Ingratitude,Holy and Otherwise: An Exploration of Gratitude and Its Abuses

Abstract

This article examines ingratitude as a neglected but ethically and theologically significant category. While gratitude is commonly praised as a virtue central to personal flourishing and social cohesion, its inverse has received far less sustained attention. Drawing on philosophical accounts of gift and reciprocity, Christian scripture, and modern political theology, the paper argues that ingratitude cannot be understood univocally as vice. Instead, it functions as either sin or virtue depending on its object and context. After outlining the classical “circle of reciprocity” governing gift-giving, the article introduces the notion of “holy ingratitude” in the teachings of Jesus and the Apostle Paul, showing how early Christianity disrupted Greco-Roman systems of obligation by redirecting gratitude toward God alone. This disruption freed givers and recipients from social debt, honor competition, and worthiness criteria. The paper then contrasts holy ingratitude with sinful ingratitude through the work of Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth, both of whom identify ingratitude toward God as a fundamental moral failure. Finally, drawing on Edward Said's critique of the Oslo peace process, the article demonstrates how gratitude can be weaponized under conditions of domination, where coerced thankfulness legitimates injustice and renders ingratitude an ethically necessary refusal.

Keywords

Ingratitude gratitude gift colonialism Karl Barth Thomas Aquinas Edward Said

There has been a lot of work over the years on the importance of gratitude for mental health and happiness.¹ But from the theological and philosophical side, there have also been many studies on reimagining gratitude as a virtue to be cultivated, not only for individual flourishing but for social well-being.² For all of this research, there has been noticeably less focus on the inverse of gratitude, namely, ingratitude. If the social effects of gratitude have been so well shown over the years, could ingratitude also tell us something about the history of ethics and how both gratitude and ingratitude have been drawn upon to either help or hinder individuals and societies?

This paper examines ingratitude not simply as a moral failure, but as a complex theological, ethical, and political phenomenon. While gratitude is widely celebrated as a virtue essential to personal flourishing and social cohesion, I show that historically ingratitude can be both holy or sinful, depending on its object and context. Here I trace how gratitude and ingratitude function within systems of gift, power, and obligation, and how demands for gratitude can become tools of domination.

Below I will first outline the classical “circle of reciprocity” that governs gift-giving: giver, gift, and counter-gift (gratitude). In philosophical and theological traditions, gratitude completes the gift by sustaining relationships rather than settling debts. From this foundation, I introduce the idea of “holy ingratitude” in the teachings of Jesus and the Apostle Paul. Early Christianity disrupted Greco-Roman systems of reciprocity by redirecting gratitude away from human benefactors toward God alone. This freed both givers and recipients from social debt, honor competition, and worthiness criteria. Gifts were to be given indiscriminately, without expectation of return, because God—not the recipient—was the ultimate patron. From the perspective of Roman society, this appeared corrosive and socially irresponsible, yet it enabled a radically egalitarian human community. Within the church, Christians owed one another not repayment, but love, while gratitude was directed continuously toward God.

The paper then turns to ingratitude as sin, drawing on Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth. I show that Thomas treats ingratitude as a vice opposed to justice, outlining a progressive moral decay: failure to repay, failure to notice the gift, and finally failure to recognize or remember the gift at all. Barth radicalizes this further, arguing that all sin is fundamentally ingratitude—human refusal to acknowledge creation and covenant as divine gifts. For Barth, to be human is to be “grateful man”; ingratitude toward God is not merely moral failure but a rejection of one's created humanity.

In contrast to holy ingratitude toward unjust human systems, the paper explores how gratitude can be weaponized in contexts of oppression. Drawing on Palestinian intellectual Edward W. Said, I show how oppressed people have often been expected to express gratitude for violence, exploitation, or colonial domination. This dynamic is explored in depth through the Palestinian case, especially the Oslo Accords. I show that Yasser Arafat's public expressions of gratitude—most notably toward U.S. President Bill Clinton—symbolized a coerced gratitude demanded of a colonized people. Rather than delivering liberation, the Oslo process entrenched Israeli control, fragmented Palestinian land, and devastated the Palestinian economy. Said is presented as embodying holy ingratitude by refusing to give thanks for a “peace” that normalized occupation and humiliation. The paper further traces how Arafat himself, once a recipient of imposed gratitude, became a figure who demanded gratitude from Palestinians while presiding over corruption and repression. While gratitude is generally virtuous, it becomes morally corrupt when demanded to sanctify injustice. In such cases, ingratitude is not a vice but a necessary ethical stance. Holy ingratitude names false gifts for what they are—burdens disguised as generosity—and refuses to bless what is not truly good.³

Gift and Gratitude as a Circle of Reciprocity

Before we can better understand ingratitude, some ground clearing with regard to what is referred to as the circle of reciprocity (or circle of gift-giving) is needed. Philosophers have conceived of gratitude as a fundamentally relational and cyclical reality, rooted in the structure of gift-giving. Gratitude does not arise spontaneously or internally; it is always a response to a perceived good received from another. To understand gratitude, therefore, one must begin not with the grateful subject but with the initial act of giving. Gifts generate a circle—giver, gift, and counter-gift of gratitude—and that this circle creates and sustains relationships, communities, and moral obligations.

