The Higher Ground
- Hamze Awawde
- Oct 30
- 5 min read
For the sake of full disclosure, I'll say that Hamza and I worked together for three years. We know each other well, and there's a solid foundation of mutual respect between us. I know that Israeli Jews who read this text of his might wince here and there. And yet, I think it's important to bring in the Palestinian voice that sees reality from a perspective different from the one the Israeli public looks through. Most of us live here without really knowing this viewpoint at all, and consequently, without considering it legitimate. That, perhaps, describes exactly what Hamza writes. The idea that there isn't another people here for whom this is also their homeland is an illusion. The reality is that there is such a people, and for the sake of all our security, we too must understand that and act from that understanding.
Ayala Shalev, Editor, That’s About Us
The Higher Ground
Hamze Awawde
There is a way to see how words and deeds move and meet. To notice when language promises peace while the world quietly bends toward domination. Liberal Zionism speaks the language of peace and democracy. It presents itself as the thoughtful, humane face of Israel, a voice that values coexistence and human rights. The words sound right. They flow like water. Yet beneath those words a pattern repeats: a political framework aimed at preserving exclusive control over the land, at a terrible human cost.
Since October 7 this contradiction has become unmistakable. Many who spoke in tones of compassion and complexity offered moral and political cover to a campaign in Gaza that numerous legal scholars and rights groups described as catastrophic. They did this through language that reads as progressive, by appealing to empathy, and by insisting on complexity. But complexity in service of power is like cloud over the sun. It hides responsibility and keeps distant the systems that allow suffering to continue.
Liberal and right wing Zionists may differ in voice and ritual, yet they share a common horizon. Both are committed to a state whose identity depends on a Jewish majority, and both accept a political order in which Palestinians must live within the limits that structure imposes. One offers a rhetoric of democracy and coexistence, the other a rhetoric of force and faith. Both make the same choice: that full equality for all who live on the land is not the goal. History bears witness to this continuity. The early liberal movements, including Labor, drew the maps of control, led the expulsions, and oversaw settlement expansion. They spoke of peace while shaping occupation. Their modern variants endorse plans that reject the right of return, preserve major settlements, and offer Palestinians limited autonomy without real sovereignty. The surface changes; the deeper current does not.
When October 7 arrived many liberal voices reacted in fear and solidarity with those they felt threatened. They called for decisive action and spoke of protecting democracy. They did so knowing the toll such action would extract. As destruction mounted these voices shifted from calls for firmness to a plea for balance. They urged us to see both sides, to hold complexity, to show nuance. Nuance can be wisdom, but it can also become a veil. When complexity clouds causality, it can turn an asymmetric reality into a symmetrical grievance. That turns accountability into consolation and power into shared sorrow.
Even those who privately sensed the scale of the harm often confined their response to language. Sorrow without consequence is a quiet surrender. To preserve moral standing many fixed blame on one leader. Netanyahu became the symbol of failure, the man who had broken the better Israel. But the truth asks us to look beneath faces to forms. The war enjoyed broad support across society; centrists and others endorsed its logic. The problem is structural, not merely personal. A polity that claims democracy while embedding inequality cannot be separated from the violence that enforces that inequality.
Liberal Zionism has a particular place in Western conversation. It speaks a language Western publics want to hear: pain softened by reason, grief balanced by restraint. That language comforts. It frames war as tragic necessity and preserves the story of a democratic state under duress. But comfort can become a barrier to change. It permits continued transfer of arms and political cover while replacing action with expressions of regret. It turns moral energy into paralysis.
Yet currents shift. A new generation, Jewish and non Jewish, is growing less willing to accept the old lexicon. They name what they see: occupation, apartheid, systemic violence. Their clarity unsettles institutions that once set the terms of debate. In response, some educational efforts have moved from critical inquiry toward defensive training, lessening space for honest questioning and amplifying repetitive defenses.
If we mean an alternative to the current course, we must be precise. Replacing one leader with another who speaks more softly does not alter the foundation. True change must reshape the ground beneath politics. A genuine alternative begins by rejecting ethnonational supremacy as the organizing principle of the state. It requires constructing a political order where Jews and Palestinians share equal citizenship and sovereignty, not one people ruling the other.
This transformation demands practical measures. It asks for dismantling settlement infrastructure and the legal architectures that sustain separation. It calls for lifting the siege on Gaza and restoring the conditions for life to flourish. It insists on recognizing the right of return and restitution not as a threat but as justice made real, balanced with arrangements for shared security. It reimagines security not as domination but as mutual protection, governed by law and equality.
Many Jewish people carry deep and generational fears, fears rooted in centuries of exile, persecution, and unimaginable loss. Those fears are not illusions; they are living memories written in the body of a people. But fear, when it governs, turns protection into control and memory into boundary. The path forward does not ask Jewish communities to abandon safety; it asks that safety be shared. The moral strength of a people is not proven by the walls they build, but by their ability to trust justice enough to live without them. True security will never come from dominance; it will come from equality freely chosen.
We must also be honest about political models. The two state framing has been used as a promise while producing fragmented, unequal realities. If it becomes a cover for Bantustanization it must be discarded. The alternatives are stark: either a truly sovereign Palestinian state with full control over its land, borders, and resources, or a single democratic polity that guarantees equal rights, dignity, and security for all who live there. Anything less perpetuates the colonial relation under a different name.
This pattern is not unfamiliar in history. Liberal vocabularies have long been used to justify dispossession across continents. To call something liberal does not by itself make it just. Many who recoil from religious settlers still live within a national story built on displacement. The Gaza war stripped away illusions. When challenged, even the most refined language of statecraft can revert to explaining rather than restraining violence.
After Gaza the moral reading is painful but clear. Liberal Zionism has not delivered justice, nor durable peace. It has offered a vocabulary that helps skilled listeners understand suffering but not always stop it. As a political project it has reached its limits. As rhetoric it still soothes, until a public refuses to equate words with change.
The future depends on that refusal. When societies, leaders, and communities stop asking for softer phrases and begin demanding structural transformation, we will have moved closer to harmony. True balance is not neutralizing truth or flattening difference. It is aligning means with ends so that action flows from justice. Nuance without justice is not balance. It is compassion that has lost its courage. Conscience without action remains only a mirror.
Hamze Awawde is a Palestinian activist, conflict resolution expert, and speaker.
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