Quite a few states have a contested past and on-going conflicts about their borders, identity and present realties. Israel is also not the only ‘new’ state around, and will probably not be the last. New states are emerging out of the civil wars that engulf the nation states of Sudan, Iraq and possibly Syria. However, it is one of the few states whose legitimacy is still questioned and its future affects the future of the Middle East as a whole and probably the stability of the international system all together. The reasons for this unique reality lie in Israel’s past and the particular historical circumstances of its birth.
The best way of approaching such complexities is recognising the prevalence of more than one narrative about the state’s past and present realities as well as acknowledging the dynamic and dialectical relationship between the competing narratives. Thus, the pendulum keeps oscillating in favour or against the validity and acceptance of the two major competing narratives about the state’s history: the Israeli Zionist one and the Palestinian one.
In such a world, the historian’s own positionality is as much a factor in the story he or she tells as is the evidence itself. For this reason, modern day Israel is a challenging topic for a textbook. It is one of the few states in the world that still struggles to be fully legitimised in the international arena and one of the many areas in the world that a national and ethnic struggle still rages on. Any scholarly work on such a place will reflect, despite all the attempts at professionalism and fairness, a certain moral as well as an emotive position. An intelligent reader could easily detect within a factual presentation where a more subjective commentary is proposed.
It is not only the personal views of the historians that affect the analysis of the country’s history, but also the changing balance of power between the competing narratives that plays a crucial role in the way textbooks like this one are written. This balance of power has changed in recent years. In crude terms, one could say that textbooks around the world on Israel reflected the Zionist narrative until the 1980s and were far more critical towards this narrative ever since. Any analysis of history, politics, economy, society and international relations, as is provided here, needs to predetermine its relations with the two competing narratives in the land.
From the Israeli Zionist narrative, a book like this should begin in the biblical times, when the Jewish nation was born as a monotheistic religion on the land, which today is Israel and Palestine. It will continue with the expulsion of the Jews by the Romans and will define Jewish life ever since as life in exile. The modern history will begin with the return of the Jews to their homeland that after centuries of neglect turned into an arid, underdeveloped, country. Their return will be characterised as an act of modernisation, blooming a desert and creating a model democracy. The native people will be described as semi nomads without any sense of national or even ethnic aspirations. Their rejection of Zionism will therefore be attributed to their primitivism or to their incitement by others; namely Islamic leaders, Arab tyrants or anti-Semitic gentiles.
This would be the explanation for the attempt by the Arab world to defeat the Jewish State in 1948, after it was recognised by the international community (through the United Nations’ General Assembly resolution 181 from 29 November, 1947) which accorded roughly half of the country to the local Arabs who rejected this proposal. In the Zionist narrative, the proposal was very generous towards the Palestinians and therefore its rejection indicates their unwillingness to live in peace with their Jewish neighbours.
The history of the state ever since moves, according to this narrative, between endless and hostile attempts to wipe it out by military force – in several recurring regional wars and recently Islamic terrorism – and a wish to find a solution in regards to the bits of Palestine Israel occupied in 1967 – the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. A lack of Palestinian leadership, internal Israeli debates about the future of the occupied territories and international diplomatic incompetence are provided as explanations for failing to end this conflict.
Where the narrative becomes neutral and accepted is when the history of Israel is not directly associated with the Palestine question. Then the existing scholarship highlights the technological achievements of an impressive high-tech industry, social enterprises – gathering more than a hundred different Jewish communities around the world and moulding them into one new nation – with a proud Hebrew culture.
More debatable is the claim within this narrative that the modern project of Zionism benefited at least one group of Palestinians, those who became Israeli citizens in 1948 or as they are called in the Zionist jargon, ‘The Israeli Arabs’. Their occasional affiliation with other Palestinian groups is quite often described as the outcome of incitement by radical leaders and as unfortunate strategy adopted by politicians but not shared by the vast majority of this minority within the Jewish State.