Gift-giving is shown to be more than the transfer of objects or services. A gift carries something of the giver and establishes a bond between persons or groups. Receiving a gift places one within a relationship that cannot remain static. There is an inherent expectation of response, not necessarily in kind, but in a way that acknowledges the giver and sustains the relationship. Gratitude functions as this acknowledgment, marking the transition from passive reception to active participation in the circle. The receiver is drawn into the role of giver, and the gift circulates rather than terminating in possession.⁴

This understanding of gift and gratitude does have its critics. For example, Jacques Derrida argues that reciprocity can appear coercive, turning gifts into instruments of obligation, power, or economic exchange. Attempts to imagine a “pure” gift entirely free of recognition, memory, or return ultimately fracture the relational purpose of giving. If a gift cannot be received, remembered, or responded to, it fails to complete itself as gift. Gratitude, rather than corrupting the gift, is what allows it to reach fulfillment.⁵

Within a theological framework, however, the circle of gift and gratitude is deepened rather than eliminated. Existence itself is understood as an original gift, given without request or merit. This initial gift establishes the conditions for all subsequent giving and receiving. Gratitude for existence is therefore foundational, shaping how all other goods are perceived and valued. To give thanks is to recognize oneself as a recipient before being an agent.⁶

In this brief overview of the connection between giver, gift, and countergift, we can see that there are no isolated gifts and no complete gratitude apart from relationship. The circle of giver, gift, and gratitude is not a closed economy but a dynamic movement that binds persons to one another and to God. Gratitude completes the gift not by settling a debt but by sustaining the relationship the gift was meant to create.⁷

Holy Ingratitude

Here I want to explore the ways that the teachings of Jesus and St Paul created the conditions for a holy ingratitude. Their approach to thinking about the circle of reciprocity altered the way that those within the community of the church interacted with each other and changed how they understood what they owed each other and God.

Early within the Christian tradition, a specifically theological emendation was made to the understanding of gift and gratitude in Ancient philosophy like Cicero and Seneca. John Barclay notes with regard to the Ancient world there was a widely held belief that gifts were “meant to be reciprocal, not unilateral.”⁸ Early Christianity effectively broke this circle. Christians created the theological and social conditions in which the connection between gift and gratitude could and should be broken. This observation at first glance may appear strange since Christianity, along with other cultural and philosophical movements, placed so much emphasis on thankfulness as important for Christian worship.

Jesus’ teaching and ministry, for example, sets a pattern of thinking about giver, gift, counter-gift in terms of what Peter Leithart calls a ‘holy ingratitude.’ Jesus's teachings free benefactors from needing to worry about depleting their resources or needing to be paid back for their initial gifts. They also free beneficiaries from the obligations of return. This is because benefactors and beneficiaries can look to God and not to others to be the one who does the ultimate repayment. Jesus frees benefactors to give generously without anxiety about depleting resources or failing to get repaid honorably (Matthew 5:40; Luke 6:29–30). This is because God the Father will take care of the reciprocal gift in a future and eschatological age. The gospel likewise frees the recipient. Because givers look to God and not to the recipients for repayment, recipients are freed from debt burdens.⁹ Christians can become holy ingrates because they are freed from these kinds of circles and social expectations. God is the beginning and the end, the heavenly patron with endless resources that distributes all good gifts (James 1:17).

Further, just as ancient philosophers worried that good gifts should only go to those who were worthy recipients, like those who could return favors or those with honors, Christian teaching undermined the need for beneficiaries to be ‘worthy.’ God's grace is not tied to the recipient's merit, and highest honors are not to be given strictly to the worthy, but to the unworthy. Because these social limits continue on to the limits of existence, the circle of giver, gift, and gratitude extends so wide as to nearly encompass everything circumstance. Social and political expectations and understandings of these limits were therefore undermined. Those who were at one time considered outsiders, unworthy of invitations to dinners, unworthy of divine gifts, undeserving of honors were all of a sudden brought into the circles, and from the outside. Leithart writes,

What Christianity did was to expand the circle of reciprocity and extend the field of gratitude until it covered everything and every circumstance. In the process of this expansion, they burst the smaller circles of Roman gift and gratitude and seemed to leave nothing in their place. Judged by the standards of the ancient world, Christianity introduced the possibility of holy ingratitude, and thus sowed seeds of a new form of social life in Greco-Roman soil.¹⁰

From the perspectives of the Romans, Christianity made ingratitude, something typically thought to be a social faux pas, socially acceptable. New lines for the circle of gratitude had been drawn.¹¹ As noted above, this is made possible because of Jesus’ eschatological teaching. The rewards of generosity are not to be sought after here in this life, in this time. Rather, as Leithart summarizes, there is a judgment to come, and at the judgment all the good deeds of the righteous will be rewarded, as all the deeds of the wicked will be punished. Be openhanded, be generous, Jesus can say: because the Father rewards at the last day.”¹²

For the Apostle Paul, thanksgiving is to be continuous. In 1 Thessalonians 5:16–18 we read, “Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus.”¹³ And in Philippians 4:6, “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” To live a life characterized by gratitude was for Paul how one sustained a God-centered life, which was Paul's aspiration for the church. Thanksgiving is, for Paul, an act of worship.¹⁴ To be ungrateful to God is to deny that all of life is a divine gift.

But if gratitude was owed only to God, what, then, was to be owed to each other within the church? What is the community circle of reciprocity that binds the church together? The church, as a political body, in order to operate in a healthy way needs each member as dependent upon the others. It is through the mutual exchange of gifts as an indiscriminate gratitude that looked to the surrounding Greco-Roman world like ingratitude, along with continually giving thanks to God, that the church grows in maturity. The church is truly a political body, where each member is dependent on the healthy operation of all the others. And it is a body growing up to maturity through the mutual exchange of gifts and the continuous offering of thanks to God.¹⁵

For Paul the only thing that Christians owe each other is a debt of love.¹⁶ Besides this, Paul envisioned a ‘no-debts’ rule where the benefits of one's generosity, though directed to another within the church, is always and primarily connected to a single divine patron. In those moments where Paul is making a case that churches are to give of their resources to provide help to the saints in poverty-stricken Jerusalem (2 Corinthians 8:9; 8:13–14; 9) the church is bound together in mutual giving. And those who provide for the needs of the Jerusalem church will have their needs met from the abundance of the church, forming a mutual dependence. Jesus, the head of the church, continuously supplies it with spiritual gifts. When one uses the gifts they have received well, they then give that gift to the benefit of the community, encouraging others to disseminate their gifts in the same fashion. Christians give, the church gives, but it is God that gets the thanks.¹⁷

Jesus and Paul's understanding of the circle of gratitude was socially and politically disruptive because it broke down the accepted hierarchies of the Greco-Roman world. They created a church whose ingratitude, through indiscriminate gifts and gratitude, created new possibilities for reciprocity. In place of debt, Paul encourages people to owe debts of self-giving love. A community like the church in the first century, where people are not in debt to each other, would have not only been seen as a disaster waiting to happen but also upset social and financial expectations. But the nexus of the church's gift and gratitude works only if there is in fact a single divine benefactor and patron to whom all the members are clients who owe grateful service. An alternative community, with an alternative object of love, was created through the Holy Spirit.

