Michael Oren writes in The Free Press about how a group of real-estate moguls and builders managed to bring a local modicum of peace to the Middle East. His answer is essentially dealmaking and personal relationships.
But the real story may be something deeper - and stranger. What Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff, and Donald Trump stumbled into was not superior negotiation technique but a kind of accidental moral philosophy: an ethics of clarity that cut through half a century of false ideas about peace itself.
For decades, Western diplomacy treated “peace” as the supreme moral goal. The word sounded noble, but it concealed a category error. Peace is not a moral value—it is a moral byproduct.
A value, by definition, must transform reality for the good: it must preserve life, restore dignity, expose evil, or advance justice. “Peace,” on its own, performs none of these functions. It merely describes the absence of visible conflict, even when injustice festers quietly beneath. That’s why peace processes designed around “peace” keep failing: they mistake stillness for healing and silence for harmony.
The goal of genuine peace is to enable the higher moral work: protecting life, restraining evil, and cultivating human dignity. When peace becomes detached from those purposes, it becomes a kind of idol: something to be pursued for its own sake, even at the cost of truth and justice. Oslo ended up fetishizing the process, and ignoring the underlying moral reasons of why we want peace to begin with. These real-estate dealmakers, lacking the pretensions of philosophers or diplomats, simply ignored the idol and started building on firmer moral ground.
For decades, Western policy talked about the Middle East in the language of “rights”: the Palestinian rights of "return," "justice" and "dignity;" Israel’s right to security or even to exist altogether. The problem is that rights, when treated as absolute, collide. Everyone ends up righteous and immovable. The real estate moguls instinctively shifted the grammar from rights to obligations. Hamas must stop murdering and kidnapping and cannot profit from it. Qatar must stop funding terror. Israel must defend its citizens. The United States must stop enabling moral confusion. Each obligation could be tested in reality, whether fulfilled or violated.
This shift mirrors what I call the Obligation Principle: a moral claim is valid only if it binds the claimant to concrete responsibility. In that light, the Abraham Accords were less a diplomatic triumph than an ethical correction. Once obligations replaced abstractions, the fog cleared and progress followed.
Critics sneered that Trump spoke “the language of strength.” They missed that strength, properly ordered, is a moral language. In the Middle East, as in human life, evil rarely yields to polite conversation or diplomacy. Peace imposed by fear of justice is not perfect, but it is better than a false peace that is only a stage toward the next war. The builders’ willingness to back moral clarity with material power was not barbaric; it was coherent. They also used positive incentives to nudge the players towards the US position which supported this coherent vision. And coherence is the first test of moral truth.
The remarkable thing is that the “builder’s ethic” produced not chaos but alignment. Once the United States stopped rewarding contradiction - condemning terrorism in principle while rewarding it in practice - regional actors recalibrated. The same kings and presidents who had long mouthed anti-Zionist clichés suddenly saw advantage in stability. Reality, long suppressed by moral relativism, reasserted itself. Ethics turned out to be the shortest path to strategy.
This is the central lesson of the episode and the reason it matters beyond politics. Ethical clarity is not an ornament to policy; it is policy. A coherent moral framework functions like a blueprint: once you know which beams must bear weight, you can build anything upon them - whether cities, treaties, or even peace.
For too long Israel's enemies screamed about their dignity and how important it was, and they even use that word to justify murder and terror. The West has been cowed by this appeal to the legitimate value of dignity, and did not have the confidence to counter that Arab dignity is just one value among many that need to be balanced. It cannot override preservation of life, fairness, or the dignity of the other side.
Real ethics is all about that balance, but without a moral core, concepts like dignity or justice can morph into evil.
Whether Kushner and Witkoff understood this in ethical terms or they simply saw through the moral posturing as another negotiating position, they did not allow themselves to be bulldozed by false ethical concepts that have stymied Western diplomats for so long.
It may seem absurd to describe Donald Trump as an ethical actor. But history is full of flawed vessels who perform correct operations. Ethics is not about personal saintliness; it is about whether one’s actions align with moral structure. Just as people with Aristotelian virtues like wisdom or courage can be immoral, people without those virtues can do the right thing. In this case, they did. By accident or instinct, the builders behaved as if guided by a hierarchy of values long familiar to Jewish moral thought: life before peace, justice before diplomacy, truth before comfort.
The diplomats built process; the builders built structure. One collapses under pressure; the other stands.
If peace required rejecting the false philosophy that had dominated foreign policy, perhaps moral clarity can do the same for our other failing institutions. The same logic that produced the Abraham Accords can produce trustworthy systems anywhere: don't assume all claims have equal moral value, name evil accurately, replace sentiment with structure, and require obligations before rights.
Peace, properly understood, is not the goal of ethics: it is what ethics produces when values like life, justice, and truth are rightly aligned. The builders’ achievement, however imperfect, was to rediscover that order without ever naming it.
That’s the architecture of ethics, and, as it turns out, of peace.
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