Tuesday, March 17, 2026
Elder of Ziyon
Note:I am writing as a Jewish thinker, not a Christian theologian. I am not arguing from within the Christian tradition about how it should read its own sources. I am arguing from outside — using a philosophical framework rooted in Jewish ethical methodology — that the theological genre examined here fails by standards universal to moral reasoning, standards that the strongest elements of Christian moral thought itself affirms. Where this essay engages Christian theology, it does so analytically, not confessionally.
The Uncontested Ground
A new theological genre has emerged in the wake of Gaza, and it has largely gone unanswered on the terrain that matters most.
They have not received one.
Christian Zionism, which is the natural constituency for a counter-argument, has largely responded to this genre by retreating to biblical geography. The land was promised, the return was prophesied, the restoration of Israel fulfills scripture. These arguments may be compelling within their own tradition, but against opponents who are arguing about justice and the prophetic tradition's concern for the oppressed, scripture-based Zionism is not playing the same game. It concedes the entire moral-reasoning space by default. Palestinian Christian theology has effectively occupied the moral high ground not because its arguments are sound, but because its opponents have declined to contest them on those terms.
That is the gap this essay attempts to fill.
The framework I am drawing on is Derechology, a system of moral reasoning I have been developing as a form of "moral engineering," applying structural insights from Jewish ethical methodology to construct universal, secular moral analysis. It is not a Jewish theology. It is a method, and methods can be used by anyone. My claim is that this framework can do what Christian Zionism has failed to do: engage Palestinian Christian theology on its own chosen terrain — moral reasoning, prophetic justice, and the ethics of violence — and demonstrate that its conclusions do not follow from the premises it uses to reach them.
I submit that Gaza theology replaces structured moral reasoning with a system in which suffering determines moral truth, moral categories are collapsed into one another, and conclusions are fixed in advance. This produces emotionally compelling but analytically unreliable moral judgments, and it does so not despite claiming the prophetic tradition but by systematically dismantling the analytical tools that tradition requires.
What Gaza Theology Is Actually Doing
The books in this genre are emotionally powerful, and the emotion is not fraudulent. Their authors have witnessed genuine suffering. Munther Isaac is a Palestinian Christian pastor who has ministered in Bethlehem while Gaza was bombed. The suffering of Gazans is real. A serious response cannot dismiss it, and this one will not. For the record: a framework that defended Israeli conduct categorically, without applying the same standards of scrutiny this essay demands of its opponents, would fail the identical test applied here.
But moral authority and emotional authority are not the same thing. The most consequential move in Gaza theology is not the reporting of suffering: it is the theological interpretation of what suffering proves. And that interpretation is where careful analysis must begin.
Across all three books, a single foundational axiom operates: moral authority resides with the victim. The framing in Isaac's book is explicit, that the divine presence is located with those under the rubble, meaning not merely that God is present with the suffering (a theologically defensible claim with deep roots in the tradition) but that the victim's perspective generates moral truth. Suffering does not merely witness to tragedy; it testifies to guilt.
This is a significant claim. It is largely unargued but rather presupposed. And once presupposed, it does enormous downstream work: moral authority is relocated away from doctrine, law, and structured reasoning, and into the experience of those who suffer. The practical consequence is that disagreement with the victim's narrative becomes morally illegitimate rather than factually contestable: not an error to be corrected but a form of complicity to be condemned. Questioning the framework's conclusions does not invite rebuttal; it triggers indictment. This is not a feature of robust moral reasoning. It is a sign that the framework has foreclosed the inquiry it claims to be conducting.
The Epistemic Problem: Claims as Axioms
Jewish ethical tradition insists on emet — the obligation to truth — as a precondition for moral reasoning, not a byproduct of it. Of course, this is not a specifically Jewish insight; it is shared across traditions. The commandment against bearing false witness is foundational to the Hebrew Bible that Christians read as their own scripture. The prophetic literature is filled with condemnations of dishonest scales, of those who call evil good and good evil, of testimony that serves predetermined conclusions. Any framework claiming continuity with this tradition must audit its own factual premises before proceeding.
Gaza theology does not do this. It proceeds axiomatically.
Consider the term "genocide." In Theology After Gaza, it appears in the preface as settled fact — not a charge to be established but a characterization already in place. Genocide, legally and morally, requires demonstrated intent to destroy a people as such. The Genocide Convention does not define genocide as high civilian casualties in urban warfare. It does not define it as disproportionate force, collective punishment, or ethnic cleansing. It requires specific intent — dolus specialis — directed at the destruction of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as a group.