Ingratitude as Sin

The above reading of Jesus and St Paul's teaching of holy ingratitude gets nuanced throughout the tradition. God does broaden the circle of gift-giving to include a divine benefactor that works through individuals to bless others with no expectation of return from the beneficiary. This, however, is not the whole picture, because there are cases when ingratitude breaks the circle of gift-giving altogether. The refusal to recognize that humankind is the recipient of divine gifts is conceived by later Christian theologians as sinful ingratitude, as vicious. We will explore this sinful ingratitude through the work of Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth.

Thomas Aquinas's (1225–1274) understanding of the virtue of gratitude is connected to the cardinal virtue of justice. In the Summa Theologica, after Thomas’s discussion of gratitude, he specifically considers the vice of ingratitude. Since ingratitude is contrary to the virtue of gratitude, it is a sin.¹⁸ There are a few ways that ingratitude becomes a vice. In the first instance, a vice may be opposed to a virtue in excess—for example, showing gratitude for the wrong things or at the wrong time.¹⁹ But a more egregious expression of the vice of ingratitude is when there is a deficiency of gratitude, when a counter-gift is not something more than the initial gift.²⁰ A vice, which is a deficiency of a virtue, is the opposite habit. “Therefore just as gratitude or thankfulness is one special virtue, so also is ingratitude one special sin.”²¹

Thomas notes here that the way that vices are habituated is the same as the corresponding virtue (in this case the virtue of gratitude) except in reverse. So, in the case of the virtue of gratitude, the first thing required for its development is the recognition of the gift received; this is the order of generation. The second thing required is the expression of thanks, and the third is the repayment of a suitable counter-gift at an appropriate place and time and in accordance with one's means. What is last in the order of generation is the first thing in the order of destruction of that virtue. Thus, the first degree of ingratitude is when one fails to repay a favor; the second is when one does not notice the gift; and the third is when someone does not recognize the reception of the gift through forgetting or by some other means. Thomas further notes, “since opposite affirmation includes negation, it follows that it belongs to the first degree of ingratitude to return evil for good, to the second to find fault with a favor received, and to the third to esteem kindness as though it were unkindness.”²²

Thomas's discussion of the ordering of destruction for ingratitude should be scary to us. What we see Thomas pointing out is that the first step in perpetuating a disposition of ingratitude is failure to repay an initial gift giver in gratitude. To not give thanks for, at the very least, God's gift of creation and salvation in our daily lives is in a sense a gateway drug that can only lead to further stages of ingratitude where we no longer notice life as a gift and finally forget about the gift altogether.

Twentieth-century Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886–1968) bases his understanding of the nature of sin on the connection between a doctrine of creation and the human response to this divine grace.²³ Barth also makes a strong connection between ingratitude and sin in The Church Dogmatics. For Barth the covenant of grace is God's free and sovereign decision to be “for humanity” in Jesus Christ, where election and reconciliation are revealed together. God is the initiator and does this reconciliation in freedom.²⁴ Jesus is the eschatological sovereign act of God. The meaning and covenant with humanity is a gift, a free covenant of effective grace.²⁵ The covenant is not a contract but God's self-binding love in which God graciously chooses to be in fellowship with humanity despite human sin. For Barth, God's covenant takes place in the act of creation. He writes, “even more, it is the affirmation and consummation of the institution of the covenant between Himself and man which took place in and with the creation. It is this covenant will which is carried out in Jesus Christ. It is this institution of the covenant which is fulfilled in Him.”²⁶ This covenant, done in grace, reaches its fulfillment in Christ's incarnation, death, and resurrection, where God's “Yes” to humanity overcomes the human “No.”²⁷ “Grace means the giving of something good and redemptive and helpful.” Grace is a powerful Yes spoken to the one to whom it is addressed.”²⁸ It is in this covenant of grace that God gives Godself to humankind for humankind as a companion, and in so doing humankind receives all things.

As a response to this gift, the covenant of grace connects God to human gratitude as partner. This covenant implies three things. The first, as we saw above, is that this covenant is established in God's freedom, and thus, humankind's reception of it is determined by God. Second, implied in the covenant of grace, is the “beneficent character proper to this presumption of the atonement.” Grace means “the giving of something good and redemptive and helpful.”²⁹ God does not simply give something; rather, God gives Godself and all things to humankind and becomes a companion. Third, the covenant of grace not only enables humankind to be a “partner of God only, but actually and necessarily, to gratitude.”³⁰ It is in this recognition of our createdness and gratitude that we as humankind find our freedom. “The real freedom of man is decided by the fact that God is his God.”³¹ In freedom humankind can choose to be humankind with God and be thankful. Any other choice is to grope in the void and reject our true humanity. Non-directed propositional gratitude loses us our humanity, but in our voluntary freedom humankind responds in giving thanks to God. This is part of our being covenant beings.

