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In order to understand the controversy provoked by the debate about “Post-Zionism” in 1990s Israel, one must first understand the mechanisms by which historical knowledge was produced in Israeli universities. From the 1930s, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem hosted separate departments of “general history” and “Jewish history,” with no unifying institutional links between them—an arrangement that was followed by all Israeli universities. Those who first challenged the official Zionist historiography were not professional historians trained in Jewish history departments; it was sociologists, political scientists, Orientalists, and even linguists that engaged with and participated in this powerful debate. What were the ramifications of the institutional architecture of Israeli academia on the ways this debate was conducted? This article attempts to map the major topics of the debate and identify its major breakthroughs: the circumstances of the 1948 war; the Zionist approach to the Holocaust, its survivors, and immigration from the Muslim world; the nature of the colonization process that began at the end of the nineteenth century; the concept of the Jewish past as a national history.