Whether that intent can be demonstrated in Israel's conduct in Gaza is a factual and legal question. It is not answered by casualty figures, no matter how high. It is not answered by quoting politicians making statements about destroying Hamas. It requires sustained evidentiary analysis of military targeting decisions, command structures, stated objectives, and patterns of action — analysis that distinguished legal bodies have conducted and contested without consensus.
Gaza theology treats this question as closed.
This closure has a diagnostic consequence worth making explicit. A moral framework is falsifiable when there exists some possible evidence that could revise its conclusions. Ask of this framework: what Israeli action, conducted under the same conditions of ongoing Hamas attack, tunnel infrastructure, hostage crisis, and explicit genocidal intent from the other side, would not constitute evidence of genocide within this system? If the answer is that no such action exists — that the conclusion is entrenched regardless of what evidence might show — then the framework is not a moral analysis. It is a verdict with supporting documentation assembled afterward. Israel's policies of warning to the population to move out of harm's way, of facilitating thousands of tons of food and aid into Gaza during active hostilities, of pausing campaigns to allow vaccine distribution and hundreds of other examples, are either ignored or twisted by Israel's critics as more evidence of atrocities. The unfalsifiability is not incidental; it follows directly from locating moral authority in suffering rather than in structured evaluation of acts and intentions.
A methodologically rigorous audit asks: what definition (of genocide, of apartheid, of occupation, of colonialism) is being used? Is it stable? Is it applied consistently? Would the same standard, applied to comparable situations, produce comparable conclusions? These are the minimum conditions for moral reasoning rather than moral performance.
The Category Problem: Fusing What Must Be Distinguished
The most consequential analytical failure in Gaza theology is what might be called category fusion — the collapse of four morally distinct phenomena into a single moral object.
War involves organized armed conflict between parties with recognized combatants and rules governing conduct. Atrocity refers to specific violations of those rules: targeting civilians, torture, execution of prisoners. Structural injustice describes ongoing systemic conditions — occupation, discrimination, unequal legal treatment — that exist apart from active combat. Genocide is a legal category with a specific intent requirement.
These categories are related but not interchangeable. A war can be just even if it contains atrocities. Structural injustice can exist without genocide. Atrocities do not automatically constitute genocide. The legal and moral consequences of each category differ dramatically. (Whether Israel is guilty of atrocities or structural injustice are separate questions requiring separate analysis — neither, in any case, implies genocide.)
In the Gaza theology genre, these categories are merged. Once merged, any evidence of one becomes evidence of all. High civilian casualties — a feature of any urban warfare, especially when one party embeds combatants in civilian infrastructure — become evidence of genocidal intent. The existence of the blockade, a structural policy meant to protect Israeli civilians, is folded into evidence of elimination. October 7th is described as contextualized, reactive violence arising from oppression. Israeli military responses are described as colonial elimination. One side's violence is categorized as structural; the other's as atrocity. Crucially, neither categorization is argued, they are assumed.
This category fusion has a specific logical consequence beyond unfalsifiability: it makes the framework incapable of distinguishing better from worse conduct. If all Israeli military action is genocide by definition, then there is no meaningful moral difference between a strike that kills twenty civilians and one that kills two thousand, between targeting a Hamas commander and targeting a hospital, between a war fought with discriminating means and one fought without them. Moral categories exist precisely to make these distinctions. A framework that erases them cannot guide conduct. It can only pronounce verdicts.
The Christian traditions that Palestinian theologians draw on are not uniform on the ethics of war . Just War theory, developed in the Western Latin tradition by Augustine and Aquinas, is not universally accepted across Christendom. Eastern Orthodox Christianity, the tradition of a substantial portion of Palestinian Christians, has historically taken a more morally austere position: that killing in war, even when unavoidable, carries moral cost requiring penitential response. That tradition, if taken seriously, demands more rigorous analysis of how wars begin, who sustains them, and who bears responsibility for their conditions, not less. The categorical precision that Gaza theology abandons is not a Western imposition. It is what serious moral reasoning about violence requires, regardless of tradition.
Palestinian Christian theology claims the prophetic mantle while dismantling the analytical tools that prophetic justice requires.
