The Israeli society has faced a crisis of the Zionism that has been the basis of their constitution for decades. A consistent sociological production dating back to the work of Shmuel Eisenstadt has unfolded in parallel with such crisis, having interacted with it in a critical way. This is expressed in discussions about the character of the Jewish colonization of Palestine in the works of Kimmerling and Shafir, as well as in the debate over the "ethnic democracy" proposed by Smooha. These discussions are herein reviewed in connection with analyses of the Israeli society today. The relationship with the Palestinians appears in both all the literature and this article, since it largely overdetermines all the social processes that have characterized the Israeli society.
Israel; Zionism; colonization; democracy