Both of those options, according to Shenhav, conceals the Arab identities and culture and provides new cultural cultures from the Mediterranean. The book discussed the way in which two categories where juxtaposed in the Israeli discourse - one which distinguishes Jews from non-Jews, and another, which is perceived as an exclusively Jewish discourse, between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi. Shenhav seeks to undermine those categories, which he believes to be fixated and do not allow a description of Mizrahi history from a comparative perspective. Shenhav described the operation of a cultural machine which fixated the Jews from Arab countries as Arab Jews, but did so without "purifying" them from their Arabism, and portrayed the wide border zone along which that conversion took place. He presented a critical inquiry of the relations between Zionism and the Arab Jews by displaying Zionism as an ideological practice with three simultaneous and symbiotic categories: "Nationality", "Religion" and "Ethnicity". In order to be included in the national collective, they had to be "de-Arabized". Religion distinguished between Arabs and Arab Jews, thus marking nationality among the Arab Jews. Thus, in order to belong to the Zionist-national discourse, the Arab Jews had to perform and practice Judaism. Religion, in that sense, was a means to the recruitment of the Mizrahi Jews into the Jewish nationality. Yet religion at the same time also marked them as an "Ethnic" group separate from the secular (Ashkenazi) Israeliness. For Shenhav, religion and nationality are not binary categories but are connected in dynamic relations. Zionist nationalism confiscated Judaism and did contain religious lineaments, but those were nationalized and re-formed. Shenhav does not suggest that Zionism made the Mizrahi Jews religious, but that Zionism orientalized them through religion. Thus, They could only exist within the national Zionist discourse by being classified as religious Jews, and that is why the intermediate category of Masortim was created. Shenhav argued that this Arab Jewish identity is a hybrid one, and is in part the result of dual consciousness - national and colonial - of Zionism. Yet he does not argue that contemporary Mizrahi identity is Arab-Jewish, but rather that it was a concept with a certain history that was cut off. So from a critical position, Shenhav accepts the conceptualization of the Mizrahi in the Israeli political and ethnic discussion since, according to him, the common experience of the various "communities" in Israel - in the education system,