the israeli incorporation regime47 [A]nti-Semitism, which was the root of the Jewish problem, was ineradicable, the Jews constituted a people in the sense of a nation, and the Jewish problem was consequently a national problem which could only be solved by the gathering into one state of all Jews who wished to retain their Jewish identity, and by the complete assimilation and effacement as Jews of the remnant still scattered among the nations (Van Der Hoeven Leonhard 2005a, 118). In other words, Herzl’s arguments go as follows: the Jewish problem exists because anti-Semitism is both real and ingrained in Christian Europe, and because the Jews constitute a nation, the Jewish problem is therefore a national problem. Through the effective merging of Jewish identity with Zionist identity, not just as collectivities but also as a general mechanism of incorporation, Zionism has provided Israel’s settler-colonial framework with a certain social and historical validity. As alluded to in Chapter Four, this is also the case for various Western liberal-democratic academic circles. Despite this, the current scholarship from critical Arab and Jewish historians, social scientists and political scientists – particularly those in Israel – indicates that at a socio-political and ideological level the Zionist project has had to constantly defend the legitimate existence of Israel as a Jewish state. At the same time, at a legal-juridical level, the Zionist movement has also repeatedly had to explain its choice of Palestine as its territory for settlement to the international community.5 On this, the theoretical framework of analysis adopted by Israeli sociologist Gershon Shafir in his account of Israeli colonialism is particularly radical, and crucial.6 Shafir draws direct conceptual and historical links between post-1967 Israeli colonization in the West Bank and Gaza and pre-1948 Zionism.7 While acknowledging that the mode of Jewish colonization and settlement in Mandate Palestine differed and tailored itself according to the political, legal and economic realities of its time, he contends that the essence and nature of the Zionist project stayed colonialist. Shafir writes: 5 Kimmerling 2008, 182. Zionist arguments justifying Mandate Palestine as its target territory for settlement are also explained in Morris (1995). 6 American-Israeli historian Gabriel Piterberg writes that “Shafir’s work on the initial stage of Zionist colonization is one of the most fundamentally radical critiques of Zionism I am aware of, a fact masked by the work’s arid register. …. It is also the most self-conscious attempt to reinterpret Israeli history within the framework of the comparative study of settler societies …. Shafir regards colonization not as a fleeting moment of formation but as a continually present and underlying structure” (2008, 62–63). 7 See Shafir (1996) and (1999). The latter text is a synopsis of the major contentions of the former text, with additional insights included by the author.