The paper introduces a new research project which contextualizes Zionist state-building within a Middle Eastern setting. By exploring the dynamics of state evasion and state-making in modern Jewish, Kurdish and Berber history, the project seeks to integrate the Zionist project into the comparative study of nation-building in the Middle East. Throughout the process of nationalizing the politics, culture and society of their non-state communities, Jewish, Kurdish and Berber nationalists encountered heavily dispersed patterns of social authority, cultural practices and settlement patterns. Instead of transferring the Eurocentric frameworks of “minorities” or “minority nationalism” to the Middle East, the comparative angle of the research project focuses on a distinct pattern of social organization (state evasion) and its transformation throughout the process of nationalization (state-making). By exploring Zionist state formation as the state-making project of a segmented society, the research project will contribute a new theoretical framework and a new comparative dimension to the emerging regionalist school in Israel Studies. The theory-guided comparison of the intellectual history and the political practices of Jewish, Kurdish and Berber nationalists unites three emerging research fields at the margins of Middle East Studies, which will benefit from a closer integration. The systematic inclusion of the Zionist project into a comparative research design will be particularly instructive for comparative research on Kurdish and Berber nationalism: While Israeli scholars have long developed an interest in non-state communities in the region, the separation between Israel Studies and Middle East Studies has contributed to a lack of studies which systematically integrate the Zionist project into an analysis of Middle Eastern state formation. By providing a Middle Eastern building block study to the analysis of a much broader phenomenon (state-making within state-evading societies), the research project will contribute to the “global history of populations trying to avoid, or having been extruded by, the state” (James Scott).