Humankind's recognition of God's willingness to be with humankind for all eternity causes us to seek God and God's direction. Later in the Dogmatics, Barth writes,

This active coming together of man with God will be the realizing of all the possibilities of his active being besides which, in the knowledge of the communion achieved by God and therefore of the love of God, he cannot see any other possibilities. In this way it will be an activity which is at bottom voluntary, which excludes the fear of any other forces but God, which claims him wholly and utterly. It will be accomplished as an act of pure gratitude, which does not make any claim and which is therefore complete.³²

The coming together of God with humankind is both voluntary and accomplished in gratitude: “The covenant engages man as the partner of God only, but actually and necessarily, to gratitude.”³³ The only appropriate answer to this gift, this caris, is thanksgiving (eucharistia). The proper thing for humankind to do is show gratitude. God's demand is that humanity become what it already is, that we act and show the obedience we already have.³⁴

To not show gratitude to God, then, is sin. “Radically and basically all sin is simply ingratitude—man's refusal of the one but necessary thing which is proper to and is required of him with whom God has graciously entered into covenant.”³⁵ For Barth, gratitude is an obligation. To not recognize God's gift, and thus to try and live one's life completely on one's own without gratitude is sin. Because humankind is created, there is no getting away from being in covenant with God. “Just as there is no God but the God of the covenant, there is no man but the man of the covenant: the man who as such is destined and called to give thanks.”³⁶ Barth would respond, to claims that there does not need to be recognition of the gift giver in propositional gratitude, that this position is at the heart of sin.³⁷ To deny our essential nature as creatura, created by God, in not recognizing the giver, rejects part of what it means to be human. This is because sins, at least in part, are actions or dispositions that rejection our essential humanness in relation to the God in which we have made covenant. Not giving gratitude to God is to reject the very foundation of this humanness. Humankind cannot improve its sinful condition without the gratitude that dissolves pride: It cannot help itself.³⁸

For Barth thanksgiving is anthropologically basic, touching on something deeply important on what it means to be created being. He writes, “by revealing himself in Jesus Christ as from the very first the gracious God, God has decided that man can only be grateful man, the man who takes up and maintains his place in the covenant with Him, the gracious God.”³⁹ Further, Barth emphasizes the work of Christ as something for which we need to give thanks. If even humankind ignores Jesus “as true man” in an attempt to construct a humankind not in connection to creation and incarnation, and to imagine a destiny and flourishing as something that we can achieve in our own power, as a matter of our own freedom apart from gratitude to God, is a transgression. “Ontologically, therefore, the covenant of grace is already included and grounded in Jesus Christ, in the human form and human content which God willed to give His Word from all eternity.”⁴⁰

There is a deep connection between ethics and gratitude in Barth's thought. God's direction is also humankind's justification in Jesus Christ. True faith, a work of God, is the human subjection to the divine verdict, and an act of pure obedience and the Holy Spirit.⁴¹ In this faith comes humankind's subjection to the divine verdict and an act of pure obedience. Justification, is firstly, the true and mighty sentence of God on humankind. It is, secondly, the placing of humankind under the divine direction. Christian love consists in the acceptance of this divine direction.⁴² Sanctification is the consequence of humankind coming under the divine direction through the obedience of faith in justification. Sanctification is also the basis of Christian ethics.⁴³ God's direction is the directing of humankind into freedom as God's children. “The term ‘faith’ expresses the orientation of the whole person towards a prevenient activity of God, an activity which is spoken of as ‘gift’, as God's utterly gratuitous ‘yes’ to us, and thus away from achievement or self-realization.”⁴⁴ What we have seen above is that for both Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth, ingratitude constitutes a deep offense.

Gratitude Amidst Oppression

When Adolf Eichmann, one of the organizers of the Holocaust, was arrested in Argentina and brought to Israel to stand trial for his crimes against humanity, philosopher Hannah Arendt, who fled Germany during the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, was sent by The New Yorker to cover the trial. Her 1963 Eichmann in Jerusalem would become influential for its portrayal of Eichmann, who did not come off as a maniacal villain, but rather as an unimpressive sycophant who was dedicated to progressing in status and influence through his career; someone who was “just doing his job, doing his duty, and obeying orders.”

In her reports of the trial, Arendt notes that, “Eichmann claimed more than once that his organizational gifts, the coordination of evacuations and deportations achieved by the office, had in fact helped his victims; it had made their fate easier. If this thing had to be done at all, he argued, “it was better that it be done in good order.”⁴⁵ He continues noting that he and his collogues, “often intervened to save Jews from sheer butchery, so that the killing could be done in what, according to them, was a civilized way.”⁴⁶ Eichmann is effectively arguing that because he was good at his particular piece of the process of mass killing, that he deserves ‘thanks,’ perhaps from those in the court who were to judge him, but also from those whom he murdered. They should be thankful that his being good at his job ended their lives quickly. This, of course, misses the mark significantly, as he never seems to consider that he should not be murdering millions of people in the first place, nonetheless, being due thanks for doing the killings efficiently.

Let us look at another quick example. Willie James Jennings illustrates how slaveowners in the United States intentionally shaped the way that slaves understood and read the Christian scriptures to mold their understanding of their place in the world. A catechism constructed by Rev. Charles Colcock Jones (1804–1863) has the usual back-and-forth structure where a question is asked, and as a teaching tool, a response to the question is given. Jones's catechism includes a string of questions which intend to get the student, in this case a slave, thinking about the related happinesses of master and slave in their social roles: “Do you think you [the slave] are happier than he [the master]?” Jones’ answer to this question is,

Yes: When I come in from my work; eat my hearty supper, worship my maker; lie down without care on my mind; sleep sound; get up in the morning strong and fresh; and hear that my master could not sleep, for thinking on his debts and taxes; and how he shall provide victuals and clothes for his family, or what he shall do for them when they are sick—then I bless God that he has placed me in my humble station; I pity my master, and feel myself happier than he is.

The catechism continues asking, “Then it seems everybody is best, just where God has placed them?” And Jones's answer reads, “Yes the Scriptures say, if I am called being a slave, I am not to care for it; for every true Christian, is Christ's free man, whether he be bound or free in this world.” Jennings notes that the really insidious thing about this catechism is that while it is an attempt to control the slaves, it is also an attempt to shape the way that they read the scriptures.⁴⁷ As a result, and for our purposes, Jones's catechism retrains readings of scripture in order to put people who are oppressed in a position to feel obligated for that oppression and their place in the master's house. This is done by teaching that God has put the slave in the better place because they do not have the worries of debts and taxes which keep the master up at night. Scripture is used as a tool to create this sense of ‘thankfulness’ for being a slave.

