with it. âOh⌠this is so sad.â
I see this happening right now with so many people in my family. And I feel for them. Iâve asked them about how theyâre doing with Palestine, etc., and theyâre like, âOh, itâs too painful. I canât even touch it. I canât even look at it. I canâtâyeah, I canât talk about it.â Theyâre not going to stand up for Palestinians. And all of these family members also can pass as white. So theyâre hiding.
CompassionâI feel for them. And Iâm not hiding. Iâm done hiding. Iâve been done hiding. And now Iâm done tolerating the lack of moral clarity and lack of consistency from my teachers. Iâm done pretending like itâs okay, like it doesnât hurt, like it hasnât contributed to the murder of tens of thousands of people. Without that complicity, without that silence, this would not be possible.
Speaking up does not guarantee results. And I think there are all kinds of practical considerations for why people donât speak up. I had a friend reach out to meâclose friend from long ago, racially whiteâand he had recently shared something on social media about Palestine. And I was surprised, and grateful, and we ended up talking about it a little bit, privately connecting.
And this friend pointed out that when he thought about his behavior and actions around this, he realized he was coming from a place of cowardiceâthat he was more concerned about the impact that speaking up would have on his relationships, on his prospects, than he was about taking a clear moral stand on what he obviously saw as wrong.
And he said he thought about what the implications would be. He thought about the people in his life who would be upset if he spoke up and took the position that he did, and he realized, âWell, actually, yeah, these are some pretty influential, powerful people.â Nowâokayâwhoa, this is sounding antisemitic. No. This is actually true in his case. Itâs actually true in his case.
And he thought about who would be upset if he didnât say anythingâand all he could think of was me.
Okay. I⌠maybe I have some influence? I donât know if I have any influence left. Thisâwhat youâre hearingâthis is pretty much the channel that people listen to me through. So he wasnât that concerned with me, and what I could say or do. Thereâs not really much I could do.
And hereâs the thing: thereâs not anything I want to do. I donât want to go out attacking my friends whoâve been silent. Nowâam I still friends with my friends whoâve been silent? No, not really. If theyâve been completely and utterly silent and havenât done anythingâeven behind the scenesâto support Palestinians, but theyâre still like, âOh, Vince, Iâm so sorryââno. Iâm not friends with those people anymore.
Those people are performing compassion; theyâre not actually being compassionate. And Iâm interested in being compassionate. What is compassion? Sometimes compassion is saying, âNo. This is not okay.â And sometimes compassion is being willing to alienate or upset people with the truthâwith reality.
So this is my attempt at being compassionate. Am I angry? Am I upset? Am I hurt? Yesâabsolutely. Am I going to say something anyway? Yes. Yes.
As Americans, I think we absolutely should not stand up and stand with the genocide of other people. We should not be sending bombs. We should not be sending aid. We should not be providing cover for a country that is set on the destruction of another people, whom it has occupied for generations.
Gaza has been described as the largest open-air prison in the world. Two million people were living in an open-air prison that had no control over basic things like food and water. Those were controlled by Israel. Their movements are controlled through checkpoints, through surveillance. Their words are controlled. My cousin in the West Bankâshe canât talk about whatâs going on. Sheâs too scared to. And sheâs right to be, because all of her words are being surveilled.
On October 10th, I remember on Twitter saying that this âis a call to genocide.â And why did I know that? How did I know that? Because Israel turned off the water and food. And they did this very soon after October 7th. That was the almost instant reaction: âLetâs turn off the water and food to the entire population.â
How can one see that other than genocidal intent? What intention could there be for turning off access to water and food?
And mind youâprior to thisâthereâs been a documented and well-known control of the amount of calories entering Gaza. Just enough so that people arenât starvingânot enough so that they can flourish.
I had a conversation right after October 7th. It was facilitated by Diane Hamilton, and it was organized by a Jewish American colleague who was living in Israel, in Tel Aviv. And we had this quote-unquote âwicked conversationâ about Israel and Palestine.
The organizer, Miles Kessler, made this pointâand I think itâs important to call this point out and then respond to it. He said that many critics of Israel will argue that there is a moral equivalency between the ArabsâPalestinians living in Gaza and the West Bankâand Israeli Jews. That theyâre operating on the same depth of moral understanding.
And his claim was: âActually, Israel is a democracy, we have all these rights, gay people arenât persecuted in the same way,â etc., etc., etc. All these argumentsâwhich youâve probably heardâfor why Israel is morally superior.
Okay. Iâm going to go ahead and concede that this may be true. What if itâs true? Okayâletâs just say itâs true.
Even if itâs true, that doesnât change the power dynamics. There may not be a moral equivalency, but nor is there a power equivalency. One group has a power position over the other. Itâs called a one-up position. One group is dominating the otherâis controlling the other.
Facts. Itâs still happening. Itâs worse now.
And the other party has been subjected to conditions that are almost designed to prevent their flourishing. So if you are part of a group thatâs being oppressed and youâre not able to get access to the resources you need in order to mature, whatâs the problem there? Itâs not the failure of the individuals within that group to develop into deeper and broader moral stages. Itâs the failure of the environmental conditions to support that natural growth.
So Israel is simultaneously engaged in a process of trying to keep Palestinians down while then using the behavior that arises from that hellish environment to justify its ongoing oppressionâand to justify their fear that these people mean them harm.