Suffering, Agency, and the Prophetic Tradition
The liberation theology tradition from which Gaza theology draws its strongest arguments contains genuine insight. Its insistence that theology must not float free of material conditions — that a gospel indifferent to poverty, displacement, and political oppression is an impoverished gospel — has real roots in the Hebrew prophets, in Amos and Micah and Isaiah. To acknowledge this is not to concede the argument. It is to engage it honestly.
But liberation theology's core claim, that the locus of moral authority shifts toward the suffering, requires examination it rarely receives. There is a crucial distinction between saying that God is present with those who suffer and saying that those who suffer occupy a privileged epistemic position from which moral truth is generated. The first is a claim about solidarity. The second is a claim about who gets to define reality. The Gaza theology books consistently move from the first claim to the second without acknowledging that they have done so.
The Hebrew prophetic tradition, which Isaac invokes extensively, does not support this move. Amos condemns Israel for its treatment of the poor. But the poor in Amos are not exempt from moral analysis by virtue of their poverty. The widow, the orphan, the stranger — protected categories throughout the Hebrew Bible — are protected because of their vulnerability, not because vulnerability confers moral infallibility. The prophets address all parties as moral agents capable of faithfulness and sin, not as pure vessels of divine testimony insulated from evaluation.
There is a deeper problem. Gaza theology's reduction of Palestinian identity to victimhood is, paradoxically, a form of dehumanization. It removes agency. It renders the question of Hamas's stated intentions, Hamas's military tactics, Hamas's governance of Gaza, Hamas's explicit theological commitment to the elimination of Israel, and the documented participation of thousands of non-Hamas Palestinian civilians in the October 7 massacre, largely irrelevant to the moral conclusions the books reach. To take those questions seriously is to treat Palestinians as agents rather than as sufferers, which the framework cannot accommodate without disrupting its own architecture.
A moral framework that functionally exempts one party from analysis is not a framework for justice. It is a framework for a verdict already reached.
The Pursuer: Restoring a Missing Variable
Jewish law has long developed the concept of the rodef — the pursuer. The principle addresses a problem that moral philosophy in every tradition must eventually confront: what obligations arise when someone is not merely threatening harm as a single act, but is on a sustained trajectory toward it? The rodef is distinguished from the ordinary aggressor precisely by this trajectory, the ongoing direction of movement toward lethal harm that creates continuing moral urgency, increasing with every moment of inaction.
The reason to introduce this concept here is not to import a specifically Jewish legal category into a Christian debate. It is to name a variable that Gaza theology's framework structurally omits, and whose omission makes reliable moral evaluation of this conflict impossible.
Any serious moral analysis of the use of force must account for sustained lethal trajectory. The question is not only what happened in a specific strike or operation but what ongoing intention and capacity the force was responding to. This maps onto what multiple Christian traditions recognize as the problem of the unjust aggressor — the party whose ongoing threat to others creates legitimate grounds for intervention. What the rodef concept contributes is precision about trajectory rather than episode: the moral situation is created not merely by a completed act but by a sustained direction of movement that continues unless interrupted. Omit this variable and you cannot correctly evaluate the use of force. You can only evaluate its outcomes, which is not the same thing.
Gaza theology's framework omits this variable entirely. October 7th is described as the opening of "the genocide," contextualizing the massacre of 1,200 civilians — many tortured, many burned alive, many taken hostage — as a response to prior Israeli oppression. Even granting the political context, this framing treats October 7th as an episode arising from conditions rather than the expression of a sustained, institutionally embedded, explicitly articulated intent to destroy.
Hamas's founding documents call for the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews. They are still in force, despite the 2017 revised document that softened some language. Hamas officials stated after October 7th that the operation was intended to be the first of many. Hamas's tunnel infrastructure — built under hospitals, schools, and civilian housing — represents a structural decision, made deliberately, to embed military assets within civilian populations. Under the laws of war and under basic ethical reasoning, moral responsibility for resulting civilian casualties rests primarily with the party that creates the shield, not the party that must confront it.
These factors do not play a meaningful role in the moral conclusions the books under examination reach. Hamas is not seriously evaluated as a moral agent with a record and a trajectory. Its governance of Gaza — including the execution of political opponents, suppression of civil society, and systematic diversion of humanitarian resources to military construction — does not inform the framework's judgments. Its explicit theological commitment to annihilationist war is not analyzed as a relevant variable. The omission is structural — the framework cannot incorporate this variable without collapsing the architecture that produces its conclusions.
