Gabriel Piterberg is author of the book The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics and Scholarship in Israel. In this original and wide-ranging study, he examines the ideology and literature behind the colonization of Palestine, from the late nineteenth century to the present. Exploring Zionism?s origins in Central-Eastern European nationalism and settler movements, he shows how its texts can be placed within a wider discourse of western colonization. Piterberg revisits the work of Theodor Herzl, Gershom Scholem, Anita Shapira and David Ben-Gurion, among other thinkers influential in the formation of the Zionist myth, to break open prevailing views of Zionism. He demonstrates that it was in fact unexceptional, expressing a consciousness and imagination typical of colonial settlermovement.