Is the Insight Tradition Complicit in Genocide?

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.

💬 Transcript

Vince: Today I want to speak to you as an authorized representative of the Insight meditation tradition. I was authorized to teach—empowered to teach—by 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 Gazans—the Palestinians in Gaza—and 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 experience—not hide—to be courageous and open about what it’s 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 Carolina—two members who married into the larger clan of Fakhourys that live here. The last name of my grandfather was Fakhoury—Latif 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 they’ve both lost over 200 family members in Gaza. I want that to land with you for a second.

Two hundred. That’s a whole family tree. People are losing family trees.

So to me, as a Buddhist practitioner and as a Palestinian American—as someone who cares about things like this—I’m just completely, utterly fucking heartbroken, and I have been for the last two years. And I feel like during that time I’ve waited, I’ve waited, I’ve waited for the leaders of my own lineage—for my own teachers—to take a courageous moral stand. And the reality is they have not. And I don’t think they will.

And so how in the world did we get here? I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I’ve been looking at my own disappointment and disillusionment around it. And I’ve been disillusioned and disappointed before by teachers—you know, I’m not new to this game. I’ve been a teacher for 15 years. I’ve seen people get disillusioned and disappointed with me. That’s, 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 it’s 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 for—the hardcore retreat experience. I had been reading Daniel Ingram’s work prior to this—my first teacher—and 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 then—me, a millennial practicing in an almost completely Boomer culture—that 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 talks—some 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. It’s not smart business to bring politics into your product or yo