Restoring the concept of sustained lethal trajectory does not predetermine the analysis. It opens it. It insists that all parties be evaluated as moral agents with intentions, capacities, and directions of movement. It asks whether there is an ongoing trajectory of violence that creates continuing moral urgency — a question that has an answer in this conflict, an answer that the Gaza theology genre is structurally prevented from seeing.
The Double Standard as Theological Method
The internal contradiction at the heart of Gaza theology is not incidental. It is structural, and it reveals itself most clearly in the response to October 7th.
Any moral framework is valid only if it applies identical evaluative standards to all agents. This is the minimum definition of a standard rather than a preference. Gaza theology fails it systematically, and the failure operates in both directions simultaneously: Israeli violence is evaluated without the context that might complicate condemnation, while Palestinian violence is contextualized in ways that functionally dissolve condemnation before it can form.
Consider how each side's violence is treated within the framework. Israeli military action is evaluated in isolation from the threats that produce it. The hostage crisis, the documented Hamas use of civilian infrastructure as military cover, the sustained trajectory of genocidal intent articulated in Hamas's own words — none of these factors play a meaningful role in the moral analysis. What plays a role is the outcome: Palestinian civilians died, therefore Israel committed an atrocity, therefore the theological verdict is condemnation. Context for Israeli action is not merely underweighted. It is structurally excluded.
Palestinian violence receives precisely the opposite treatment. The Kairos Palestine document, the foundational text of this theological movement, does not merely acknowledge Palestinian violence; it constructs a causal argument that transfers moral responsibility for it entirely to Israel. "If there were no occupation, there would be no resistance, no fear and no insecurity," the document states, presenting Palestinian violence not as the chosen acts of moral agents but as the mechanical outputs of Israeli input. Under this logic, Palestinian violence has no independent moral standing requiring evaluation. It is Israel's responsibility by definition, before any specific act is examined.
The October 7th massacre made this structural double standard impossible to conceal. Munther Isaac delivered a sermon the day after the massacre that described it in terms of Palestinian endurance — framing the murder of 1,200 civilians around "the strength of the Palestinian man who defied his siege." Later, under significant pressure, he offered a more qualified position: "What happened on 7 October was evil. No one can approve the murder and abduction of civilians and children. But I refuse to ignore the context. What happened on 7 October was the desperate act of people who have known nothing other than the siege of Gaza."
The structure of that statement repays close attention. The condemnation is entered, then immediately bracketed by context — context that, within the framework's own logic, explains and therefore partially dissolves the moral weight of the act. That same contextual generosity is nowhere operative when Israeli military actions are evaluated. Israeli operations are not described as responses from people who have known nothing but rocket fire, tunnel infiltration, and the sustained genocidal declarations of their neighbors. Israeli context does not soften Israeli verdicts. Palestinian context dissolves Palestinian verdicts. The asymmetry is total and operates in both directions simultaneously.
The 2025 Kairos II document, issued more than two years after October 7th with full knowledge of what the massacre involved, confirms that this asymmetry is not a temporary failure of nerve but a settled theological position. It reaffirms "the right of all colonized peoples to resist their colonizers," framing resistance as simultaneously a political right and a theological calling. While including a caveat against civilian killings, the document consistently portrays resistance not merely as a political response but as a faith-driven act rooted in divine calling and religious conscience. The caveat against civilian deaths is formal. The sanctification of resistance is substantive. When the two conflict — as they did on October 7th — the framework's actual priorities are visible.
This double standard is load-bearing to Gaza theology. Remove it and the framework cannot reach its conclusions, because those conclusions depend on applying maximum scrutiny to Israeli actions while granting structural exemption to Palestinian ones. Apply the same standard in both directions — evaluate both sides' violence in light of the threats each faces, the alternatives each had, the stated intentions each holds, and the moral agency each exercises — and the predetermined verdict dissolves. What remains is a genuine moral inquiry that might produce genuinely complicated conclusions. That, precisely, is what the framework is designed to prevent.
The test is simple: would the same contextual generosity extended to Hamas operatives carrying out October 7th be extended to Israeli military planners responding to ongoing attack, documented genocidal intent, and a hostage crisis? If not — if context humanizes one party while the other's context is structurally irrelevant — then what is being practiced is not ethics. It is weaponized false morality.
The prophetic tradition these books claim as their inheritance was not a tradition of selective indignation. Amos condemned Israel. Jeremiah condemned Judah. The prophets did not exempt their own people from moral analysis on grounds of historical suffering or national solidarity. The standard was consistent precisely because consistency was what made it a standard rather than a preference. Gaza theology, for all its prophetic self-presentation, does not meet the prophets' own test.