The Israeli narrative admits to the existence of tensions within the Jewish society, such as between Mizrahi and Ashkenazi Jews, or religious and secular Jews, but they are treated as normal tensions within a Western democracy; the only one in the Middle East, according to the narrative.
This book does not reflect this narrative. It is written in a period in which this narrative was thoroughly deconstructed and challenged, not only outside Israel, but by a significant group of Israeli scholars themselves. This change is triggered by new developments in general historiography as well as new discoveries made by critical or revisionist Israeli historians. The new approach does not bow to the power of nationalism and therefore neither the Zionist nor the Palestinian national agenda dictates the way these historians tell the historical story. They are driven by more universal approaches to human life, sufferings and hopes. It is there where the Israeli narrative is encountered in a way that many Israeli Jews still find very difficult to accept and quite a few of them deem this new development as endangering the very legitimacy of the Jewish State.
Recent Palestinian historiography also contributed significantly to this swing of the pendulum. As one of the leading Palestinian historians put it, Palestinian scholarship in the 1980s returned the Palestinians back to Palestine’s history, after years of absence.1 History was written until then by the victorious Israelis and therefore the voice of the native people of Palestine was not heard.
The Palestinian narrative ascended not just as the ‘other side’ of the story that was silenced, but also appeared as the more universal one among the two. It became the narrative of the human rights’ agenda and thus the Palestinians were depicted as victims and the Israelis the victimisers. This is work in progress and recent scholarship is not content with such a simplified dichotomous historiographical approach. As will transpire presently, this new updated look on human history, from a moral and not just factual point of view, still requires a paradigm that would help the historian to make sense of a complicated reality.
Indeed, the choice of a narrative does not influence every aspect of history. In order to grasp the Israeli story, its success and failures, it is best to fuse the Palestinian perspective on Palestine with a more scholarly and conceptual approach that will help us understand the Israeli reality beyond a dry factual analysis.
These two, on the face of it, opposing historical narratives of Israel (a state obsessed and impacted by the Palestine issue on the one hand, and a society with other concerns, achievements and agendas, on the other) have been reconciled lately by dramatic historiographical developments both in Israel and among the Palestinians.
Ever since the late 1970s, professional Israeli scholars, and in particular historians and sociologists, began casting doubts about the validity of the Zionist narrative, or version, of events. The most significant challenge came in the late 1980s, when a small group of professional Israeli historians debunked the foundational mythologies surrounding the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. The year 1948 was, and still is in many ways, regarded in Israel as a miraculous moment in the history of the Jewish people: the year in which the exile of the Jews that had occurred in 70 AD finally came to an end with the creation of a Jewish state in May 1948.
Moreover, in the eyes of many Israelis, this is a year in which Israel fought the most justified war of all of them. A war of survival against all odds in which the foundations were laid for everything which is pure and sacred in the new Jewish State. Thus, challenging the official version of what happened in that year and re-evaluating its significance through more neutral eyes could be seen, and was seen, as tantamount to an act of treason.
And yet, it was done, probably because the challenging voices appeared after a chain of events, which will be described in full in this book, that produced both a chance for peace with the Palestinians for the first time since 1948 and which cast doubts about the Israeli self-image (shared by many in the world) of moral superiority and military invincibility.
The historians who offered a new narrative for the 1948 war and the events surrounding it became known as ‘the new historians’. They challenged several foundational mythologies in a way that nowadays, books such as this one, accept as authoritative narration, as readers of this book will find out when these events are described later on.
The first myth the ‘new historians’ debunked was the myth that Israel in 1948 was a David facing an Arab Goliath in the war by proving that the military balance of power in most stages of the fighting tilted in the Jewish army’s favour. One of the principal reasons for this imbalance of power, was a tacit agreement between the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan (today’s Jordan) and the Jewish Agency (the political body running the Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine). The two sides agreed to partition post-Mandatory Palestine between themselves. This understanding, or collusion, confined the Arab Legion, the Jordanian army to the greater Jerusalem area and its limited scope of operations enabled the Jewish forces to defend the new state and defeat the other contingents sent by neighbouring Arab states.2 Officially Jordan was as committed as the other members of the Arab League to an attempt to occupy Palestine and prevent the creation of a Jewish state according to the UN General Assembly decision of 29 November, 1947 that proposed to partition Palestine into two states: one Arab and one Jewish. The Palestinians and the Arab League rejected the idea and yet the UN decided to implement it, regardless of this rejection.
