In “The Cost of Truth,” Vince Fakhoury Horn speaks with Daniel Klein—a former religious Zionist settler turned outspoken critic of the ideology—about dehumanization, self-forgiveness, and the courage required to speak truth at the risk of losing everything (except one’s humanity).

💬 Transcript

Vince Fakhoury Horn: All right, Daniel, I got my tea ready. Okay, so we can dive in.

Daniel Klein: One of my last drugs is coffee.

Vince: I’ve heard often that the Buddhist drug of choice is tea, and it makes sense if you look at the history of people doping up on tea before sesshins and long sits. Clearly it’s a stimulant.

Daniel: If you approach it with enough intention too, I’m sure some of the dens in China with the right master can take you quite far.

Vince: Oh yeah. They call it gongfu for a reason.

Vince: Well, Daniel, it’s great to be here with you. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation since we connected last week and had a get-to-know-you chat. And before that I met your work through Substack and your voice and your perspective on things. I definitely encourage people to check you out there if they’re listening from Buddhist Geeks to get the full breadth and depth of what you’re talking about. But I appreciate you being willing to have this conversation with me about what is one of the hardest topics right now to talk about, period. Like globally, it seems like it’s one of the most charged things that one can discuss, as I found with my teachers recently, and as I’m sure you found on your side of the conversations. Does that seem accurate, to assess it that way? It’s a difficult conversation.

Daniel: Yeah. I mean, for me, it’s a conversation that’s been almost 35 years in the making, ever since I was born. And it probably took another 10 years of really arduous work to get to a point where we can have the conversation, though I do think it’s getting easier as time goes by. It’s kind of a muscle, having these really challenging conversations.

Vince: That’s a good point. Difficult conversations are like practice. I appreciate you having this with me. Maybe I could give my ridiculously oversimplified version of my understanding of your story and then you could actually correct me and tell the real story.

Daniel: It probably can’t be wrong and I would love to hear it reflected back at me.

Vince: Well, I know very little, but the little that I’ve garnered and the reason I was excited to chat with you here in the context of this series of conversations I’ve been having on the Buddhist Geeks podcast, Meditating on Palestine. My understanding of your background, your history — it’s so unique. You came up in the West Bank in a settler community as an Israeli. You grew up with a family and a community that was completely embedded in Zionist Israeli culture. And specifically, there’s a difference, as I understand it, between the settler culture and the more urban culture, far off from where things are happening. Maybe I’m not sure if that’s true, but it is here in the US. Urban and rural cultures tend to be different. So you grew up in what I would think of as a place where most people are not going to engage in deep self-reflection about their relationship to their own country’s actions. Especially when they’ve learned their whole life that this is totally reasonable, justified defense. My understanding is that at a young age you started to question some of these things and eventually that culminated in you fully kind of breaking from your own community and your own family in some sense, and your religion. I think at some point, I’m not sure how the religion falls into that. I know you had a shift in your relationship to religion as well. I mean, otherwise you probably wouldn’t be practicing dharma.

Daniel: I would say it was a reconnection, is probably more accurate.

Vince: Great. Well, sometimes a reconnection can look like, from a conventional standpoint, completely leaving something. But in reality you’re like, oh no, this is what it’s really about. I totally get that. So here’s the crazy thing. When we talked last, you told me that you left Israel a month before October 7th, 2023. And you felt that something was building and that you did not want to be there anymore. So that brings us up to present day. You’re living in the US now. And you are married or engaged?

Daniel: I’m engaged to Christina. I’ve been married in the past. That’s part of the journey. That’s part of the story.

Vince: Part of your story as well.

Daniel: Part of the self-reckoning. I think everything that you said is really accurate and there are so many layers to it, from the urban to the rural, because on some level, Zionism is certainly not a monolith. However, there is a systemic architecture to it that applies across all spectrums. So the Zionist ideology will meet lots of people where they’re at. There’s the secular flavor, there’s the religious settler flavor. Is it divine, is it secular? All of these different things can all be true at once. But what you were saying is accurate. So I was born and raised in a religious Zionist West Bank settlement. These are the spearhead of the ideology of the settlements. And I really, for me, I say that this was a journey of how I came to see the Palestinians as humans. That’s what I really think is the arc of the journey. And in order to get to the place where I could see them as humans, I first had to discover my own humanity.

And as I understand it, the basis of everything that we’re seeing is dehumanization, is the othering of another person, which starts at a very, very young age with very deep conditioning and programming. And the thing is that it really can start from things as simple as the regular childhood trauma that we all experience. Something as simple as you can’t marry outside of the tribe, and how do these seeds of beliefs over time create a situation in which we can see the other as non-human?

Vince: Yes. I agree with you that dehumanization is the root issue here and that’s why I’m happy to have this conversation as well, because as you know about my history, my grandfather was a refugee of the Nakba. So he came to the US through Egypt and his family continued to live in the West Bank until the 1980s. So they were connected to this area, and your family is from this area. It’s like, how else could two people with these histories be talking if we weren’t able to meet each other as human beings?

You know, I think that’s the case here. I see your writing and I see your work and I see it’s deeply human. And it’s not just that I agree with you on theoretical points about the challenges that Palestinians face with respect to Zionism and Israel and unequal power, occupation, et cetera. I think we see largely eye to eye, but it’s your humanness and how you’re sharing that, that for me is what’s most interesting about it. It’s not just like, oh, there’s a person who ideologically I’m in agreement with.

And I guess I want to highlight that. To me, this is important. Your story is a human story, like you said. How did you encounter your own humanity? I’m sure there are many moments, but what was the big one with respect to this?

Daniel: I recently wrote an article called “Breaking the 10 Commandments.” And that was really the breaking point for me. So I married young, I was married at 20.

Vince: Okay.

Daniel: And about five years into that relationship, there was a window of time where I was unfaithful to my partner. And back then I was still very much in a state of unawareness, going through the motions. I was allowing myself to kind of be controlled. You’re just moving through all of it. And I had this moment of reckoning at some point where I had to take a deep breath and I look back in total shock, realizing what had just happened. And I kept this a secret for seven, eight years.

And that was really a time where I was sitting with just the first part of the reckoning, which was: first of all, how did this happen? How could this have happened to me? I’m such a good person. I’m so moral. I say the right things. I do the right things. Everything looks so perfect on the outside.

Vince: Right?

Daniel: I’m the golden child. All of these things. And somehow I did one of the worst things in the world, one of the Big 10. And I had to sit with that. And at first I was trying to figure out how could I bury it? How could I explain it away? How could I take a big enough dose of psychedelics and hopefully not return to planet Earth? There were nights where I was praying, just praying for death, because the thought of having to face this and the shame of what I’d done. And all the while I am continuing to play the part, while I’m completely being destroyed on the inside.

Vince: So at this point, you’re still acting like a faithful husband and like you’re the golden child.

Daniel: I’m the golden child, and my spiritual journey is still progressing. Right. These things are not actually exclusive. We can hold many compartments and we can evolve in some ways, and we can be held back in other ways.

So I’m trying to figure things out. I’m going through this journey, and ultimately I came to this realization that if I could do this, there is nothing that anybody else can’t do, because I knew what my center was. And so if I was capable of this, there’s nothing that anybody else isn’t capable of. And in that moment, that’s when I realized, okay, I’m human. But that was really only the beginning of the journey, because it’s not just about recognizing it, it’s actually about going through the work of trying to repair.

And so I came forward and realized that I needed to tell my wife the truth. And so I came forward with the intention of...