For most of us, gratitude as a practice and in our minds exists as something positive. As we have seen, gratitude is a fundamental virtue that has been praised throughout history for its ability to cultivate positive emotions, build social relationships, and promote well-being. However, sometimes gratitude is weaponized and used as a means of social control, manipulation, oppression, and this has contributed to the spread of conformity, nationalism, consumerism, and blind obedience. In some cases, people have been made to feel grateful for their own oppression. Women who are subjected to violence or discrimination may be told that they should be grateful for their male partners or for the opportunity to have children.⁴⁸ Similarly, workers who are mistreated or exploited may be told that they should be grateful for their jobs, even if those jobs pay low wages or have unsafe working conditions. Even in some Christian circles, gratitude is used to discourage dissent and criticism of leaders. People who are struggling with poverty or other difficult circumstances are often told that they should be grateful for what they have, even if what they have is not enough to meet their basic needs. This kind of gratitude is harmful as it reinforces a sense of hopelessness and resignation in people who are already struggling. People have been made to feel grateful for things that are actually quite burdensome to bear.

A Movement of Expectation

By drawing on the work of Edward Said (1935–2003) the intention here is to make us aware of a common movement that takes place within history. It is a “movement of expectation” where, first, a state or nation who has colonized another people then, in response, asks for their gratitude. It is this second movement that I want to focus on here. This move comes with the assumption that the colonized are better off than they would have been if not subjected to the colonizer, such that colonization is to their benefit. Franz Fanon addresses this colonialist ingratitude in his book The Wretch of the Earth. Fanon, thinking specifically about European colonialism and the “third world” that it created, writes that oppressors often believe their aid and involvement is a necessary part of improving the lives and cultures of the colonized. To make this belief plausible, a false history has to be created that depicts colonized people as not truly existing prior to the colonizer.⁴⁹ And when the persecuted people do not “tremble with gratitude” it is taken as a lack of “intelligence—not to mention ingratitude” that the colonialism and capitalist countries refuse “to pay up then the unrelenting dialectic of their own system would see to it that they are esphyxiated.”⁵⁰ As soon as these nations prepare to decolonize, “they hasten to withdraw all their capital from the colony. This spectacular flight of capital is one of the most constant phenomena of decolonization.”⁵¹

Theodor Herzl, the father of political Zionism, employed a justification for colonialism that has been a touchstone and what would become an argument of the Zionist movement.⁵² This same abuse of forced gratitude can be found in pre-1948 Zionism. Herzl argued that Jewish immigration would benefit the indigenous people of Palestine: “It is their well-being, their individual wealth, which we will increase by bringing in our own.” Jews bringing their financial acumen, intelligence, and enterprise could bring nothing but a positive result to Palestinians.⁵³ “This condescending attitude towards the intelligence, not to speak of the rights, of the Arab population Palestine was to be serially repeated by Zionists, British, European, and American leaders in the decades that followed, down to the present day.”⁵⁴ Zionism is a colonial-national movement that, like similar movements, was adorned with the idea that there is divine permission for conquest. What is distinct in this case is the Old Testament eschatological claims on land and territorial enlargement that captured the imaginations of Christians in the West.⁵⁵ Speaking more generally about Islam and the Middle East, Said writes,

…during the explosive decade of the 70 s, Islam gave further proof of its fundamental intransigence. There was, for example, the Iranian revolution: neither procommunist nor pro modernization, the people who overthrew the Shah were simply not explainable according to the canons of behavior presupposed by modernization theory. They did not seem grateful for the quotidian benefits of modernization (cars, an enormous military and security apparatus, a stable regime) and appeared indifferent to the blandishments of ‘Western’ ideas together.⁵⁶

Before we get a better understanding of Said's insights into gratitude in the midst of colonialism, we first need to do some historical ground clearing. For years Israeli leadership believed that the Palestinians living under “enlightened occupation” were content under control.⁵⁷ However, 1987 saw a grassroots uprising of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, beginning in Gaza and spreading to the West Bank, which included widespread civil disobedience and strikes. These events are typically referred to as the Intifada, literally meaning rebellion or uprising in Arabic. The Intifada, despite its initial spontaneity and lack of connections to organized leadership, was driven by a unified strategic vision that did not exacerbate internal Palestinian divisions and made clear that there was no “enlightened occupation”: that the people still under colonial rule did not find their situation acceptable.

The Intifada was a movement that began within the Occupied Territories. Yasser Arafat, chair of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and other leadership, however, were not present, but were in Tunis and other Arab capitals. For years, the PLO had not been able to make headway with the United States and Israel on a settlement. But Israel was taken by surprise by the grassroots uprising. At first, those within the Occupied Territories who led the uprising had little issue viewing the PLO as a legitimate representative in fighting for Palestinian nationalism. The relationship between those within the leadership of the Intifada and the PLO would become more tense over time as the PLO, based in Tunis, lacked an understanding of life in the Occupied Territories and a vision on how to proceed. Arafat was watching a successful uprising from the outside. Rashid Khalidi describes the tensions that arose: “The consequence was increasingly intrusive management of the Intifada by remote control from Tunis, as the PLO came to dominate what had been a popular resistance movement. It issued directives and ran things from a distance, often ignoring the views and preferences of those who had initiated the revolts and had led it successfully.”⁵⁸

The Palestine Liberation Organization and the Buildup to Oslo

In December 1988, Yasser Arafat accepted UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, implicitly recognizing Israel's right to exist in peace. Resolution 242, adopted after the 1967 Six-Day War, called for Israeli withdrawal from occupied territories and affirmed every state's right to secure boundaries, while omitting explicit reference to Palestinian statehood. Its acceptance signaled willingness to enter U.S.-mediated negotiations, despite concerns about American impartiality. The resolution became a foundation for future diplomacy, though ambiguities persisted. The 1991 Madrid Conference initiated direct talks among Israel, Palestinians, and Arab states, paving the way for subsequent negotiations, including the Oslo Accords, though it produced no immediate agreement.⁵⁹