Perhaps, more importantly, the ‘new historians’ dramatically revised the traditional Israeli historiographical analysis of the causes of the Palestinian exodus in 1948 and the making of the Palestinian refugee problem. Three quarter of a million Palestinians became refugees after the 1948 war (half of Palestine’s Arab population) and their presence in refugee camps and exilic communities enabled the Palestinian national movement to re-emerge after the 1948 war and eventually establish the Palestine Liberation Organisation (the PLO) which carries out the Palestinian struggle to this very day.
The state’s narrative was that the Palestinians fled ‘voluntarily’ since they were asked to do so by their own leaders and the leaders of the Arab states. The ‘new historians’ followed the discovery already made by the Irish journalist Erskine Childers, who had searched the airwaves of the time, finding no evidence for such a call. The ‘new historians’ also put forward an alternative explanation for the flight. With various degrees of conviction, they pointed to Israeli policies of expulsion and intimidation as the main cause of the transfer of half of Palestine’s population from their homeland.3
The last myth was the claim that Israel extended its hand to the Arab side and offered peace in the immediate aftermath of the 1948 war but was reciprocated by an intransigent enemy. The ‘new historians’, through a thorough excavation of diplomatic files, showed an Arab and Palestinian willingness to enter into peace talks on the basis of a new UN resolution (replacing resolution 181 from 29 November, 1947, known as the partition resolution – which as mentioned was rejected at the time by the Arab side). Resolution 194 from December 11, 1948, included, among other issues, an unconditional support for the Palestinian refugees’ right of return and demanded renegotiation of the borders of the future Israeli state in a way that would have endangered the territorial gains made by Israel in the war (taking over almost eighty percent of the country). Further analysis done by the ‘new historians’ showed it was the Israeli Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, who led his government into a rejectionist policy towards all peace proposals, including those which came from individual Arab states for bilateral agreements (from Syria and Jordan, and later in the mid-1950s, from Egypt).
Sociologists of knowledge attempted to provide explanation for this surge of self-criticism within Israeli academia. This interest stemmed from the undeniable fact that this new Israeli historiographical harvest justified, in one way or another, major claims made by the Palestinian historiography about the 1948 war (claims that hitherto were suspected as being sheer propaganda).
The consensus among these sociologists was that the Israeli Jewish society had undergone a transformation which made some sections of it more open-minded. This transformation was caused by catalytic events such as the peace with Egypt in 1979, the first Lebanon war of 1982 and the first Intifada of 1987. The political manifestation, or maybe even consequence, of this relative openness, according to this point of view, was Israel’s willingness to sign a peace treaty with the PLO in 1993.4
The global scholarly interest in the critical historians, and not just in the new history they produced, was triggered by the extension of the revisionist Israeli impulse beyond the research on 1948. Historians and social scientists inquired about the early years of Zionism and probed the option of analysing Zionism as a colonialist movement and cast doubts on how socialist it was in essence. This was followed by revisiting the 1950s as a formative decade in which the state and the society’s attitudes towards the Mizrahim, the Jews who came from Arab and Muslim countries, were formulated. Basic racist attitudes seemed to be influential in determining the policies towards these Jews at the time, pushing them to the society’s geographical and social margins. This challenged the mainstream sociological claim that the hardships of these Jewish immigrants was caused by the objective financial and economic conditions prevailing in the young state of Israel.5
The new critical scholars used updated concepts of cultural studies, and quite often post-modern methodologies, to unearth this discrimination (and the racism towards the Palestinian minority in Israel) beyond the political dimension. It was found in films, literature, the media and the educational system. The reference to these two groups as Mizrahi Jews and the ‘Arab minority’ was criticised as well and alternative references were offered to call the former group, the ‘Arab Jews’ and the latter the ‘Palestinians in Israel’. Later on, the term ‘Palestinians in Israel’ was used also by less critical academics while the term ‘Arab Jews’ was rejected.6
