Buddhism is not a call to neutrality in the face of oppression

Buddhism begins with suffering, but it does not end with observing it. The First Noble Truth is not an invitation to become a spectator of pain. It is an invitation to see suffering clearly, including the suffering produced by bombs, blockade, displacement, hunger, and the daily denial of a people’s freedom.

Too often, Western Buddhist communities respond to oppression, including the oppression of Palestinians, with a familiar gesture: a call for peace that names no occupation, a prayer for all beings that asks nothing of those with power, or a studied neutrality treated as proof of spiritual maturity. But nonattachment is not indifference. Equanimity is not silence. And compassion that refuses to take the side of the harmed is too thin to be called compassion at all.

The Buddha clearly favored nonviolence, and the first precept is a call not to take life or cause harm. But it is not a call to political passivity. It is not permission to watch a people be starved, displaced, imprisoned, and killed, then congratulate ourselves for remaining above the conflict.

The teachings ask us to examine intention. Are we acting from hatred, ego, revenge, or the need to dominate? Or are we acting to protect life, reduce suffering, and end the conditions that produce harm? Intention matters deeply, but it does not make violence clean or killing harmless. Even when people believe force is necessary, it creates suffering and leaves consequences no one can fully control. We should be honest both about the violence used to maintain domination and about the moral cost carried by those who resist it.

In Palestine, this is not a simple “both sides” argument. One side controls the borders, the airspace, the military, the movement of people and goods, and receives extraordinary support from powerful Western governments. The other has lived through occupation, siege, dispossession, and repeated mass violence. Naming that imbalance is not hatred. It is the beginning of seeing clearly.

The International Court of Justice concluded in its July 2024 advisory opinion that Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful and must end as rapidly as possible. It also said other states must not recognize as lawful, or provide aid or assistance in maintaining, that unlawful situation.

A Buddhist response must be more than a vague wish for peace. Peace without freedom is only quiet imposed by force. Peace without justice asks the oppressed to accept their suffering so that those with power can remain comfortable. If we want peace, we must be willing to name what prevents it: occupation, collective punishment, racism, militarism, and the treatment of Palestinian life as expendable.

This does not require hatred toward Israelis or indifference to any civilian’s suffering. It requires us to refuse the lie that compassion means looking away. Compassion must be willing to stand with the harmed, tell the truth about the conditions harming them, and join the work of changing those conditions.

I am not here to dismiss Buddhist teachings or to celebrate violence. The first precept matters. Taking life creates suffering, even when people believe they have no other path left. A serious Buddhist response cannot treat violence as clean, easy, or spiritually uncomplicated.

But neither can it pretend that all violence begins at the moment an oppressed person fights back. We have to understand the violence already at work: the bombing, siege, imprisonment, dispossession, home demolitions, loss of land, and daily denial of freedom. We have to ask what it means to condemn those who resist while treating the violence that made resistance imaginable as normal or inevitable.

Angela Davis made a related point in a 1972 prison interview. When people asked whether she approved of violence, she argued that the question ignored the continuous violence Black Americans already experienced through racism, policing, segregation, and terror. Her point was not that violence is good. It was that violence cannot be understood honestly when we only notice it once the oppressed respond.

The violence of occupation, siege, deprivation, and state repression is too often treated as background. The violence of resistance is then isolated from the conditions that produced it and treated as the only moral question worth asking. If we only notice violence when it disrupts the comfort of those watching from afar, we are not practicing clarity. We are practicing selective attention.

Palestinians have used nonviolent protest for decades, and those efforts have repeatedly been met with repression. Peaceful organizing, marches, boycotts, labor organizing, legal advocacy, student activism, and international appeals have all been met with hostility, suppression, and often violence. We should be especially cautious about demanding that oppressed people remain perfectly peaceful when peaceful protest has so often been answered with force.

This does not mean every act committed in the name of resistance is beyond criticism. It does not mean we should celebrate death or become indifferent to civilian suffering. It means we should not require Palestinians to demonstrate spiritual perfection in order to deserve freedom. We should not make liberation conditional on a standard of passivity that no people should be asked to meet.

When someone in the West condemns Palestinians for armed resistance, I have to ask whether they can truly imagine the conditions they are judging from a distance: a home demolished, family members killed, movement controlled, land taken, and freedom continually deferred. I cannot pretend to know what I would do in those conditions. But I can refuse to make Palestinian liberation conditional on a standard of passivity that no people should be asked to meet.

I support Palestinian freedom, self-determination, and resistance to occupation. I do not believe Palestinians should be required to demonstrate spiritual perfection, or endless passivity, to deserve liberation. At the same time, I cannot call killing pure or uncomplicated, even when it occurs within an unjust and violent reality. The task is to oppose the conditions that make violence seem inevitable, while refusing to ignore the humanity of anyone caught within them.

To me, this is radical Buddhism: practicing through a recognition of the causes and conditions shaping the lives of all beings. It means refusing the comfort of neutrality when people are being oppressed. It means working to end the conditions that produce violence, including occupation, deprivation, racism, militarism, and the denial of a people’s freedom.

Radical Buddhism is not Buddhism that has found a way to make oppression feel spiritually interesting. It is Buddhism that refuses to look away from suffering, refuses to make peace with it, and refuses to let hatred determine its response.

It asks us to practice compassion not only on the cushion, but in public. To speak when silence protects power. To organize when private concern is not enough. To give materially, pressure our institutions, and stand with Palestinians seeking freedom. And it asks us to do all of this without pretending that liberation can be built through the same dehumanization and indifference that oppression requires.