The Oslo Accords and Arafat's Gratitude

The Oslo Accord (later known as Oslo I) was signed on September 13, 1993. It was an agreement between Israel and the PLO aimed at establishing a framework for peace and Palestinian self-governance in parts of the West Bank and Gaza. It was a bright, sunny day in Washington, DC, and reporters noted the warmth of the weather matched the moment's historic sense of hope after decades of conflict. The signing ceremony took place on the South Lawn of the White House, attended by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Chairman Arafat as well as U.S. President Bill Clinton. At the appointed time, Arafat stepped to the microphone:

I thank you Mr. President. We hope that our meeting will be a new beginning for fruitful and effective relations between the American people and the Palestinian people.” “I wish to thank the Russian federation and President Boris Yeltsin our also goes to Secretary Christopher Kozyrev to the government of Norway, and to the foreign minister of Norway for the positive part they played in bring about this major achievement. “Mr. President, thank you, thank you, thank you. (emphasis mine)

Here Arafat signed a deeply flawed “Declaration of Principles” by Israel, an established modern state with an incredibly strong military and occupying land already seized. This, perhaps, is exactly where Israel wanted Arafat. Or perhaps the PLO were overly eager to accept any deal to remain the negotiating face of the “peace process,” given the popularity of the leaders of the Intifada who were taking issue with Chairman Arafat's capitulation to the US and Israel, or because other Palestinian delegations were making ground in negotiations with more carefully developed plans. Whatever the reason, Arafat acquiesced to a deal. In September 1993 Zionist and previous deputy major of Jerusalem Meron Benvenisti wrote that “the Zionist enterprise is here to rescue [Palestinians] from the morass of hardship and backwardness… and they must therefore be eternally grateful.” The only leg that the PLO had to stand on was the inconvenient fact that “they were there, they wouldn't go away, and they wouldn't let the Israelis forget what they had done to them.”⁶⁰

The negotiations for the Declaration of Principles were negotiated by Palestinians who were themselves exiles and had never been to the Occupied Territories. Khalidi writes that the problem with the agreement was that the devil was in the details, “and the personnel that the PLO sent to Oslo were not strong on details. Indeed, they did not have the linguistic or legal or other expertise necessary to comprehend exactly what the Israelis were doing.” Those brought to Oslo to negotiate “found themselves up against a formidable and expert Israeli negotiating team including individuals with vast international legal experience.”⁶¹

What was clear, however, was that this was not a deal created by two equal states, but one with military power and occupied land over a displaced people who would not be silent. Yasser Arafat was placed in a position to offer gratitude to a pair of colonial powers, the US and Israel. To say ‘thank you’ for a seat at the table, for a deal that would ultimately harm his people in years to come. Edward Said forcefully and poignantly writes,

…the showbiz pomp of the White House ceremony on September 13th, the degrading spectacle of Yasser Arafat thanking everyone for the suspension of most of his people's rights, and the solemnity of Bill Clinton's performance—like a twentieth-century Roman emperor shepherding two vassal kings through rituals of reconciliation and obeisance—all these only temporarily obscure the truly astonishing proportions of the quite sudden Palestinian capitulation, which smacks of the PLO leadership's exhaustion and of Israel's shrewdness.⁶²

The Oslo peace process normalized the occupation of Palestinian lands by Israel and further showed no evidence of leading to an equitable peace. It has proved to be, from the outset, a deeply flawed peace.⁶³ What was to take place after the Oslo peace process was in some respects unsurprising.

Palestine After Oslo I and the Implementation of Oslo II

The Taba Interim Agreement on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, also known as the Oslo II Accord in 1995, addressed the implementation of Oslo I. This agreement completed the harmful work of the 1993 agreement. For one thing, it carved the region into patchwork of areas known as A, B, and C, with over 60 percent of the territory, area C, under direct Israeli control.⁶⁴ Historian Tony Judt notes some of the major changes that took place in the years after Oslo I. He writes, “When the initial Declaration was signed in 1993 there were just 32,750 Jewish housing units in settlements on the West Bank and in Gaza. By October 2001 there were 53,121—a 62 percent increase, with more to come.” “From 1992 to 1996,” Judt notes, that under “Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, the settler population of the West Bank grew by 48 percent, that of Gaza by 61 percent.”⁶⁵ On this same theme of the extensiveness and speed at which the Israelis further occupied land Said writes,

In effect then, through the Palestinian negotiating tactics we have ironically fulfilled the Zionist dream of giving Palestinians rule over and municipal services for their own people but not land. Israel reserves the right to the land, the total amount of which under Palestinian Authority self rule for 1,000,000 Palestinians (Israel retains sovereignty) equals about 4% of the total land surface (the West Bank settlement with 140,000 Israelis account for 8% of the land) it adds up to 18%. This is supposed at an unspecified later date to be augmented by 22% or jointly controlled land with Israel.⁶⁶

In an interview in 1999 Said further notes that the peace process “has been a total fiasco,” and that the situation for the Palestinians got significantly worse. “They are unable to move freely; more of their land has been taken; they have not gotten anything like self-determination; the Israeli occupation continues.”⁶⁷ The PLO had allowed themselves to be complicit in their colonial suffering along with their colonizers.⁶⁸ The Declaration of Principles signed on the White House lawn did allow the PLO to be recognized as the representatives of Palestinian people by Israel, but it did not recognize a Palestinian state, much less establish an opportunity to create one. “This was a peculiar transaction, whereby the National Liberation movement had obtained nominal recognition from its oppressors, without achieving liberation, by trading its own recognition of the state that had colonized its homeland and continued to occupy it. This was a resounding, historic mistake, one with grave consequences for the Palestinian people.”⁶⁹