At that very formative period another term was born – the ethnic state. Describing a state that considered itself to be ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ as an ‘ethnic state’, meant that it was not a democracy. In the new critical gaze, Israel was not a democracy since the state’s ideology was racist towards the non-Jewish citizens in the state. A state in which full citizenship depends on national or religious identity is not defined as a democratic one (imagine if Catholics, Muslims or Jews who live in Britain were denied citizenship or full citizenship exclusively on the basis of their religious identity). This is why one critical scholar called Israel an ‘ethnocracy’.7 In both the cases of the Arab Jews and the Palestinian minority, the very inclusion for the first time of scholars from these two groups, extended the scope and depth of the critique. This was particularly evident in the case of the Palestinian minority in Israel which found its voice for the first time within the Israeli academia. The period in which this minority suffered under a harsh military rule (1948–1966) was researched thoroughly and the overall discriminative structure of the state’s legislative and constitutional systems was presented in a way that led some scholars to define Israel as an apartheid state.8
It was very much a case of politics of identity as it was an intellectual enterprise. In a similar way, feminist studies appeared in this period of openness and pluralism in the Israeli academia – deconstructing the misogynist attitude of a militarist and chauvinist society worshiping the army and the ‘security threat’ as the supreme value of Israel. A more pacifist approach to history and education followed this surge of feminist scholarship in Israel.9
These scholarly revelations spilled out of the academia for a short period. The same critical instinct could be found in new films, novels and poems. Even the Israeli educational curriculum for a while was affected by this energy and there was an option for teachers to narrate the local history in a slightly more balanced and reflective way. Chronologically, one can say that the critical academic inputs appeared in the late 1980s and by the mid-1990s they were echoed by similar impulses in other media and aspects of life in Israel.10
The critical instinct was very short-lived. Its moment of peak was probably 1995 where you could not evade this critical point of view in art exhibits, academic conferences, TV talk-shows and documentaries and other media. It lingered on until the outbreak of the second Intifada in October 2000.
The collapse of the peace process, the Oslo accord, and the overall shift of the Israeli political system to the right ended the period of relative pluralism in the Israeli production of knowledge. Critical academics either left or retracted from their previous challenges, the educational curricula were cleansed from the inputs ‘new historians’ injected into them in the past and the media became once more obedient and patriotic. The sense was Israel was once more at war with the Palestinians over the homeland and the muses were asked to be silent when the guns were roaring. The critical impulse was left alive mainly in the civil society among small groups of NGOs such as ‘New Profile’ and ‘Anarchists Against the Wall’.11
The political mood in Israel affects directly the fortunes of the critical historiography in the state. Thus, when the Israeli Jewish electorate chose Ariel Sharon for the first time as Prime Minister in 2001 it reflected a new mood in the state. Sharon, and his successors, Ehud Olmert and Benjamin Netanyahu, were part of a political elite that put very little faith in the diplomatic process with the Palestinians and were strong believers in a unilateral Israeli policy of settling in those parts of the territories Israel occupied in 1967 they deemed vital for the state’s national security.
They also represented a society that regarded the protection of the ethnic, namely Jewish, nature of the state as far more important than safeguarding its democratic image. The ‘return’ to Zionist values, as they saw it, was also reflected in the new trends in the Israeli historiography.
In terms of producing historiographical works, it meant first retracting from the critical impulse of the 1990s and returning to the hegemonic narrative. For this to happen there was a need to adopt an even firmer loyalty to the meta Zionist narrative. However, in terms of professional historiography, it was very difficult to ignore the factual infrastructure the ‘new history’ provided about the 1948 war or the clear picture of the discrimination ingrained in the official positions in the early years of statehood towards the Jews who came from Arab and Muslim countries.
