1. Shmuel Ettinger, “The Modern Period,” in A History of the Jewish People, ed. Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson (Harvard University Press, 1976), 790–93.

2. This thesis is developed by Shlomo Avineri, The Making of Modern Zionism: The Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State (Basic Books, 1981), 5–13.

3. Jacob Katz, Emancipation and Assimilation: Studies in Modern Jewish History (Gregg International Publishers, 1972), 143; among the many concurring analysts, see especially Yonathan Shapiro, Democracy in Israel (in Hebrew)(Masada, 1977), chap. 1, on the dominance of “the national principle” over other components in Israeli society; and Baruch Kimmerling, “Between the Primordial and Civil Definitions of the Collective Identity: Eretz Yisrael or the State of Israel,” in M. Lissak, E. Cohen, and U. Almagor, eds., Comparative Social Dynamics: Essays in Honor of Shmuel Eisenstadt (Westview Press, 1984), 265, who describes secular nationalism as “the main conceptual system within which Zionism could operate.”

4. Biale, Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History (Schocken Books, 1986), 206.

5. Benyamin Neuberger, “Does Israel Have a Liberal-Democratic Tradition?” Jewish Political Studies Review 2, nos. 3 and 4 (Fall 1990): 94–95.

6. A. L. Patkin, The Origins of the Russian-Jewish Labour Movement (F. W. Cheshire, 1947), 247–48, 265–66; Sam Lehman-Wilzig, “‘Am K’shei Oref’: Oppositionism in the Jewish Heritage,” Judaism 40 (Winter 1991): 36–37; Shapiro, Democracy in Israel, chap. 1.

7. For a full statement of this thesis, see Robert J. Brym, The Jewish Intelligentsia and Russian Marxism: A Sociological Study of Intellectual Radicalism and Ideological Divergence (Macmillan, 1978), esp. 5–6, 113; see also Calvin Goldscheider and Alan S. Zuckerman, The Transformation of the Jews (University of Chicago Press, 1984), 122.

8. Howard Morley Sachar, The Course of Modern Jewish History (Dell, 1958), 296; see also 287–90.

9. Quoted in ibid., 289.

10. Goldscheider and Zuckerman, Transformation, 123–25.

11. Patkin, Origins, 216–17; see the chapters on Hess, Syrkin, and Borochov in Avineri, Making of Modern Zionism.

12. For a fuller elaboration of Labor Zionist ideology (labeled “kibbutz ideology”) and its role in Israeli thinking through the 1960s, see Alan Arian, Ideological Change in Israel (Case Western Reserve University Press, 1968).

13. On the contributions of socialism to Zionism, see Kimmerling, “Between the Primordial and Civil Definitions,” 264–65.

14. Itzhak Galnoor, Steering the Polity: Communication and Politics in Israel (Sage, 1982), 304; Kimmerling, “Between the Primordial and Civil Definitions,” 265–66; Neuberger, “Does Israel Have a Liberal-Democratic Tradition?” 88.

15. Shapiro, Democracy in Israel, 38. This is elaborated below and in chapter 4.

16. Vital, Zionism: The Formative Years (Clarendon Press, 1982), 41. See discussion in the following section.

17. Ibid., 5, 349–50; Vital, Zionism: The Crucial Phase (Clarendon Press, 1987), vii; see also Biale, Power and Powerlessness, 4. On Zionism as collective assimilation, see Boas Evron, Jewish State or Israeli Nation? (Indiana University Press, 1995), 108, 207.

18. Jacques Kornberg, TheodoreHerzl: From Assimilation to Zionism (Indiana University Press, 1993), 21, 66, 154, 162.

19. Brenner, “From Here and There,” Collected Writings (in Hebrew), vol. 2 (Kibbutz Hame’uhad, 1977), 1280; Evron, Jewish State or Israeli Nation? 102–3, 193.

20. Haim Hazaz, “The Sermon,” in Seething Stones: Stories, Collected Writings of Haim Hazaz (in Hebrew), ed. Haim Hazaz (Am Oved, 1970); for an analysis from a right-wing perspective, see Dov Landau, “Who’s Afraid of Yudkeh’s Sermon?” (in Hebrew), Nativ 2 , no. 7 (January 1989): 71–81.