Prior to the 1993 Declaration of Principles, tensions between the PLO leadership and Palestinians in the Occupied Territories—especially those shaped by the Intifada—revealed deep divisions over strategy and goals. Said captures this fracture, writing, “[Arafat] either had to accept his irrelevance or he could accept a deal that guaranteed his survival but, alas, did not advance the best interests of his people. He took the latter. And that's why I separated from him.”⁷⁰ While this assessment may overstate Arafat's motives, it reflects a broader disagreement about how the peace process should proceed. Said further argues, “Not only does this situation and this peace process not fulfill Palestinian aspirations, it doesn't begin to address the fundamental problem which began in 1948, as a people we were driven off the land, lost the entire land of Palestine and have remained refugees or second class citizens ever since.”⁷¹

A central issue in Oslo was a fundamental misunderstanding of “autonomy.” Palestinian negotiators accepted a limited form of self-rule over fragmented territories, lacking authority over borders, resources, or security. As Said explains, “In the Palestinian autonomy areas (it should be remembered that the Oslo accords specify autonomy but leave sovereignty, exits and entrances, resources like water and land, as well as overall security entirely in Israeli hands) a corrupt, cruel, and incompetent regime of autocracy under Arafat rules Palestinians for the benefit of a small handful of cronies.” This arrangement constrained economic development and mobility. Israeli control over residency, permits, and infrastructure—combined with restricted roads and checkpoints—fractured the West Bank “into a series of isolated islands and scarred the landscape,”⁷² effectively blocking free movement.

This denial of free movement had a massive effect on the economy of the area. People were confined to the West Bank and Gaza. Gazans who depended on work in Israel, for example, or who depended on the exporting of goods were unable to do their work. Permissions to move from one territory to another were denied. Between 1993 and 2004 the per capita GDP of the are significantly declined. Commenting on this, Said writes, “Thirty-three percent of the Palestinian poor were forced into poverty after the Oslo Accord was finished. Unemployment is sometimes over 50% and, Roy says, the number of poor exceeds by 74% the number now being helped by the authorities ministry of social affairs and UNRWA United Nations relief and works agency).”⁷³

…a truck carrying tomatoes from Gaza to Nablus must stop at the border, unload onto an Israeli truck, then reload the product onto Palestinian truck upon entering Nablus. This takes three days, with the fruit rotting in the mean time, and the costs being so high as to make such transactions prohibitive (it is cheaper to import tomatoes from Spain than from Gaza). The main idea of course is that Israel controls the Palestinian economy in as humiliating away as possible.⁷⁴

The effect of the Oslo Process was a strangulation by the creating a prison guarded by the guards of Israel. “If this is the kind of peace that Palestinian Authority under Arafat is able to achieve, then we should call it by its real name: a protracted, disorderly, hypocritical, and undignified surrender.”⁷⁵

The story that I have been attempting to tell is one where a ruled people are put in a place to say “thank you” for not only the conditions they were currently in from 1948, through 1967, and up to 1993, but also for a deal that would make their lives much more difficult. This context is important because it draws our attention to the conditions and outcomes of the Oslo Accords, and what, exactly Arafat was giving thanks for. Arafat publicly thanked U.S. President Bill Clinton—an avowed supporter of Israel—for his role in what Arafat called a “major achievement,” expressing deep gratitude three times in his remarks. Yet this display of thanks, as Said and others observed, revealed the profound imbalance of power underlying the event: a colonized and displaced people offering gratitude to their occupiers and to the global superpower that sustained them. The ceremony, orchestrated as a moment of hope, instead symbolized Palestinian capitulation—Arafat thanking the very architect of a “peace process” that legitimized Israeli occupation and left Palestinians with fragmented autonomy, deepened economic strangulation, and little control over their own land or movement. Said likened the scene to an imperial ritual, with Clinton as a modern Roman emperor presiding over the humiliation of a weakened vassal—Arafat's gratitude masking the ongoing reality of colonial domination. But this leads to another fascinating turn in this story, that of Arafat himself being placed in the role of abuser, and asking for those whom he has abused to say “thank you.”

Arafat's Turn: The Colonized Becomes the Colonizer

Oslo created horrific conditions for Palestinians. Before the Oslo Accords, Said was an open supporter of Arafat. Afterwards, however, Said became one of Arafat's and the PLO's most vocal opponents. For Said, “the Palestinian leadership persists in its illusion that negotiations with Israel on the basis of the Oslo accords can deliver land for peace.”⁷⁶ Said wasn’t the only one who was critical of the PLO leadership; like him, other critics accused Arafat of corruption and abuse.⁷⁷ He detailed the PLO's use of patronage and siphoning of funds away from ordinary Palestinians who had to live under the occupation.⁷⁸ It is an insufficiently remarked irony that Arafat's corrupt peace with Israel forgave the Zionist movement everything that it did to Palestinians, beginning with the destruction of their society and the forced expulsion of 70 percent of their numbers from Palestine in 1948. To compound the irony, the PLO essentially ignored the devastation of 30 years of Israeli military occupation, accepted the annexation of Jerusalem and the presence of 140 settlements on expropriated Palestinian land, and more or less said let bygones be bygones.⁷⁹

What the peace process did, Said writes, is normalize the Israeli occupation. This had turned Arafat “into an enforcer for the occupation, which with the increasing number of settlements and land expropriations was clearly intended to continue.”⁸⁰ Oslo, through Rabin's security deal, enlisted the PLO as a kind of subcontractor for continued occupation and subjection.⁸¹ The Palestinian Authority acted as an enforcer for Israel.⁸² In effect, Arafat was in a position to persecute his own people for Israel, stripping legislators of their parliamentary immunity and raiding homes and offices.

