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Scholarship emphasizing the colonial character of the Zionist enterprise have elicited a lively debate that indirectly opens the question of how to define colonialism. Many scholars only see in the Israeli-Arab conflict a national, ethnic, and religious clash, setting aside its link to the colonization of land. This tendency is furthered, among Israeli historians, by the ideological weight of the vocabulary used to construct their discourse. This vocabulary is the product of an ambitious project to transform Hebrew into a modern spoken language. Immigrant-colonists arriving in Palestine with the second wave of Zionist immigration known under the name of Aliya Shniya (1904-1914) were not only the founders of a new society, but the forgers of concepts that prevented them from becoming aware of the colonial dimension of their actions.