The new political mood however affected these two major areas of inquiry at the heart of the local historiography in two diametrically opposed ways. The factual account provided by the new history of the 1948 war was acknowledged by the scholarly community. New publications appearing at the time did not repeat the myth of a voluntary Palestinian flight, the tacit alliance with the Jordanians was recognised and the international community in 1948 was depicted as far less hostile to Zionism as it had appeared in the old narrative. However, the tone was very different from the one that accompanied the ‘new history’ of the 1948 war. The acts performed in the war – be it expulsion, demolition of villages, arrest of civilians or massacres– were all seen as acts of self-defence.12 One of the ‘new historians’, Benny Morris, who retracted from his moral judgement in his early works, now described the actions of the young state as survival in the face of a Jihadi war (whereas in his early work he accused Israel of unnecessary human rights’ abuse and war crimes). The actions he once condemned, and now condoned, were the same. Their moral judgement was very different.13
The debate about the history of the 1948 war in Israel was never confined to the academic ivory towers. When the ‘new history’ appeared in the late 1980s it was discussed in public venues and in wider sections of society by people who based their opinions on memories, information from home or the educational system and quite a profound sense of patriotism mixed with the anti-Palestinian prejudices. This continued to be the case also after 2000. The public debate was initiated by a right-wing NGO, Im Tirtzu (if you will in Hebrew, which was the first part of a famous quote from Theodor Herzl ‘If you will, it is not a dream’). This group took an active part in the scholarly historiographical debate on 1948 and other issues that were raised at the time by critical Israeli scholarship. It was one of many such NGOs that mushroomed in this century, with a direct help from right-wing parties in Israel and their supporters abroad.14
Im Tirtzu published a booklet ‘Nakba-Harta’ which more or less means ‘the nonsense of the Nakba’. With very little scholarly effort or proof the booklet treats any reference to 1948 as a Palestinian catastrophe as a pure anti-Semitic fabrication.15 Later on, in around 2010, the Israeli parliament, passed the Nakba law, regarding any reference to 1948 as a ‘catastrophe’ as a violation of the law that could lead to withdrawal of public money from any institute that endorses the term. Moreover, in recent years, Im Tirtzu despatches its members as students to enrol into Israeli university modules and courses it suspects of displaying ‘post-Zionist’ tendencies. Post Zionist became the generic term for describing critical Israeli historiography of the 1990s. Whereas in the 1990s, it was a term defining someone open-minded and peace seeking, it became synonymous with anti-Semitism in this century.
So, while the scholarly community challenged the ‘new history’ through the re-introduction of a nationalist and patriotic interpretation of the historical facts, these NGOs returned to the early allegations directed at the ‘new history’ when it first emerged in the late 1980s and accused it of fabricating history.
The re-examination of the discriminatory early policy towards the Mizrahi Jews in the post-2000 era went in a very different direction. A very important part of the right-wing electorate in Israel are Mizrahi Jews. The Likud, and its allies in Israeli politics, has a deep and solid powerbase among the Arab Jews (as noted the term Mizrahi Jews alternates with the term Arab Jews). This constituency views the Labour party as an oppressive ideological movement that discriminated against Jews who came from Arab countries and identifies this party, today in opposition, with the Ashkenazi Jews, the Jews who came from European countries. Hence, the critical re-examination of the attitude towards Mizrahim in the past and the present continued unhindered after 2000.
Women are also an important constituency as is the gay community. When these constituencies do not associate their struggle for equality with critique on issues at the heart of the Palestine question, their agenda is respected also by leading members of the centre and right-wing parties (Likud in 2017 had one openly gay member of Knesset).
