For Israeli Soldiers and All of Us

Notes on compassion from an anti-Zionist

My best spiritual teachers and my own experience as a practitioner have taught me that compassion is for everyone. No fucking exceptions. We don’t get a pass on compassion if we want a truly different world.

Compassion for everyone is not just a nice concept or something you have to strive to cultivate.

When you have teachers who have recognized what is really going on here at a fundamental level, or if you have recognized that yourself, a feeling of kindness and wanting the well-being of everyone arises naturally and spontaneously over time.

There are no enemies. We don’t actually live in an “us” and “them” world.

Not knowing this is the root of our crappy way of inhabiting the planet together. Discovering it is the fruit of spiritual life and the open door.

One of the great examples of spiritual growth has been brought to us by Garchen Rinpoche.

Check out the documentary For the Benefit of All Beings if you want to hear him tell the story himself.

Garchen Rinpoche

When the Chinese invaded Tibet, Garchen Rinpoche was a monk. He disrobed and joined the Tibetan army in order to resist occupation.

Shortly after joining up, he was captured and thrown into a Chinese labor camp for 20 years. His captors starved and tortured him. He kept practicing and met his root teacher in prison.

Rinpoche speaks of his imprisonment as a profound period during which anger toward his captors transformed into compassion, an experience for which he is grateful.

His transformation has always been a beacon for me.

Soldiers

On a few occasions, I’ve publicly expressed empathy for Israeli soldiers.

Each time, I’ve been immediately labeled as an Israeli troll or Zionist.

The ridiculousness of this is beyond commenting on.

But hear me out.

Israeli soldiers have been taught hate and fear from an early age. They are lied to, manipulated to the nth degree, and spiritually and emotionally brutalized.

Their resulting condition is nothing short of sociopathic. They are committing unimaginably cruel acts against their fellow human beings. How will they recover? Their lives have been utterly decimated.

They are also members of an oppressed group that has recently experienced genocide while also being deliberately blocked from the possibility of recovery.

In fact, their fear and trauma have been carefully preserved and are now being weaponized on a global scale.

Just writing these sentences, I feel the the depth of their entrapment.

Compassion does not

Compassion does not mean we approve of everyone’s behavior or allow harm to perpetuate.

We can take the strongest actions, including armed resistance, while still feeling for and with others.

We can feel anger, while still holding the knowledge that those who harm us are worthy of compassion.

We can keep people from harming others without doing further harm to the perpetrators by forgetting their humanity.

We are capable of this, even if it takes us a long time to get there.

Our current behavior, both as perpetrators of harm and punishers of harm sucks.

We need to become protectors, not punishers.

Punishment belongs to this world. The one we’re complaining about.

Humanity

Nobody is “inhuman.” “Humanity” is not a special quality that some of us have and some of us don’t.

Anything humans do and feel is human. Humanity is how humans are, not just the parts we find palatable.

Humans can be cruel and frankly, crazy. Humans can be compassionate and creative. And humans are usually a mix of all of these.

We’re all on various spectrums, and we are never totally separate from anyone or any thing.

If we want the same old world where some of us are thrown out and declared evil and inhuman, and we get to not care about lots and lots of us, well, that’s not the world I am yearning for.

We already have that. We’ve had it for a long, long time. What we are experiencing now is just a little more obvious.

I fail to see how ejecting some beings and giving ourselves reasons not to care about their well being is, in its relational structure, any different from what Israel and the U.S. are doing.

Remember Audre Lorde?

“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”

Audre Lorde is still right.

So dig deep and find a way to feel for and with everyone, even if you have to protect yourself from some of us.

Then we might finally be onto something new.

with infinite love, Shambhavi

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