The relationship between Zionism and colonialism, long a highly controversial subject among scholars throughout the world, has in recent years become a primary source of friction between champions and opponents of revisionism within Israeli historiography and sociology. Until the 1980s, most scholars of Israel Studies teaching in Israeli universities denied or qualified linkages between Zionism and the high imperialism of the finde siècle. This approach is still taken by a number of younger scholars in Israel, but in the past 15 years diere has risen a cohort of Israeli academics who, following the lead of Arab and Western scholarship on the modern Middle East, have made linkages between Zionism and colonialism central to their scholarly endeavors.
Regardless of their political stance, historians of Israel have sought to reconstruct the sensibilities and mental universe of their subjects, just as sociologists of Israel have focused on broad sociocultural and economic structures. Traditional Zionist historiography emphasized that the founders of the State of Israel did not think of their enterprise as colonial in nature and, in fact, abhorred contemporary European colonialism for its parasitical profiting from the expropriation of native land and the exploitation of native labor. Classic Israeli sociology, in turn, has contended that the Zionist movement and Yishuv did not conform to any conventional model of a colonizing state and that the structural barriers between Jewish and Arab society before 1948 were so great as to render impossible any consideration of the Jewish-Arab relationship as one between colonizers and colonized. Some of the more recent historical literature, on the other hand, claims that Zionist thinking, like that of fin-de-siècle Europeans as a whole, operated on multiple levels and that feelings of benevolence, humanitarianism and sympathy could easily blend with condescending, Orientalist and even racist views of the Palestinian Arabs. Israel's current crop of critical sociologists, claiming that Jews and Arabs in pre-1948 Palestine constituted a common socioeconomic and political matrix, argue that Zionism conformed closely with typical European settlement colonialism, in which, as Ronen Shamir has put it, "employers and employees belong to the same ethnic group ... and in which that ethnic group has effective control over the land in ways that enable it to extract and utilize its resources." 1