21. Ben Halpern, The Idea of the Jewish State, 2nd ed. (Harvard University Press, 1969), 4. Halpern presents the case for seeing Zionism as a “reconstruction” of tradition, in opposition to modern Western ideology; see 20–21, 57.

22. Nachman Syrkin, “The Jewish Problem and the Socialist-Jewish State,” in Arthur Hertzberg, The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader (Atheneum, 1973), 349; see also Katz, Emancipation and Assimilation, 145; Daniel Elazar, Israel: Building a New Society (Indiana University Press, 1986), 15; Shmuel Almog, Zionism and History: The Rise of a New Jewish Consciousness (St. Martin’s Press and Magnes Press, 1987), 66.

23. Vital, Zionism: The Formative Years, 228–29, 356–57.

24. Almog, Zionism and History, 309; see also 305–8.

25. Vital, Zionism: The Formative Years, 353; see also Kornberg, Theodore Herzl, 131, 160–61.

26. Ahad Ha’am, “The Jewish State and the Jewish Problem” (1897), in Nationalism and the Jewish Ethic: Basic Writings of Ahad Ha’am, ed. Hans Kohn (Schocken Books, 1962), 79; see also Steven Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha’am and the Origins of Zionism (University of California Press, 1993), 138–39.

27. Vital, Zionism: The Formative Years, 172–73; Elazar, Israel: Building a New Society, 134. Elazar maintains that, given the intensity of their ideological fervor, “only their common Jewishness, which led them to certain perceptions about the necessity for unity at some point and which gave them a useful cultural inheritance for the promotion of the requisite unity, kept them from going the divisive or repressive way of their non-Jewish peers from the same Eastern European milieu” (40).

28. Katz, Emancipation and Assimilation, 142.

29. Aliya (pl. aliyot) literally means “ascent” and is used uniquely to describe Jewish immigration to Eretz Yisrael.

30. Vital, The Origins of Zionism (Clarendon Press, 1975), 150; see also Elazar, Israel: Building a New Society, 22; and Elazar, “Covenant as the Basis of the Jewish Political Tradition,” in Kinship and Consent: The Jewish Political Tradition and Its Contemporary Uses, ed. Daniel J. Elazar (University Press of America, 1983), 35–36. Vital also describes the early Hibbat Zion structure as “analogous to the old pattern of the informal rabbinical hierarchy” (155). While often observant religiously, the new settlers were still regarded as maskilim by Orthodox Jews of the “old yishuv ” and came into conflict with them over such issues as shmita (the biblical injunction to let fields lay fallow every seventh year); see Richard Cohen, The Return to the Land of Israel (Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 1986), 75–81.

31. Vital, Origins, 175, 293; Vital, Zionism: The Formative Years, 348–49; Shmuel Eisenstadt, The Transformation of Israeli Society (Westview Press, 1985), 507; Galnoor, Steering the Polity, 302–3; Shapiro, Democracy, 40; Jay Y. Gonen, A Psychohistory of Zionism (Mason/Charter, 1975), 59; Elazar, 35–37; Neuberger, “Does Israel Have a Liberal-Democratic Tradition?” 80.

32. Shlomo Avineri, “The Historical Roots of Israeli Democracy,” Second Annual Guest Lecture, Kaplan Center for Jewish Studies and Research, University of Cape Town, March 31, 1985, 7.

33. Amos Elon, Herzl (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975), 154.

34. Ibid., 181.

35. Ernst Pawel, The Labyrinth of Exile: A Life of Theodor Herzl (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989), 303.

36. Samuel Sager, The Parliamentary System of Israel (Syracuse University Press, 1985), 3.

37. Proportional representation had been proposed during the French Revolution and first applied to public elections in Adelaide, South Australia, in 1839. The first national proportional elections were held in Denmark in 1856, but after 1866 the principle was applied there only to the upper house and indirectly. The party list system of proportional representation was introduced in two Swiss cantons in 1891 and 1892, and first applied on a national level, in Serbia and Belgium, in 1899. Only an additional five states adopted the system before World War I, and it became widespread only after the war. Clarence Gilbert Hoag and George Hervey Hallett, Proportional Representation (Macmillan, 1926), 65–66, 162–67, 171–75.