It is in this context that we can explore Arafat's own “movement of expectation” where he demands gratitude. The Oslo Accords, as we have seen, put the people in deep political and economic anxieties, their struggle overlooked, and their people turned from colonized become colonizer. There were no doubt people who supported Arafat, most often those in the United States and Great Britian, noting people's need to express gratitude. Said writes,

All the newspapers run advertisements praising Mr. Arafat as a great man, and they express gratitude for the things he has done. Yet no one has any illusions at all that his rule is anything but corrupt, that his police and prisons (there are thirty-five prisons in Gaza alone) are cruel, torture is rife, due process is suspended most of the time, and if you need to get anything done you have to have a connection with someone in the Authority.⁸³

Said notes that he himself was pressured to offer gratitude to Arafat and the PLO for a peace process that had led, in his view, to anything but peace. “For another, I spoke in terms of facts and figures, and I was unsparing in my criticism of all the parties to the peace process. But I found that I was expected to express gratitude and a general attitude of cheerfulness, which I had violated by complaining about concrete abuses.”⁸⁴ Said was encouraged to,

…be thankful for the little bit of peace you have…not being a politician myself I keep being reminded by knowledgeable experts who understand ‘reality’ the politics is the art of the possible and given the present disparity in power between the Arabs on the one hand, Israel and the US on the other, we can only expect a ‘pragmatic’ peace, not a satisfactory one.⁸⁵

What we have seen above is that after the Oslo Accords, Edward Said turned from being a supporter of Yasser Arafat to one of his fiercest critics, arguing that Arafat and the PLO had betrayed the Palestinian cause by accepting a deeply unequal peace that entrenched Israeli domination. Oslo, Said contended, transformed the Palestinian Authority into a subcontractor of the Israeli occupation—enforcing Israeli control, repressing dissent, and perpetuating corruption and inequality. Arafat's regime, marked by luxury for the elite and suffering for ordinary Palestinians, normalized Israel's colonial violence by forgiving its dispossession of Palestinians in 1948 and its decades of occupation since. “Palestinians,” Said writes, “are obligated to see such people as somehow entitled to tell us what is good for us for our own good.”⁸⁶ Arafat's “peace” turned the colonized into colonizer, as Palestinians were forced to police their own people. Despite widespread corruption and abuse, Arafat was celebrated internationally and praised domestically, where expressions of gratitude were expected—even demanded.

This history gives some perspective to Said's rejection of gratitude as an appropriate response. Said resisted the pressure to be “thankful for the little bit of peace you have,” calling such gratitude “moral idiocy”—the self-deception of believing one's interests are being served while still living as a prisoner. “The achievements of his earlier years…remain, of course: the pity is that they are now marred, if not undone, by his behavior since 1990.”⁸⁷ But even here, Said can recognize in an article written in 2000 a lack of gratitude from Arafat to those who had supported him for so long. He writes,

“is [Arafat's] heart made of stone, is his conscience completely anesthetized? I find this astonishingly incomprehensible, and this after 30 years of leading us from one catastrophe and ill-considered venture to another, without respite and without even a whispered ‘thank you for bearing with me and my appalling, bumbling mistakes and miscalculations for so long!” I for one am fed up with his attitude of contempt for his people, and his stony autocratic imperturbability, his inability either to listen or to take other people seriously, his unending ambiguities, secrecy, and blindly irrational lurches from one patron to another, all the while leaving his long-suffering people fend for themselves.”⁸⁸

Because of the Oslo Accords and what came from them, “peace is now a discredited word.”⁸⁹

Conclusion

We can read or hear statements like “gratitude is truly a social virtue and ingratitude is a social vice”⁹⁰ and certainly understand where this is coming from. Gratitude certainly does create important social bonds. But, as we have seen, there are historical moments where what was intended in expecting (or demanding) gratitude is closer to a social vice. There are important strands of the Christian tradition that show that gratitude is closely connected to justice, meaning that giving thanks is one way of “giving what is due” within networks of benefactor and beneficiary. Institutions—whether formal (laws, governments, churches) or informal (traditions, communal practices)—shape these networks and habituate the virtues that sustain them.⁹¹ Yet this paper complicates this by exposing how the same structures of gift and obligation can be distorted. When institutions demand gratitude as repayment for what are in fact unjust or harmful “gifts,” they invert justice rather than fulfill it. In such cases, the expectation of gratitude becomes a mechanism of domination, binding recipients into cycles of obligation that conceal exploitation. Thus, while gratitude is necessary for justice, it must be rightly ordered toward genuine goods; otherwise, it becomes complicit in injustice.

This tension clarifies why there can be no true gratitude apart from justice—and why, paradoxically, the demand for gratitude may at times require its refusal. If gratitude is a virtue that perfects our recognition of genuine goods received, then false or coerced gratitude is not gratitude at all but a deformation of justice. Institutions that demand thankfulness from those they harm—whether in colonial contexts, exploitative labor systems, or abusive ecclesial structures—attempt to sanctify injustice by moralizing the response of the oppressed. Part of thinking about a theology and ethics of gratitude should be to pay attention to what I have called “movements of expectation,” those moments in history where people are demanded to give thanks for unjust conditions.

Here the notion of “holy ingratitude” emerges as a helpful and necessary corrective. Holy ingratitude is the refusal to bless what is not just; what is not of God. Said, in his own way, provides for us an example of holy ingratitude by calling out those moments when movements, colonial or nationalist, that are not of God, but where people demand thanksgiving. Some gifts are not gifts at all, but burdens disguised as generosity. There are no doubt instances where ingratitude is a vice and sin. This cannot and should not be denied. Holy ingratitude, however, far from being a vice is a form of witness: a refusal to name as gift what is in fact injury, and a reorientation of gratitude away from corrupt human systems toward God as the true giver. In this sense, holy ingratitude is not the rejection of gratitude but it's a necessary correction. It exposes institutional abuses, interrupts unjust expectations of reciprocity, and calls both individuals and institutions back to the proper alignment of gratitude with justice, without which neither virtue can genuinely exist.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Nathaniel Aram Warne Adishian

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the United Thank Offering.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.