The ideological wellspring of Zionist capitalism: The impact of private capital and industry on the shaping of the dominant Zionist ideology

Despite deep paradigmatic differences, most researchers of Israeli society agree that from its beginnings to the present day it has undergone a political, economic, and cultural revolution. The core of that revolution was the transition from a socialist to a capitalist orientation, from a centralist, planned economy controlled by the labor movement and the Histadrut (General Federation of Labor) to a semi-competitive economy in which the owners of private capital play a central role and decisions are affected by a liberal-economic ideology. An additional assumption shared by most students of Israeli society is that the political institutions—the labor parties, the Histadrut, and the state—are dominant factors in engineering the structural shift. The principal benefactors of the transformation—the capitalists, the industrialists, and the merchants—are omitted from the explanation.