Two Peoples, One Moral Standard

What the Consistency Test Requires of Christians

Part VII of a Seven-Part Series

This series began with history but eventually arrived at a moral question. Christians did not create Zionism or the State of Israel, yet Christian restorationism, biblical interpretation, advocacy, and political networks belonged to the environment in which Jewish restoration became imaginable to influential people in Britain and the United States. After 1948, Christian attachment to Israel became an organized American political constituency. By the twenty-first century, biblical interpretations of Israel could be heard not only in churches and advocacy organizations but from people exercising significant political and diplomatic authority.

Following that history forced the series into more difficult territory. Supporting Israel’s continued existence does not settle whether Israeli governments can commit serious wrongs. Criticizing occupation, settlements, discrimination, military conduct, or other policies does not by itself establish that abolition of the state is the appropriate remedy. Nor can claims that Israel is permanently illegitimate because of its origins function as general principles unless we are prepared to consider what the same principles would mean when applied elsewhere.

Parts V and VI then exposed another complication. Christians who appeal to the Bible do not reach one political conclusion. Some emphasize covenant, promise, restoration, and the land in defending Jewish sovereignty. Palestinian Christians and others emphasize creation, human dignity, prophetic justice, liberation, the teachings of Jesus, and the rights of people living under oppression. The disagreement is therefore not between Christians who use Scripture and those who do not. It concerns how Scripture should shape political judgment when two peoples inhabit the same land.

The final question is whether a moral standard can survive when the identity of the people to whom it is applied changes.

Two Peoples Already Exist

Historical narratives can make one of these peoples disappear. A Jewish account can move from biblical Israel through exile, persecution, antisemitism, the Holocaust, Zionism, and statehood while Palestinians appear principally when they resist Jewish restoration. A Palestinian account can move from longstanding presence through empire, Zionist immigration, the Nakba, occupation, settlements, and Gaza while Jewish political existence appears mainly as a colonial intrusion.

Each account contains history the other cannot responsibly erase. The distortion begins when either becomes so complete that the people inside the other story become secondary.

Israel is not merely a proposal made in 1947. It is an established political society containing generations born long after its founding. Its admission to the United Nations in 1949 does not sanctify everything associated with its creation or excuse later conduct, but contemporary arguments concern an existing population and state rather than a political proposal that can simply be returned to the drafting table.

Palestinians likewise cannot be reduced to a problem created by Israel’s existence. They constitute a people with historical, cultural, civil, political, and national claims. In 2012 the United Nations General Assembly granted Palestine non-member observer State status while reaffirming Palestinian self-determination. In its 2024 advisory opinion, the International Court of Justice described Palestinian self-determination as an inalienable right and concluded that Israeli policies and practices in the occupied territory had obstructed its exercise.¹ ²

The political challenge therefore begins with an inconvenient fact for absolutists on both sides: both peoples exist, and neither can achieve justice through the political disappearance of the other.

Trauma Creates Obligations, Not Monopolies

Both peoples carry histories of trauma, but acknowledging both does not require treating them as equivalent. The Holocaust was not the Nakba, and the Nakba was not the Holocaust. Antisemitism has its own theological, political, and murderous history. Palestinian displacement, refugeehood, statelessness, and military occupation have a different history. Moral seriousness requires understanding each without using one to cancel the other.

Jewish historical vulnerability helps explain why sovereignty and security carry meanings outsiders may underestimate. A people subjected repeatedly to expulsion, persecution, pogroms, and genocide will not readily accept dependence upon the protection of others as an adequate political future. Palestinian history produces another understandable conclusion. A people that experienced mass displacement and decades without sovereign control over much of its national life will not regard indefinite administration by another state as freedom.

Historical trauma therefore creates claims that political arrangements must address. It does not grant either people a monopoly on suffering or a permanent exemption from obligations toward the other.

That distinction is the heart of the consistency test. The principle derived from one people’s history must remain recognizable when the identity of the claimant changes.

The Standard Has to Travel

Civilian protection provides the simplest example. Jewish civilians have a right not to be deliberately attacked, and Palestinian civilians possess the same right. Palestinian children do not become responsible for the actions of Hamas, just as Israeli children do not become responsible for decisions made by an Israeli government. Genuine Israeli security concerns cannot make Palestinian civilian suffering morally irrelevant, and Palestinian suffering cannot make attacks on Israeli civilians permissible.

