Theology and the Absence of Moral Agency in Gaza

Why was there no evidence of any Gazan acting morally to rescue any hostages?  Even in the lowest depths of human depravity during the Holocaust, there were rescuers who risked their lives to save Jews, even at the risk of their own lives and the lives of their family members.  Granted that the numbers of the Righteous Among the Nations during the Holocaust were small; 28,707 individuals out of a European population of more than 500 million, but their actions served as evidence that moral agency survives even under genocidal terror. Their numbers were miniscule; their existence was everything.

My late rabbi, Harold Schulweis (z’l), developed a theology to deal with the existence of evil and suffering in a post-Holocaust world. Rather than asking where God was at Auschwitz, he asked where human beings were. His answer to the problem of theodicy was not metaphysical but moral.  Even amidst radical evil, there existed the possibility of transformative goodness as evidenced by the Righteous Among the Nations. The rabbi posited that the rescuers’ actions served as a proof text that moral agency survives even under genocidal terror.

Rabbi Schulweis’ framework poses a demanding question: When a society descends into sanctioned barbarism; is it capable of producing even the slightest remnant of moral transcendence? Since Oct. 7, 2023, Gaza has provided a disturbing answer. Freed hostages have described not only Hamas’ brutality but also the participation of ordinary civilians in abduction, sexual abuse and concealment. Some point to fear of Hamas reprisals as an explanation. But fear alone cannot answer the moral question. Under Nazism, assisting Jews meant near-certain death. Nevertheless, some still resisted.

If this absence of moral dissent were universal across Muslim or Arab societies, one might be incorrectly tempted to attribute it to culture or religion. But such explanations collapse in the face of reality. On Oct. 7, Bedouin citizens of Israel and Israeli Arabs risked their lives to save Jews. Elsewhere, Muslims such as Ahmed al-Ahmed at Sydney’s Bondi Beach demonstrated extraordinary moral courage in the face of murderous violence. Islam and Arab culture plainly do not preclude moral heroism and it would be wrong to say that they did.

The failure, then, is specific to Palestinians living under the current ideological regimes governing Gaza. History makes this specificity even harder to ignore. During the 1929 Hebron massacre, which was incited by the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini’s false claim that Jews intended to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque, Arab mobs brutally murdered dozens of Jews. Yet, Arab neighbors and landlords also saved Jewish lives at risk of physical peril. The Arab rescuers, who were ancestors of today’s Gazans and West Bank Palestinians, were few; they did not stop the massacre. But their presence once again validated Rabbi Schulweis’ standard of individual transformative goodness.

What changed over the past century to wholly eliminate this element of morality from Palestinian discourse?

The answer lies in the Palestinian narrative and in the institutions that have sustained it. After the United Nations voted to partition Mandatory Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, Jewish leaders accepted the plan; Arab leaders wholly rejected it.  Upon the declaration of the State of Israel, five Arab armies launched an existential war with a stated goal of eliminating the nascent Jewish state. The Israelis, who were both better organized and better armed, defeated the Arabs at a tremendous price, losing over one percent of their population.  Approximately 700,000 Arabs became refugees, a genuine human tragedy, but one neither unique nor historically unprecedented.

What was unprecedented was the handling of the Arab refugees. In the case of significantly larger displacements in the same time period, e.g., the partition of India and Pakistan, and the expulsion of ethnic Germans after World War II, the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) worked to resettle and integrate the refugees. Palestinians alone were placed under the aegis of a separate agency, the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA), whose mandate pointedly excluded resettlement and integration and does so to this day. Refugee status became hereditary; displacement formed the crux of Palestinian national identity.

This decision froze history into grievance. Over decades, selective truths hardened into a totalizing narrative: the Nakba not as tragedy amid war, but as a foundational crime. Israel is not a state born of conflict, but its creation is the Palestinian version of original sin. Within this framework, Palestinian agency disappears and violence acquires moral cover.

A society steeped in such a narrative does not merely justify brutality; it loses the moral vocabulary to oppose it. Hamas is viewed not as criminal usurper but as a legitimate expression of resistance. In that environment, producing a “Righteous Among the Nations” figure becomes nearly impossible because of a narrative that will not tolerate moral dissent.

Fear alone cannot explain Gaza’s moral void after Oct. 7. Fear existed in Nazi Europe and Hebron in 1929. Yet in those places, but not in Gaza, there were actors, however few, that could not tolerate the unbridled evil in their midst.

Rabbi Schulweis taught that in a post-Holocaust world, we need to rely on the presence of human goodness, even it only exists in small amounts. Gaza today presents a tragedy deeper than political failure or humanitarian crisis with the collapse of that final moral refuge.  It transforms Rabbi Schulweis’ teachings from being derived from experience with the presence of Righteous Among the Nations to aspirational because of the total absence of transformative morality in Gaza.  And the question that Rabbi Schulweis raised to confront history will continue to echo, unanswered: Where was humanity?

Douglas Workman is a lawyer in Los Angeles and a co-founder of Werlpower, LLC, a green energy startup.  As a longtime member of Valley Beth Shalom, he had the opportunity to learn from Rabbi Harold Schulweis (z’l) for about two decades.