One topic that was almost wiped out from the legitimate agenda of the pluralist research of the 1990s were the advances made in the study of the Palestinians in Israel. A reflective research on their situation was far less welcome now and new works justifying the harsh ideological positions towards this minority re-appeared after a long period of absence.16
This state of affairs runs contrary to the scholarly developments elsewhere in the study of Israel and Palestine. In recent years, scholars around the world adopted a new old paradigm that enabled a view of Israel as part of Palestine’s history and at the Palestinians and the Jews as a group of natives and settlers, respectively, living within geopolitical entities called Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. This paradigm is settler colonialism.
Settler colonialism refers to movements of white settlers who fled, or were sent as convicts, from Europe to start a new life and had no intention whatsoever of returning to a continent in which they felt unwanted or insecure. They decided to make the new places they reached their home, and even more importantly, their homeland. The main obstacle was the native population. In many cases, they genocided the natives on the way to reinventing themselves as the new natives of the newfoundland.17
In modern times, other means were sought for overcoming the presence of a native population. In Algeria, the French settlers who played with the idea of ceding from their mother country, eventually abided by the mother country’s strategy and went back to France. In South Africa, the minority of settlers imposed itself on the native society through an Apartheid regime. This particular strategy towards the native was formalised by law in 1948. In that very year, the Zionist settler colonial strategy opted for another option: ethnically cleansing the native people while accepting the possibility of having, temporarily, only part of the coveted new homeland.
Demography and geography always interplay importantly in any settler colonial strategy and Zionism was not an exception. Whenever new territory was gained it came with more native people; thus, the options would remain the same: either give up territory or take the territory and get rid of the people. With time, this became a more complicated game when expulsions were impossible due to changes in the world’s moral agenda. Then, the territory and the ‘undesired’ population remained in Israel’s hands and a complex system, described in this book later on, was devised so as to ensure that the demographic reality (by which Jews were not the majority in Palestine) would not undermine the geographical achievement of stretching Israel’s rule over the whole of historical Palestine.
In scholarly terms, what is unique about this stage in the production of knowledge about Israel is that it is a joint Palestinian and Israeli effort. At the heart of the enterprise, scholars of both sides apply, for the first time, the same paradigm to understand the past, decipher the present and predict the future.18
Applying the paradigm of settler colonialism to Israel is not an entirely new concept. Already in 1967, the French historian Maxime Rodinson probed the paradigm’s applicability in an article titled ‘Israel: A Colonial-Settler State’.19 Scholars such as Patrick Wolfe and Lorenzo Veracini who revived the paradigm and helped turn it into an independent area of inquiry referred extensively to Palestine in their work.20 This was followed by a very rich application of the paradigm to the case of Palestine, which continues to this very day.
There are two approaches in this exercise. The more common, and older, approach is to treat the Israeli occupation since 1967 as a colonialist project. However, the newer trend views the whole Zionist history in Palestine as a long trajectory of settler colonialism that continues to this very day not only in the occupied territories but also inside pre-1967 Israel as well. Thus, for instance the Judaisation policies of the government in the Galilee – building Jewish settlements and towns in order to disrupt the territorial continuity of the Palestinian population there and the incarceration of the Bedouin community in the south into reservations – are seen as the inevitable outcome of such an ideology.
Within the Israeli academia at first, the tendency was to ignore this new line of research. Recently Israeli academics attempted to challenge this paradigm. They claimed that the paradigm is ideological and not scholarly but failed to provide an alternative explanation apart from parroting once more the national narrative of a people who came back home after two thousand years of exile.21
The historiographical debate in Israel about Israel and Palestine is indeed both factual and moral. The importance of the settler colonial paradigm is not just in its reappraisal of the country’s history without resorting to the distorting and unhelpful paradigm of national conflict between two equal sides. It questions not only the narrative of the past but also the language those living in, and engaged with, Israel and Palestine are employing.22
If the settler colonial paradigm has any validity then terms such as ‘occupation’ and the ‘peace process’ lose their relevance as a language that describes aptly the reality on the ground or the possible ways forward. Decolonisation become a scholarly, as well as a political, term which, social scientists involved in the analysis of conflict resolution will have to probe from now on. This also has implications for economic and cultural studies, as well as for jurists.
