Zionism and Buddhism
Is there a division over Zionism in Western Buddhism?
These days one frequently hears two claims from certain Buddhist writers on Substack: (1) that there is a very audible silence concerning Gaza from a number of American Buddhist teachers and (2) that there is a split over Zionism amongst Western Buddhists.
With respect to the first claim, the Insight Meditation Society (IMS) issued a statement in mid 2024:
At IMS, we chose not to make a statement about the unfolding violence in Israel and Palestine. This was, in part, because we could see the degree of pain held on conflicting sides of this tragedy, and we did not want to alienate anyone from their place of practice. We also felt mindful of so many other horrific situations around the world that don’t receive daily attention, including Sudan, Ukraine, and—given its significance in the lineage of offerings at IMS—Burma. Our silence angered some in our community who felt IMS was shirking its responsibility as a major Dharma center in our tradition. We’ve received emails and petitions asking—insisting—that we condemn what they saw as genocide and apartheid. We’ve received emails asking us to condemn Hamas and its terrorism. Others have written asking us to please stay out of it.
IMS invoked this dated statement from Sprit Rock as their guiding principles:
The Buddha’s teachings guide us in our commitment to create a container and safe place for all to practice at Spirit Rock. People with many backgrounds, beliefs and faith traditions seek spiritual refuge at Spirit Rock. People also have differing interpretations of the Buddhadharma and what specific actions it calls for at this time. While some may be externally active and call for peaceful protest, others may have a more internal expression and be moved to meditation and compassion practice.
While these two statements certainly condemn violence, they only do so as far as the Buddhist tradition as a whole considers nonharming (ahimsa) a vital aspect of refuge in the Dharma. Spirit Rock statement seems to equivocate between wishing to condemn violence, and yet allow those who support Israels’ war against women and children to continue to participate in their programs. Effectively, they have silenced opposition to the Israeli war in their community. But does this mean IMS and Spirit Rock are pro-Zionist? Downplaying discussion around this issue appears to be an economic decision, as both Spirit Rock and IMS cater not only to card-carrying Buddhists, like myself, but to non-Buddhists who approach insight meditation and mindfulness as a part of their wellness programs. I don’t think we can infer that IMS and Spirit Rock are pro-Zionist.
There most certainly are people who are “Buddhist-adjacent,” like Sam Harris, who came out as a Zionist as part of his long standing antipathy towards Islam:
While I have no religious connection to Judaism, and have many misgivings about the current government of Israel, the global response to October 7th made me a Zionist.1
His blind spot is very telling. While decrying extremism of all kinds, he says:
While Israel has its own religious zealots on the far Right, they do not represent Israeli society nearly to the degree that Hamas and other jihadist groups represent the will of the Palestinian people.
He seems to be blind to the fact that it is exactly the Israeli Far Right, who control the Israeli Gvt. and military, who hold onto Zionism most dearly, and consider Palestinian lives to be less important than Jewish lives. However, Sam Harris is not a Buddhist— despite his facile monetization of Buddhist mediation practices—and does not represent the Dharma at all.
Consider the very different response from Bhikku Bodhi:
I write this essay as a senior American Buddhist monk of Jewish ethnicity who has been deeply distressed by Israelis military assault on the population of Gaza. I see this campaign as one of the gravest moral crises of our time. The blistering bombardments, the ever-mounting death toll, the deadly blockade of vital essentials, the annihilation of innocent human lives – all these events sear the moral consciousness like a red-hot iron. I find myself shouting from the depths of my soul: For Gods sake, stop it! Indeed such a cry has arisen not only from Western-based Palestinian and Arab groups, but also from progressive Jewish organizations such as Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now. Yet American Buddhist communities and Buddhist leaders, who should be speaking up, have been eerily silent.
I learned this, to my dismay, already in late October, during the third week after the assault began. At this time I turned to the internet to see what the prominent Buddhist teachers, centers, and online Buddhist journals were saying in response to Israels operations in the Gaza Strip. I expected to see a flurry of essays and talks condemning the violence. However, with a few noteworthy exceptions, I found that hardly anyone was saying anything.
More recently, Shalini Bahl wrote an article pointing out that there has been, over the past 28 months, a broad Buddhist response condemning the Israeli war:
The catalyst for much of this conversation is a powerful podcast by Vince Fakhoury Horn, a Palestinian-American dharma teacher and founder of Buddhist Geeks, titled “Is the Insight Tradition Complicit in Genocide?” Vince shared that two of his family members lost over 200 people in Gaza. He’s calling out the Insight tradition specifically, saying it “has remained silent, largely silent, on such an important issue, one of the moral issues of our time.”
His pain is real. His critique deserves to be heard.
Other articles have extended this critique to Plum Village, Zen communities, and Buddhist organizations more broadly — questioning whether the Bodhisattva vow means anything if teachers cannot speak to the suffering in Gaza.
And — the claim that Buddhist teachers have been uniformly silent is not accurate.