38. Stenographisches Protokoll der Verhandlung des III Zionisten-Kongresses, 20–22, quoted by Vital, Zionism: The Formative Years, 206.

39. Vital, Zionism: The Formative Years, 222–23.

40. Ibid., 220, 304–5; Pawel, Labyrinth of Exile, 507; Mitchell Cohen, Zion and State: Nation, Class and the Shaping of Modern Israel (Basil Blackwell, 1987), 69.

41. Yosef Gorny, Zionism and the Arabs, 1882–1948: A Study in Ideology (Clarendon Press, 1987), vii.

42. Elazar, Israel: Building a New Society, 10.

43. Elon, Herzl, 290.

44. Israel Government Yearbook 1952 (Government Printer, 1953), 21, quoted in Don Peretz, “Early State Policy towards the Arab Population, 1948–1955,” in New Perspectives on Israeli History: The Early Years of the State, ed. Laurence J. Silberstein (New York University Press, 1991), 87.

45. Gorny, Zionism and the Arabs, 103–4.

46. Ibid., 42–43.

47. See the ideas of Shlomo Lavie, a second aliya pioneer, in Amos Elon, The Israelis: Founders and Sons (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 165. A variant on this theme, promoted only by a handful, was the idea of assimilating Jewish settlement to the Arab context rather than the reverse.

48. Gorny, Zionism and the Arabs, 275; Susan Lee Hattis, The Bi-National Idea in Palestine during Mandatory Times (Shikmona, 1970).

49. Gorny, Zionism and the Arabs, 33–35, 110.

50. Quoted in Elon, Herzl, 312; see also Baruch Kimmerling, Zionism and Territory: The Socio-Territorial Dimensions of Zionist Politics, Research Series No. 51 (Institute of International Studies, University of California, 1983), 197.

51. This is the necessary background for understanding the description of Palestine as “a land without a people for a people without a land” often attributed to early Zionist leaders. The phrase was actually used by Israel Zangwill (who, paradoxically, later became leader of the Territorialist movement), though it was used before him by two “Christian Zionist” figures (one as early as 1853). It was not used by other Zionist leaders, but in any event the meaning was that Palestine was a land not identified with a specific nation (as was indeed true at the time), not that it was uninhabited. As this discussion has demonstrated, Zionist leaders were well aware that there were people in Palestine, even when (like Herzl) they sometimes avoided the subject. See the definitive article by Adam M. Garfinkle, “On the Origin, Meaning, Use, and Abuse of a Phrase,” Middle East Studies 27 (October 1991): 539–50.

52. Quoted in Elon, The Israelis, 156.

53. Gorny, Zionism and the Arabs, 40–77; Israel Kolatt, “The Zionist Movement and the Arabs,” in Shmuel Almog, Zionism and the Arabs: Essays (The Historical Society of Israel and the Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 1983), 2.

54. Henry Baker, The Legal System of Israel (Israel Universities Press, 1968), 60–63; Daniel Friedmann, The Effect of Foreign Law on the Law of Israel (Israel Law Review Association, 1975), 20–21; Shlomo Avineri, “Israel as a Democratic State,” Skira Hodshit (May 1973); Gregory Mahler, The Knesset: Parliament in the Israeli Political System (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1981), 34–35.

55. Dan Horowitz, “Before the State: Communal Politics in Palestine under the Mandate,” in The Israeli State and Society: Boundaries and Frontiers, ed. Baruch Kimmerling (State University of New York Press, 1989), 28–65.

56. Sager, Parliamentary System, 10–21.

57. Peter Medding, The Founding of Israeli Democracy, 1948–1967 (Oxford University Press, 1990), 10.

58. Gorny, “Zionist Voluntarism in the Political Struggle: 1939–1948,” Jewish Political Studies Review 2 (Spring 1990): 85.

59. M. Cohen, Zion and State, 147–48, 177–78.

60. On consociationalism see Dan Horowitz and Moshe Lissak, Origins of the Israeli Polity: Palestine under the Mandate (University of Chicago Press, 1978), 12–13, 228–29; Horowitz, “Before the State,” 30, 45–46; Eisenstadt, Transformation, 120–21; Medding, Founding of Israeli Democracy, 10; Shapiro, Democracy, 43–46; Galnoor, Steering the Polity, 368–69; Ehud Sprinzak, Every Man Whatsoever Is Right in His Own Eyes—Illegalism in Israeli Society (in Hebrew)(Sifriat Po’alim, 1986), 47. “Compound polity” appears in the writings of Daniel Elazar; see, for example, Elazar, Israel: Building a Society, 59–82. Mitchell Cohen applies “segmented pluralism” in a similar sense; see M. Cohen, Zion and State, 128–29, 185.