The same principle applies to collective political rights. If Palestinian self-determination matters, Jewish self-determination cannot simply be declared meaningless. If Jewish history generates legitimate concerns about security and political continuity, Palestinian history generates legitimate concerns about freedom and political agency.

A consistency test is not an equivalence test. It does not require assuming that power is evenly distributed, that every historical analogy works, or that competing legal claims possess equal strength. It asks something more basic: does the moral rule change merely because the people invoking it have changed?

Parts III and IV applied that question primarily to Israel. But a consistency test used only to protect Israel from selective standards would itself be selective. If universal principles protect Israeli political existence from erasure, those principles must also protect Palestinian equality, freedom, and self-determination.

The Bible Must Pass the Same Test

For Christians, the argument is more demanding because Scripture is already inside the conflict. Christian restorationism sometimes helped Christians reject supersessionism and centuries of contempt toward Jews by insisting that Jewish history and covenant had not simply disappeared into the Church. That correction was important.

Yet a theology that learns to see Jews more clearly cannot be considered adequate if Palestinians become invisible in the process.

The reverse is equally important. Palestinian liberation theology rightly forces Christians to confront suffering that prophetic or territorial readings can obscure. But a Christian theology of Palestinian liberation becomes morally compromised if Jewish history, antisemitism, Jewish vulnerability, or the continuing existence of Israeli Jews becomes expendable within its narrative.

Christians therefore cannot resolve the disagreement merely by saying, “The Bible says.” We have to ask which texts are being emphasized, how ancient promises are being related to modern political institutions, what theological principles govern interpretation, and what happens to people who stand outside the preferred reading.

The problem is not that Christians bring theology into politics. Political reasoning always contains assumptions about justice, human worth, authority, obligation, and power. The problem begins when theology makes one people’s humanity more visible by making another’s less visible.

What Scripture Cannot Decide for Us

Christians may believe that God made enduring promises to Abraham and his descendants. The political question is what follows from that conviction in a land where another people also possesses homes, property, history, national aspirations, and political rights.

Biblical promise by itself cannot determine contemporary borders, citizenship, settlements, sovereignty, military occupation, private property, refugee arrangements, or the application of international law. These are questions involving modern states and living populations, not merely ancient Israel.

The same limitation applies to biblical arguments from liberation and justice. The prophets’ condemnation of oppression and Jesus’s identification with those who suffer do not themselves determine the borders of a Palestinian state, the future of Jerusalem, the disposition of Israeli settlements, refugee policy, or security arrangements.

Scripture can shape the moral imagination Christians bring to these questions. It cannot relieve us of the obligation to confront history, law, political reality, and the rights of people whose interpretation differs from ours.

That restraint becomes especially important when officials understand political claims as divinely grounded. A strategic position can ordinarily be reconsidered when circumstances change. A territorial claim understood as sacred may be harder to negotiate because compromise can acquire theological significance. That does not mean religious policymakers cannot compromise; history provides counterexamples. It means religion deserves the same analytical attention given to nationalism, ideology, security doctrine, and historical memory.

Security and Freedom Must Constrain Each Other

Any durable political arrangement must take Israeli security seriously. The attacks of October 7, 2023, demonstrated the consequences when armed groups deliberately target civilians and take hostages. No plausible peace can ask Israeli Jews to accept existential vulnerability as the price of Palestinian freedom.

But security cannot become an argument without an endpoint. If Palestinian freedom can always be postponed because freedom might create future risk, temporary control can become permanent subordination. A people cannot meaningfully exercise self-determination while another state indefinitely controls the essential conditions of its political life.

The ICJ’s 2024 advisory opinion addressed part of this tension by concluding that prolonged Israeli policies obstructing Palestinian self-determination could not be justified indefinitely by security considerations. Some judges disagreed with elements of the majority’s reasoning and placed greater emphasis on Israel’s security requirements and the conditions surrounding withdrawal.² ³ The disagreement illustrates the difficulty rather than eliminating it: Palestinian self-determination and Israeli security both have to survive the political arrangement.

A proposal that secures one by permanently denying the other has not resolved the conflict. It has institutionalized it.

Political Rights Do Not Depend on Collective Innocence

The search for an innocent people is one of the least useful habits in this conflict. Governments commit wrongs. Armies commit wrongs. Armed movements commit wrongs. Citizens inherit political systems and histories they did not choose. Political rights cannot sensibly depend upon collective innocence.