A Tibetan Buddhist response was written by Joseph Loizzo, focusing on how we might approach “breaking the cycle of genocidal violence.” He focuses on the causes, perceiving the Israeli war on Gaza as a symptom of much deeper social problems:
Naturally, in the heat of genocidal violence of the kind we are witnessing as I write this in Gaza, Ukraine, the Congo and Sudan, such a hopeful, long-term vision seems just to bypass the immediacy of the suffering on the ground and the life-or-death urgency of the here and now. We tell ourselves that something much more concrete needs to happen, and that no individuals or groups can break free of their trauma legacy as long as such violence continues. And yet, trying to stop the mass reenactment of trauma without at the same time targeting its root causes leaves us constantly reacting to the next explosion of genocidal violence.2 So while I wholeheartedly agree that the deep inner work of uprooting our own trauma system and the vision of spreading a counterculture of non-violence globally cannot substitute for doing all we can to stop the harm being done right now, it seems plain to me that the opposite is also true.
Thus, the claim that there is silence from Buddhist teachers over the issue of Gaza Genocide is overstated. There is certainly disappointment that the response from certain teachers is not louder.
With respect to the second claim, that there is a split among Western Buddhists over Zionism, I do not see a split among Western Buddhists into pro-Zionist and Anti-Zionist factions. There must certainly be pro-Zionist Buddhists, but I don’t know any personally, and there certainly is no pro-Zionist Western Buddhist faction of which I am aware.
Zionism is as foreign to Buddhism as Christianity, Judaism, or Islam, or for that matter MAGA. To be any kind of nationalist is in opposition to fundamental principles of Buddhist refuge. As Buddhists, we cannot find our refuge in any secular government, political, or economic theory. Of course we may have preferences. For example, I think ethnostates of all kinds are a terrible idea. We certainly cannot find our refuge in Zionism, which is a claim to land that was wrested from the Canaanites by the ancient Israelites through a process of ethnic cleansing based on claims of divine sanction.
Everywhere I look, I find no support among Western Buddhist Teachers, even the silent ones, for Zionism, let alone the Israeli war on Gaza. I conclude that this so-called “division over Zionism in Western Buddhism” is clickbait, meant to grab attention. It does a disservice to the Dharma to make such claims.
Italics mine.
Italics mine.
Hi Malcolm, thank you for this essay. I think I may be one of the Substack writers you’re referring to, along with many of my colleagues and friends. I’d be very open to a longer conversation if you are, but here are some initial reflections.
As you note, IMS has effectively silenced opposition to Israel’s war within its community. "But does that mean IMS and Spirit Rock are pro-Zionist?" I think it’s important to recognize that this silencing is not neutral. It reinforces a status quo in which Zionism goes largely unchallenged and is therefore tolerated and normalized. How are Palestinian members of these sanghas supposed to feel when their families are being starved and killed by the hundreds of thousands, yet they cannot speak openly or advocate for their basic human rights? Or even do something as simple as wear a keffiyeh in the dharma hall while they meditate? This is a choice that privileges one person’s sense of safety and comfort over the lives of people undergoing genocide.
These centers have, in the past, allowed individuals to wear or speak freely about Pride, Black Lives Matter, or other politically oriented issues that others might perceive as polarizing or harmful. Palestine and Gaza, however, are treated differently because of the cultural power of Zionism within our communities.
If non-Buddhists who approach insight meditation or mindfulness primarily as part of a wellness practice are turned off by a center speaking clearly about Palestine, that itself says something about what that center’s culture is preserving. More than that, if dharma centers are catering primarily to apolitical mindfulness practitioners, isn’t that also a form of harm or disservice to the dharma? What, exactly, is being privileged?
While it’s true that there have been statements over the past 2.5 years, as Shalini Bahl has documented, for those of us who have been paying close attention to responses since October 7th, the response has been remarkably small and slow—especially in comparison to how other faith communities have mobilized. My observation is that the broader fragility and confusion within convert Buddhist communities about how to respond is connected to a lack of awareness of how Zionism functions within our institutions and culture, as well as how deeply entrenched anti-Palestinian racism is.
For example, even Joseph Loizzo’s response frames this as a conflict that began on October 7th—a Zionist narrative that is historically inaccurate. Moreover, mainstream Buddhist publications like Tricycle and Lion’s Roar declined to publish the Bhikkhu Bodhi essay you referenced; he ultimately found a home for it at Common Dreams instead.
For those of us writing about Palestine online, we are not doing so for clickbait. We are trying to put words to what we wish we had heard from our teachers and communities 2.5 years ago. We are writing for our Palestinian dharma siblings who feel forgotten. We are writing not to reinforce binaries or assign blame, but to speak clearly about the reality of what is unfolding.
Western convert Buddhism has a pro-Zionism problem insofar critical speech about Israel has been discouraged, and the response to horrific cruelty—funded by our tax dollars—has for the most part lacked any organized or collective response. There are many specific examples I could point to of conversations about Palestine being shut down in sanghas, including in communities that have issued public statements. Statements and conversations are, of course, the bare minimum, and they also often serve as the foundation for whether meaningful organized action can follow.
Also useful: https://www.christophertitmussblog.org/buddhist-statements-and-responses-worldwide-to-the-death-suffering-and-decimation-of-gaza