On Repentance: The Correct Order of Operations
The books in this genre conclude, consistently, with a call to repentance. Western Christians must repent of their complicity. The Church must reckon with its support for Zionism. The demand is urgent, the language searing.
The Jewish concept of teshuvah — repentance, literally "returning" — is among the most morally serious acts available to human beings. Christian theology has a direct parallel in the Greek concept of metanoia, the change of mind and direction that stands at the center of the New Testament's moral vocabulary. Both traditions agree on the essential structure: genuine repentance is a complete turning, grounded in honest reckoning with what one has actually done, oriented toward genuine correction. It is not a performance. It is not the expression of solidarity with a cause. It is moral transformation, and both traditions insist that it must be rooted in truth to be real.
This is precisely why false repentance is not a virtue in either tradition. It is a corruption of the concept. To repent on the basis of a false account of what occurred is to perform the form of moral seriousness while evacuating its content. The Hebrew Bible is explicit on the related question of moral responsibility: accountability attaches to the specific acts of specific persons, not to inherited guilt or associative complicity. To demand that Western Christians repent for Israel's conduct on the basis of confessional solidarity — because many Christians support Israel — attributes guilt by association rather than by act. The prophetic tradition that Gaza theology invokes consistently repudiates exactly that move.
More fundamentally, the call to repentance in these books arrives before the moral work that would justify it. Casualty figures are cited not as data to be analyzed but as proof of what has already been decided. Expert claims — genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing — are treated not as conclusions to be argued but as premises from which to reason. The demand for repentance precedes rather than follows the establishment of truth, judgment, and responsibility.
In both Jewish and Christian moral understanding, the correct sequence runs in one direction only: truth, then judgment, then responsibility, then repentance. Gaza theology reverses this entirely. A call to repentance that bypasses truth is not moral seriousness. In the very prophetic tradition it claims to represent, it bears a closer resemblance to the false prophecy that tradition consistently and forcefully condemns.
The Gaza theology call to repentance is not a desire to improve oneself; it is a call to condemn fellow Christians under the pretense of religious imperative.
What This Framework Offers
This is not a defense of every Israeli military decision in Gaza. Specific targeting choices, specific civilian casualty events, specific policy decisions can and should be evaluated on their merits by anyone willing to apply consistent standards. A framework that insists on methodological rigor applies that insistence to all parties, without exception and without predetermined conclusions.
What this analysis contests is the methodological structure Gaza theology uses to reach its conclusions — a structure that treats contested legal categories as settled facts, collapses morally distinct phenomena into a single object of condemnation, locates moral authority in suffering rather than in reasoned evaluation, functionally exempts one party from analysis, applies context asymmetrically in both directions, and demands repentance before establishing truth. These are not failures specific to writing about Gaza. They are failures of method that would corrupt any moral analysis to which they were applied.
Christian Zionism has not made this argument adequately, because it has been fighting on the wrong terrain, defending the legitimacy of Jewish sovereignty through scripture rather than defending the integrity of moral reasoning against its methodological opponents. Palestinian Christian theology has been permitted to claim the high ground of justice and prophetic tradition largely uncontested, while its actual methods have gone unexamined.
The concepts required for that examination are available across traditions. The obligation to truth that Jewish tradition calls emet is the same obligation enshrined in the commandment against false witness that both traditions share. The repentance that Jewish tradition calls teshuvah and Christian tradition calls metanoia both insist that genuine moral turning is grounded in truth, not performed ahead of it. The concept of the sustained lethal trajectory that Jewish law names with precision maps onto what multiple Christian traditions recognize as the unjust aggressor whose ongoing threat creates legitimate grounds for intervention. These are parallel developments from overlapping moral intuitions, and they are available to anyone willing to use them consistently.
The derechological contribution is to insist that these tools actually be deployed — honestly, symmetrically, and without predetermined conclusions. Not as an attack on compassion, which is genuine and morally required, but as a defense of the analytical conditions under which compassion can produce reliable moral judgments rather than misdirected ones. Mourning Palestinian civilian deaths is not only compatible with this framework; it is required by it. What the framework refuses is the move from mourning to verdict without the analytical work that the distance between those two things demands.
A grief that mistakes itself for a verdict is not justice. It is sorrow with a predetermined conclusion — and both the tradition these books invoke and the people whose suffering they describe deserve better than that.
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