Wellâyeah. At this point they do. But thatâs a self-fulfilling prophecy. And thatâs the issue I take ethically, morally, with that kind of argumentation.
Iâve also heard the argument from well-meaning people that, âWell, thereâs always been conflict. This is a history of conflict in this area. These parties have been fighting and warring for generations and hundreds and thousands of years.â The implication of that argument is that itâs hopeless. Thereâs nothing we can do about it. Itâs like the history is this endless, bloody warring, so this is just the continuation of that, and thereâs nothing we can really doâbecause this is a historical civilizational pattern that goes back way deep.
Okay. Itâs not true. Itâs just not true historically.
Lookâthere was a period of 400 years under the Ottoman Empire when there was not bloody war and conflict between these parties. They existed and they co-existed in relative peace for 400 yearsâfrom the 1500s to the 1900s. The Ottoman Empire had a pragmatic system called the Millet System that allowed people who were non-Islamicâbecause the Ottoman Empire is an Islamic empireâto have their own rules, to have their own communities. Through the Millet System, this very practical system, people could have their own economics, their own microeconomics, and people were able to coexist for 400 years in this very pragmatic, pre-modern, pluralistic kind of society.
Iâm not saying it was perfect or that there was no conflict. But just: itâs not what people claim. The history is not just one of bloody war and conflict.
As a Palestinian American, what I keep running up against over and over again in this conversation are bad-faith arguments. People who are throwing up reasonsâlike Trudy did, like other people I talk to, like almost everyone I talk to about this doesâwho donât know the history, who havenât spent the time to understand the situation, but who have pat answers for why it is this way and why it canât change. They basically have argumentation to protect the status quo and to keep themselves from having to look at the conflict and look at their own relationship to it.
And this is quite painful. And I think in America itâs particularly hard to do that because of our own historyâbecause of our own history of oppression.
When I was speaking to Robert Wright recently on thisâin the series on Meditating on Palestine, the episode is called Meditating on PalestineâI was speaking to him about his own history and my own history as Irish people, people who come from an Irish heritage in part, of our own history of persecution. That, in fact, America is built on persecution. So here we are, as a culture: many of us, our ancestors were persecutors, but they were also persecuted. Thatâs part of why they came here.
So againâsame cycle. The victim becomes the persecutor, especially when there is undigested trauma, when we donât look and see.
So the Insight tradition is continuing, unfortunately, to perpetuate the harms of persecution by remaining silent and complicit on the genocide in Gaza. The teachers who have the resourcesâfinancially, socially, emotionallyâhave the resources to digest this trauma. I donât see evidence that theyâre really doing it, in part because Iâm the only one putting pressure on them. They donât have pressure. They have a lot more pressure on the other side. If they start speaking up with moral clarity on these topics, do you know how much backlash theyâre going to get?
Theyâre scared about backlash from the governmentâfrom Trump. They saw how that went with the DEIA movement and the backlash from that. And so theyâre hiding.
Theyâre older. Theyâre getting into their eighties now. They donât have the energy to fight.
Great. Retire.
If you canât stand up for whatâs good and right, and youâre too scared, you need to pass on the baton. Pass the torch. Put down the Dharma-teacher role and let other people who are ready and willing take it up.
Now, I also think itâs worth notingâitâs worth mentioningâthe people and organizations who have stepped up, who have heeded the moral call to courageously and bravely put out an unpopular opinion and taken a moral stand here.
Iâm not going to be able to name them all, because I donât even know them all. But I do want to name the people I personally have gotten solidarity and support from, in hopes that if youâre interested in seeing those voices and those perspectives, you can see them too.
In my own traditionâin the Insight traditionâthere have been people who have spoken up and who have stood for this. Itâs not completely ubiquitous, fortunately.
For instance, Jackâs teaching partner, Tara Brach, has taken a courageous stand here. Upon the urging of her own students, she realized she needed to speak up. To her credit and to her studentsâ credit.
Bhikkhu Bodhiâfrom the very beginning, the Venerable monkâhas been talking about this openly. He wrote an excellent article called âNo Time for Silenceâ in the summer of 2024.
Also, Thanissara, practicing in the same Insight tradition, has been a fierce voice of justice.
My friend Theo HoreshâIâm greatly appreciative of.
My colleague Ethan Nichtern, who Iâve spoken with about this, invited me to join him in a dialogue about this on The Road Home, his podcast.
Iâve heard of communities who are trying to center this as part of their Dharma communities. Iâve seen the Decolonial Dharma community, the Liberation CircleâIâve seen communities who are really trying to integrate this and I admire it.
And Iâm doing the best I can in my own teaching and through Buddhist Geeks to make space for this kind of thing to be explored openly and honestlyâwhich honestly is quite hard to do. I understand why itâs so difficult. Because we have a momentum in our communities. A lot of it has to do with the momentum of just focusing on ourselves and our own meditation practice. Thatâs the heritage of modern BuddhismâBuddhist modernism.
But for those of us who want to go beyond that sort of self-focus and who care about social issues, and see that they shape individuals as much as individuals shape them, itâs worthwhile considering that there are people and institutions out there who are still doing the work and who havenât stoppedâwho didnât give up at this pointâunlike some of the leadership I mentioned in the Insight meditation tradition.
So we can look to them. We can look to them as leaders.
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