Israeli civilians do not lose their political rights because an Israeli government violates international law. Palestinians do not lose their national rights because Hamas committed atrocities. Jewish historical attachment does not disappear because Palestinians were dispossessed, and Palestinian claims do not disappear because Jews possess ancient connections to the land.

Responsibility provides a better method. We should ask who acted, what they did, whose rights were violated, what legal or moral obligations apply, and what remedy follows. The more serious the wrongdoing, the more precise responsibility should become.

That approach permits accountability without inherited collective guilt and allows historical obligations to survive without turning them into arguments for the political disappearance of entire peoples.

Judging the Political Alternatives

Nothing in this series proves that justice requires one particular constitutional model. Two states, one state, confederation, federation, and hybrid arrangements distribute sovereignty, security, citizenship, and national identity differently. Their names tell us less than their consequences.

A credible arrangement must therefore be tested against the people required to live under it. Israelis cannot reasonably be asked to surrender physical security or political continuity. Palestinians cannot reasonably be asked to accept permanent military domination or political dependency. Civil and political equality must be more than rhetorical. Refugee and property claims cannot simply be wished away. Religious sites must be protected without becoming instruments of exclusive sovereignty, and the historical attachments of Jews and Palestinians to the land must be capable of coexistence.

These criteria do not choose a political system for Israelis and Palestinians. They identify standards against which competing systems can be judged.

The Consistency Test, Completed

The seven essays in this series began with Christian history and end with Christian responsibility. Christians participated in the historical environment preceding modern Israel without being the authors of Jewish Zionism. Christian support for Israel developed into an organized political constituency and eventually reached people exercising significant governmental authority. Israel can nevertheless be subjected to severe legal and moral criticism without assuming that every wrong requires national abolition. Arguments based on Israel’s origins must be tested as general principles rather than applied selectively. And the Bible that has been used to support Jewish restoration has also been used by Christians to argue for Palestinian freedom and justice.

The conclusion is not that Christians must choose which people Scripture permits us to see. It is that Christian moral reasoning fails whenever its principles stop at the border of sympathy.

Jewish suffering cannot make Palestinian suffering irrelevant. Palestinian suffering cannot make Jewish vulnerability expendable. Jewish self-determination cannot make Palestinian self-determination optional, and Palestinian freedom cannot require treating Israeli political existence as disposable. Israelis cannot be reduced to the actions of their government, just as Palestinians cannot be reduced to Hamas.

Christian history gives this conclusion particular urgency. Christians have spent centuries confronting, often inadequately, what happens when theology teaches us not to see Jews. Correcting that failure cannot require learning not to see Palestinians. Nor can Christian solidarity with Palestinians justify returning to a politics in which Jewish history, vulnerability, and peoplehood again become morally secondary.

The conflict remains difficult because both peoples are real, their histories are real, and their claims sometimes collide. Faith does not remove that difficulty. It should make Christians less willing to solve it by erasing the humanity or political existence of either people.

A Christian faith capable of seeing only one of them is not seeing the Holy Land clearly enough.

Notes

1. United Nations General Assembly Resolution 67/19, “Status of Palestine in the United Nations,” November 29, 2012.
2. International Court of Justice, Legal Consequences Arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Including East Jerusalem, Advisory Opinion, July 19, 2024.
3. International Court of Justice, joint opinion of Judges Tomka, Abraham, and Aurescu, July 19, 2024.
4. United Nations General Assembly Resolution 273 (III), “Admission of Israel to Membership in the United Nations,” May 11, 1949.
5. Kairos Palestine: A Moment of Truth — A Word of Faith, Hope and Love from the Heart of Palestinian Suffering, December 2009.
6. Naim Ateek, A Palestinian Theology of Liberation.
7. Mitri Raheb, Decolonizing Palestine: The Land, the People, the Bible (2023).
8. Munther Isaac, Christ in the Rubble: Faith, the Bible, and the Genocide in Gaza (Eerdmans, 2025). The title reflects Isaac’s characterization; the legal application of the term remains contested.
9. Jimmy Carter, “Peace With Justice in the Middle East,” Oxford University, June 21, 2007.
10. Pope Francis, address to the Diplomatic Corps accredited to the Holy See, January 8, 2024.
11. Pope Leo XIV, address to the Diplomatic Corps accredited to the Holy See, January 9, 2026.