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20 Rodinson concludes that the process of the creation of the Israeli state was part of the ‘great European-American movement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries whose aim was to settle new inhabitants among other people or to dominate them economically and politically’. Other writers21 have used the concept to argue that Israel developed along a similar trajectory to Apartheid South Africa, with the Zionism–Apartheid analogy becoming a highly controversial part of international diplomacy in the 1970s and 1980s.

The disparate communities suffered varying degrees of persecution, never fully integrating into host societies. It is now commonly accepted that conditions in Arab and Muslim lands were relatively good, since as ‘people of the book’ they held a higher status than non-believers or polytheists. Even so they were not considered to be legal or moral equals and were subjected to discriminatory taxes, legal and social codes. In Western Europe, the combination of western European enlightenment and a desire to mobilise the resources of minority populations had led to the emancipation of the Jews in many countries.

He had fused together a combination of secularism, nationalism, liberalism and Western European bourgeois values to construct his solution to the Jewish question. Moreover, in his view any indigenous population of the territories to be settled were to have no say in the programme; the suggestion that they be ‘spirited across the border’ reflected the prevailing colonial mentality that considered any land outside European borders to be ‘empty’ and available for settlement, their populations being barbarous and uncivilised.