For the state-bearing nation audience, Palestinian characters were absent from the series, only 25% of those who responded clearly seeing them. Chapter 5 describes how these Jewish Israeli children from Alfei Menashe argued that since Palestinians are “terrorists,” the “Israeli” producers, Jewish Israelis just like they are, would not have allowed them onto Sesame Street to harm them. They used production-based conventions to reinterpret what they perceived as the imbalance of encoded characters who were both “good people” and their partners to conflict. The majority converted both the national and civic identity of Palestinian characters: 80 percent transformed them into Jewish Israelis, or simply “Israelis”; 25 percent into Arab/Palestinian Israelis. 56% decoded their shared others, Arab/Palestinian Israeli characters. These children interpreted all the characters as “good people,” whether defined as Jewish Israeli, Arab/Palestinian Israeli or Palestinian, though none generalized their mediated experiences about their other out-grouping, or Palestinians, to additional characters and real-world scenarios. Where their shared other was concerned, Arab/Palestinian-Israelis, only a minority generalized those experiences, such that at least regarding their shared other, the series could potentially move this audience attitudes, which otherwise ranged from negative to neutral.

This chapter examines how nationalism, religious claims, and settler colonialism enmesh within Zionism and demonstrates how their interaction played a major role for Israeli academia and politics in sidelining or obfuscating settler colonialism as an appropriate frame of analysis for Zionism’s encounter with the Palestinians. The chapter makes three main arguments: first, that while settler colonialism is an obvious framework for analyzing and understanding the unfolding of the Zionist project in Palestine, the framework has been obscured by highlighting the connection between Jewish nationalism and religious claims; second, that the steady rise in religious encroachment into institutions and the public sphere in Israel is rooted in the need for legitimation (grounded in religious claims) in face of rising Palestinian resistance to the expansion of the settler-colonial project from Israel to the West Bank; and third, that while secularization was possible in other settler-colonial contexts such as South Africa, Northern Ireland, and North America, it is impossible to achieve secularization within a Zionist regime. Rather, for secularization and democratization to take place, Israel has to recognize the settler-colonial reality of the Zionist project, a recognition that will make it possible to free Israeli Jewish nationalism from religionism and work toward decolonization.

Barnett uses the 'Jewish Problem' to compare how different kinds of nationalism have offered different ways of dealing with minorities and, in turn, the strategies available to minorities who want to both retain their community and maintain their physical survival. Nineteenth-century Europe developed two different kinds of nationalism that had different responses to the minorities in their midst. Western ‘civic’ conceptions of the nation offered minorities the ability to integrate if they accepted that they were part of the civic nation. Eastern 'ethnic' nationalism could not imagine minorities such as the Jews as being a candidate for membership in the nation. In response to the opportunities offered by countries with civic nationalism, Jews 'reformed' Judaism and their Jewish identities so that it could fit into a broader Christian, liberal society. For Eastern Jews, there was no possibility of integration, forcing then to flee, turn to broader transnational movements such as socialism, or develop their own brand of Jewish nationalism, best known as Zionism.