Testing the Gospel Ethic in Israel and Palestine

Where the Jesus ethic meets the daily reality of Israel and Palestine

By J. André Faust (Oct 04, 2025)

The Motif

The figure of Jesus is a moral North Star: peace, mercy, forgiveness, love of enemy, care for the vulnerable. The Sermon on the Mount, the call to peacemakers, the command to love those who hate you, and the preference for humility over status set a clear ethic. It is an ethic of means, not only ends, and it measures success by the dignity preserved in those who suffer.

Where the Contradiction Appears

Modern states operate inside a hard world of borders, deterrence, and survival. Leaders are rewarded for security outcomes, not for moral beauty. The result is a visible gap between the motif and the methods often used in its name. This gap is not new. It is a repeating pattern: an ideal rises, power consolidates around it, power drifts toward self-preservation, then renewal is needed to realign means with the original purpose.

The Dialectic: How Ideals Drift

1. Ideal: a unifying moral vision invites sacrifice and trust.
2. Power: institutions stabilize the vision and guard the community.
3. Corruption: incentives tilt toward control, secrecy, and punishment.
4. Renewal: voices of conscience expose the drift and call the system back.

Mechanics of the Contradiction

• Security dilemma: one side’s “defense” looks like “aggression” to the other, so each escalation invites the next.
• Trauma memory: communities with deep wounds overweight worst-case risks and accept harsher measures as “insurance.”
• Bureaucratic survival: agencies protect budgets, reputations, and doctrines, even when conditions change.
• Signaling politics: leaders prove strength to domestic audiences, which narrows room for de-escalation.
• Moral licensing: doing some good becomes a pass for doing harm “for the greater good.”
• Media incentives: outrage and spectacle reward maximal responses and punish restraint.
• Path dependence: once you invest in a tool, you keep using it, even when it is no longer the right tool.

Practical Tests: Are We Close to the Motif?

• Means vs ends: are the means humane, or only the goal?
• Enemy image: do we leave space for the opponent’s repentance, or only for their defeat?
• Proportionality: are responses limited, precise, and revisable?
• Protection of the vulnerable: are noncombatants, prisoners, and the poor actively shielded?
• Transparency: can citizens audit the policy, the data, and the costs?
• Burden sharing: do decision makers share the costs, or export them downward?
• Room for dissent: are critics treated as partners in truth-seeking, or as enemies?

What Renewal Looks Like

Renewal begins when conscience regains jurisdiction over strategy. In practice that means verifiable de-escalation steps, humanitarian corridors with third-party monitors, time-limited emergency powers, protection of journalists and medics, restorative elements for the innocent, and language that recognizes the other’s dignity. None of this guarantees safety, yet each step closes the gap between the motif and the method.

Why This Matters

The point is not to romanticize power or to shame those who exercise it. The point is to keep power answerable to the very ideal that gave it birth. Every era repeats the same spiral. The question is whether we notice the drift early enough to correct it without catastrophe.

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References (APA 7)

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Structural entanglements, layered systems, humble forecasts.