Zionism and its Discontents

The book explores political alternatives to mainstream nationalist movements in Israel-Palestine. It focuses on four attempts to challenge or modify the dominance of the Zionist movement and its settlement project before and after 1948. These are: the Palestinian Communist Party and the binationalist movement, both operating during the British Mandate period. The efforts by Palestinian citizens of Israel to challenge their conditions of marginalization after 1948, and the radical antiZionist Matzpen group, which operated from the early 1960s to the 1980s. In addition to analyses of the shifting positions these movements adopted in relation to Zionism, Arab nationalism and the Question of Palestine, the book examines their perspectives regarding a set of conceptual issues: colonialism and settlement, race/ethnicity and class, and questions of identity, rights and power. In doing that, it invokes comparisons to other historical cases of group conflict, such as South Africa, in order to develop a broad theoretical understanding of the issues raised by the discussion.