Our purpose in this book was to offer a comprehensive long-term historical–sociological analysis of Israeli society that could explain its trajectory of development, from its origins in the Yishuv up to its currently ongoing liberalization and setting out on the way of peacemaking with the Arabs. To achieve this goal we developed a conceptual framework that departed in several important respects from previous comprehensive studies of Israeli society. Following a critical evaluation of these studies, we rejected the functionalist mode of explanation; the view of Israeli society as exclusively Jewish; the view of the Arab–Israeli conflict as exogenous to the society; the view of the Labor Zionist elite as a “service elite” devoid of its own particular interests and unconcerned with the pursuit of power; and the conceptualization of Israeli political culture as comprised of only two ideological elements – Jewish nationalism and liberal democracy.

Our own theoretical framework has centered on the concepts of “citizenship discourse” and “incorporation regime.” An incorporation regime, as defined by Yasemin Soysal, is a regime of social, political, economic, and cultural institutions that may stratify a society's putatively universalist citizenship by differentially dispensing rights, privileges, and obligations to distinct groups within it. This differential allocation is legitimated, we argued, through the use of particular ways of conceiving of the membership of individuals and groups in the society and the state. These conceptions of membership, which define the rights and duties each side has towards the other, we have termed “discourses of citizenship.”