61. Nathan Yanai, “Ben-Gurion’s Concept of Mamlachtiut and the Forming Reality of the State of Israel,” Jewish Political Studies Review 1 (Spring, 1989): 169; Avineri, “Israel as a Democratic State”; Elazar, Israel: Building a New Society, 38.

62. Sarah Honig, “The Ben-Gurion History Overlooked,” Jerusalem Post, June 26, 1989. Ben-Gurion’s enthusiasm for the Soviet example was dampened by a visit there in 1923.

63. Elazar, Israel: Building a New Society, 23.

64. Gorny, “Changes in the Social and Political Structure of the Second Aliya between 1904 and 1940,” in Zionism: Studies in the History of the Zionist Movement and of the Jewish Community in Palestine (in Hebrew), ed. Daniel Caspi and Gedalia Yogev, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv University and Massada Publishing, 1975), 49–101, cited by Elazar, Israel: Building a New Society, 25.

65. Elazar, Israel: Building a New Society, 32.

66. Eliezer Rieger, Professional Education in the Jewish Yishuv of Eretz Yisrael (in Hebrew)(Publishing Society of the Hebrew University, 1945), 6, cited by Shapiro, Democracy, 32.

67. This thesis is developed primarily by Joel Migdal, “The Crystallization of the State and the Struggles over Rulemaking: Israel in Comparative Perspective,” in The Israel State and Society: Boundaries and Frontiers, ed. Baruch Kimmerling (State University of New York Press, 1989), 1–27.

68. On the puzzle of Labor dominance generally, see Ze’ev Tshor, The Roots of Israeli Politics (in Hebrew)(Hakibbutz Hame’uhad, 1987); M. Cohen, Zion and State, esp. 74–75, 177; Gorny, “Zionist Voluntarism,” 69–70; Myron Aronoff, Israel Visions and Divisions (Transaction Publishers, 1989), 1–2.

69. Itzhak Galnoor, The Partition of Palestine: Decision Crossroads in the Zionist Movement (State University of New York Press, 1994).

70. Gorny, Zionism and the Arabs, 306–7.

71. Speech at the Seventeenth Zionist Congress (1931), in Jabotinsky, Speeches 1927–1940, 117, 122, cited in Gorny, Zionism and the Arabs, 234.

72. Gorny, Zionism and the Arabs, 207–8.

73. Enzo Sereni and R. E. Ashery, eds., Jews and Arabs in Palestine: Studies in a National and Colonial Problem (Hechalutz Press, 1936), 149, quoted by Peretz, “Early State Policy,” 9.

74. Gorny, Zionism and the State, 291, 310.

75. Ibid., 152–55; Michael Shalev, “Jewish Organized Labor and the Palestinians: A Study of State/Society Relations in Israel,” in The Israeli State and Society: Boundaries and Frontiers, ed. Baruch Kimmerling (State University of New York Press, 1989), esp. 94–95, 102–3. Shalev emphasizes the role of labor market factors in the exclusion of Arab workers; whatever their relative weight, competition for jobs, traditional Jewish separatism, and “Zionist logic” worked together in this case to overwhelm the ideology of class solidarity.

76. Gorny, Zionism and the State, 132, 212–13, 218.

77. On the fleeting and qualified role of the “transfer” concept in Zionist thinking generally, see Shabtai Teveth, The Evolution of ‘Transfer’ in Zionist Thinking, Occasional Paper No. 107, Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, The Shiloah Institute, Tel Aviv University, May 1989.

78. Gabriel Sheffer, “The Confrontation between Moshe Sharett and David Ben-Gurion,” in Zionism and the Arabs: Essays, ed. Shmuel Almog (The Historical Society of Israel and the Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 1983), 95–147; see also Shabtai Teveth, Ben-Gurion and the Palestinian Arabs: From Peace to War (Oxford University Press, 1985).