160 chapter five political­milieu where any criticism of Israeli policies was vociferously labelled anti-Semitic, Zureik’s book was a daring theoretical challenge rich in its account of the social condition of the Palestinians inside Israel through the lens of race, ethnic relations and colonialism. Unlike his contemporaries and the Israeli writings available on Arabs in Israel at the time, Zureik’s analysis of the Arab and Jewish historical relationship is the first impressive attempt at examining Jewish colonization at the turn of the twentieth century rather than from the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. Zureik begins by outlining the features of a settler-society that apply to Israel with a keen eye on the primacy of Israeli political economy, its class structure and Jewish-Arab class relations. The transformations in the traditional peasant social order and the socio-economic structure of the indigenous Arab community “in the context of a superimposing capitalist economy;” the acquisition of land by Jewish settlers and the formation of a subordinate and occupied native labour force “creating identified pockets of hinterland in the midst of areas with native concentration” with metropolitan centres in regions occupied by Jewish settlers and their agents; and the political domination fuelled by an economic one which reproduces a “justificatory ideology” rooted in the dehumanization of the indigenous society, are all explained by Zureik as working in tandem to establish a value-system that is in-tune with the hegemonic structure of the Zionist colonial project (Zureik 1979, 28–29). He explains that the Arab and Jewish sectors of Israeli society, “did not develop separately and independently under similar conditions,” but were “interconnected in an asymmetrical relationship mediated by the British [colonial] presence” (Zureik 1979, 5). Working from this important framework, Zureik goes on to relate the system of domination in pre-1948 Palestine, first during the Ottoman, then the mixed Anglo-Zionist colonial rules, and on to the post1948 Zionist colonial social order in contemporary Israel to which its Arab population is exposed. Delineating the mechanisms of Israel’s oppressive socio-political system, and its effects on Arab education, social services, health care, employment, and ‘criminal’ behaviour, Zureik concludes that the situation of Palestinian citizens in Israel define it as an internal colony. Taken together, the state of Arabs in Israel therefore renders inapplicable characterizations of the community as simply members of a multicultural Israeli society (Zureik 1979, 140). He writes: The situation in pre-1948 Palestine was more like a dual society, with one society, mainly the Zionist, deriving benefits from the sponsoring imperial power at the expense of the other, namely the indigenous Palestinian society. …. [But] the post-1948 period ushered in a third cycle of colonialism. ….