Colonialism and the Jews (The Modern Jewish Experience) Highlight

It is certainly possible to employ the term “colonial” to describe not merely physical domination but also cultural hegemony, not governmentality but collective mentality, but if we are to do so then we must be willing to apply this concept to the historic status of European, and not only Mizrahi, Jews as a colonized people. Only then can we understand why Zionism, even when espoused by an Ashkenazi elite and suffused with colonial motifs, represented the ultimate phase of a European anticolonial discourse that dated back to the early nineteenth century.