the israeli incorporation regime49 plantation­colony’ fuelled mainly by a large low-paid and seasonal Arab labour force and a smaller better-paid Jewish labour force. The contradiction between market-based colonialism and Jewish national aims resulting from the considerable use of Arab labour stimulated a change in the colonial direction during the second major phase of immigration. The arrival of Jewish immigrants during the Second Aliyah whose organized workers formed the ranks of the Labour Movement generated a change in the colonial struggle from the ‘conquest of land’ to the ‘conquest of labour’ as a central concern. However, despite this shift, Shafir contends that the ultimate aim of furthering Jewish colonialism and establishing a pure settlement colony has remained unchanged. This analysis is significant given the ripples it creates within some of the most critical Israeli political circles. Any depiction of Zionism as a colonial project is considered a provocation by the vast majority of Israeli society, and translated to self-hatred and disloyalty to the state. That said, as Israeli historian Ilan Pappé notes, the comparative colonial discourse does appear among a few critical Israeli scholars who tend to self-identify as the Zionist Left. But this too is a limited analysis. Pappé explains: Critical Israeli academicians … tend to see the year 1967 as a watershed between a pre-1967 moral, contained and basically united Israel and a post-1967 occupying, expansionist and divided Jewish state. Hence, they are willing to point to colonialist features in the Israeli conduct in the occupied territories and trace all the present social and political predicaments to the making of Greater Israel in 1967 (Pappé’s commentary in Shafir 1999, 81). Shafir’s reformulation of Israeli history within the parameters of a ­colonial-settler scheme, and one that simultaneously acknowledges the “particular cast” of Zionist colonialism along with its “fundamental similarity with other pure settlement colonies,” refuses the above demarcation. The colonial logic of pre-1948 Zionism was amended in its post-1967 realization, yet remained central to the Zionist project of nation-building. It is upon this understanding that this book seeks to examine the inclusive and exclusive dynamics faced by Palestinian-Arab citizens in contemporary Israel. The colonial logic of pre-1948 Zionism will be shown to resurface in contemporary Israeli democracy, at the legislative, declarative, structural, and operational levels. In other words, the historical matrix of colonialism within which the Jewish national movement burgeoned is the main source of the multifaceted racial discrimination faced by PalestinianArab citizens today.

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