In the past, history was used as ammunition in the conflict. The two sides adhered to a historical narrative that justified in their eyes their policies, including the most violent ones. There was no bridging narrative. The best one could have hoped for was a research that ‘respected’ both narratives.23 In situations of colonisation and dispossession the two narratives paradigm is a false one due to the imbalance on the ground; hence these noble efforts have failed. The settler colonial paradigm is shared by Israelis and Palestinians alike who are not captivated by national narratives on either side, as the brilliant work of Beshara Doumani has indicated for us.24
A third generation of Jewish settlers are part of the reality of Israel and Palestine – understanding their trajectory, motives, actions and aspirations is something the native population can accept within the settler colonial paradigm. This enabled political reconciliation in South Africa. Without it, the critical Israeli historians will be regarded as traitors by their own society and move abroad leaving the local academia to liberal scholars too timid to challenge any significant fabrication and highly patriotic academics who would justify a priori any narrative spanned by the political elite.
1 Beshara Doumani, ‘Rediscovering Ottoman Palestine: Writing Palestinians into History’ in Ilan Pappe (ed.), The Israel/Palestine Question, London and New York: Routledge, 1999, pp. 10–35.
2 I have summarised these findings in my book The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge, London and New York: Verso, 2014, pp. 106–126. See also Avi Shlaim’s summary of these findings in Avi Shlaim, ‘The Debate about 1948’ in Pappe, The Israel/Palestine Question, pp. 150–168.
3 See Benny Morris, ‘The Causes and Character of the Arab Exodus from Palestine: The Israeli Defence Forces Intelligence Service Analysis of June 1948’ in Pappe, ibid., pp. 169–183.
4 This background is provided in Uri Ram, The Changing Agenda of Israeli Sociology, St. Albany: SUNY Press, 1995.
5 This is explored in Pappe, The Idea of Israel, pp. 179–196.
6 See Sami Shalom-Chetrit, Intra-Jewish Conflict in Israel: White Jews, Black Jews, London and New York: Routledge, 2009.
7 Oren Yiftachel, Ethnocracy: Land and Identity: Politics in Israel Palestine, Philadelphia: Penn University Press, 2006.
8 Ilan Pappe, The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010, pp. 276–291.
9 For instance, Hagit Gur-Zeev, Statements on Silence: The Silence of Israeli Society in the Face of the Intifada, Tel-Aviv: The Center for Peace, 1989 (Hebrew).
10 Pappe, The Idea of Israel, pp. 197–216.
11 See New Profile (http://newprofile.org/english) and Anarchists Against the Wall (http://www.awalls.org/) websites.
12 Pappe, The Idea of Israel, pp. 275–294.
13 Benny Morris, 1948: The First Arab-Israeli War, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008.
14 Im Tirtzu website: https://imti.org.il.
15 Im Tirtzu, ibid.
16 Dan Schueftan, Palestinians in Israel, Tel-Aviv: Zemora and Bitan, 2010 (Hebrew).
17 Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, London and New York: Palgrave, 2010.
18 Omar Jabary Salamanca, Mezna Qato, Kareem Rabie and Sobhi Samour (eds.), ‘Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine’, Settler Colonialism Studies, Volume 2, Issue 1, 2012.
19 Maxime Rodinson, ‘Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? London: Pathfinder Press, 1973.
20 Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research, Volume 8, Issue 4, 2006, pp. 387–409.
21 See for instance, Avi Bareli, ‘Forgetting Europe: Israeli Historical Revision from Left to Right’ in Ilan Troen (ed.), ‘De-Judaizing the Homeland: Academic Politics and Re-writing the History of Palestine’, Special Volume, Israeli Affairs, Volume 13, Issue 4, 2007.
22 Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappe, On Palestine, London: Penguin, 2015.
23 Dan Bar-On, The Other Within Us: Constructing Jewish Israeli Identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
24 Doumani, ‘Rediscovering Ottoman Palestine’.