Stateless Citizenship

Front matter

Stateless Citizenship

Studies in Critical Social Sciences

Series Editor

Contents

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Formal and Declarative Levels

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Preface

On November 29, 2012, exactly sixty-five years after passing the Partition Plan for Palestine, the UN General Assembly voted by an overwhelming majority to recognize the State of Palestine within the 1967 borders as a non-member state with observer status.! In his speech before the UN General Assembly, Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas declared: “The moment has arrived for the world to say clearly: Enough of aggression, settlements and occupation.” That this bid for statehood comes on the heels of rising Israeli political and military intransigence and instability in the region served as a significant drive behind its adoption.

I first traveled to Israel-Palestine near the end of the second Intifada. Looking only at the period since the start of my independent research on Palestinian citizens in this country, the military establishment of the State of Israel has initiated wars with intense bombardment of neighbouring populations, violated a range of prohibitions contained in international law including multiple ceasefires, and reinforced an illegal and debilitating land, air and sea blockade of the Palestinians in Gaza. This does not include the daily violations of Palestinian human rights, particularly in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem, in the form of checkpoints, roadblocks, military raids and shootings, home demolitions, arrests, settlement building, collective punishment, population transfer and more. Throughout this aggression we have also seen the rise of a disturbing and increasingly normalized discourse in Israeli society depicting these offences as a dress rehearsal for a future war with Iran.

Perhaps most troubling is that these devastating military initiatives were conducted without any significant public political uproar from global actors — not to mention from Jewish-Israeli society. Evidently, the world has not yet had enough. Today most observers appear more sympathetic

1 The bid for statehood at the United Nations was submitted by PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas to the organization in September 2011. Though the Palestinian political group Hamas initially rejected the initiative, it later voiced support for the statehood bid, arguing that it backs any political gain Abbas can achieve at the UN that does not cause “harm to the national Palestinian rights.” See Reuters, “Hamas lends support to Abbas’s UN statehood bid,” The Jerusalem Post, November 26, 2012, http://www.jpost.com/MiddleEast/Article .aspx?id=293489.

x PREFACE to a Jewish state than to Israel being a democratic state. But we ought not kid ourselves. The devastation in the region signals that the existing expansionism and exclusionary mechanisms of incorporation in Israel as a Jewish state are simply unsustainable in the long run.

Importantly, at all of the above political and military junctures the question of Palestinians inside Israel and their relationship with the state as its citizen-subjects was at the heart of social, legal and political discussions. In Israel, each of these military onslaughts set the stage for debates on what to do with the Palestinian citizenry, how to instil in them a sense of loyalty to the Jewish state, and how to maintain Jewish dominance and control in the face of continued Palestinian calls for collective rights and equality. What these discussions reveal is that the Zionist-Palestinian conflict is not only one over land, recognition or rights — it is also a battle at the level of consciousness. Palestinian citizens are situated within an increasingly racialized citizenship regime designed to exclude them. As such, their continued presence as citizen-subjects penetrates the Israeli consciousness by acutely pointing to the contradictions within the state and the unfeasibility of its self-definition and organization as exclusively Jewish’. Put differently, Palestinian placement within a polity that did not anticipate their presence is a constant reminder that Israel’s settler-colonial citizenship regime is sitting on borrowed time.

Though most observers acknowledged that the recognition of Palestinian statehood is largely symbolic, many also called it ‘the last chance to save the two-state settlement’.? Of course, the Palestine statehood bid is unlikely to revive the imagined two-state solution — an option that contradicts the spatial arrangements on the ground. But despite this reality, any potential framework for a two-state settlement must also consider the kind of regime of exclusion within which Palestinian citizens are placed in the event that such a resolution is reached. Ifa two-state settlement means a Palestinian state and a separate Israeli state with entrenched Jewish domination and control over its non-Jewish citizen population, then this

2 On this, Noura Erakat nicely summarizes the reasons for the impossibility of a two-state settlement: “Israel has civilian and military control over sixty-two percent of the West Bank; the apartheid wall has further confiscated another thirteen percent of the West Bank; and the Jewish-Israeli settler population now numbers six hundred thousand. East Jerusalem, which is part of the West Bank, has been the site of rapid ethnic cleansing where Israel is explicitly pursuing a Judaization campaign. Meanwhile, Gaza is territorially separated, isolated, and besieged. The World Health Organization says it will be unliveable by 2020.” See “Quick Thoughts on the Significance of the November 2012 Palestine UN Bid,” Jadaliyya, November 29, 2012, http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/8674/ quick-thoughts-on-the-significance-of-the-november.

PREFACE xi must be rejected outright. In other words, integral to any political position challenging the modern Zionist project and Israel’s contemporary settler-colonial practices is consideration of the Palestinian citizenry. The legitimacy and staying power of any just resolution to the conflict depends on its ability to also incorporate demands for equality, genuine inclusion, recognition and historical rights for Arabs inside Israel. To this end, I hope that this book can outline some of the contradictions of the stateless citizenship provided to Palestinians that must be addressed before any future resolution can be considered.

Haifa — December 2012

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is the culmination of first-hand research I have carried out during the last eight years into the dynamics of Palestinian-Arab citizenship in Israel. Born out of a desire to illuminate and explore the ambiguous situation of this population, this book seeks to analyze the nature of Palestinian-Arab existence within Israel as a Jewish state, and deconstruct the particular dynamics of exclusion embedded in its hierarchical citizenship framework. After finally setting out to conduct independent research on this subject, the scale of those who have supported, encouraged and helped me throughout the years has grown past the point where I am able to remember all who have contributed to this project. Simply put, this publication would not have been possible without the generosity and efforts of a large number of people and civil society institutions.

To begin, my political engagements on which this book is based would not have been possible without the support and inspiration of my mother, Parvin, who instilled in me a drive to unapologetically challenge oppression and racism. Nor without Bibimah, my Nane, whose love and care has never ceased. Their strength, as well as the understanding and my father and brother, Masoud and Behzad, form a central force behind this book. This drive was also coupled with encouragement from my best friend and loving partner, Fabian, whose generosity in thought continues to deepen my political and intellectual positions. Close friends and respected allies who have provided particular assistance and helped ensure that this book actually got out include Hazem Jamjoum, Bill Swanson and Donya Ziaee — and my academic supervisors, Gerald Kernerman and Robert Latham - all of whose attention and insight helped shape this project. Others who have also provided good company and discussion on this topic include Uri Davis, John Elmer, Dan Freeman-Maloy, Niloofar Golkar, Amira Hass, Amir Hassanpour, Clare O’Connor, Justin Podur, Shekoufe Sakhi and Mai Taha. I would also like to express gratitude to my editor, David Fasenfest at Brill Academic Publishers, for his assistance and efforts throughout the publication process.

My analysis of the stateless citizenship of Palestinian-Arabs was shaped and nurtured by my various posts and interactions with Haifa-based Palestinian civil society organizations, including Mada al-Carmel: The Arab Center for Applied Social Research, Ittijah: The Union of Arab xiv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Community-Based Associations, and Adalah: The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel. The longest and most fruitful of these posts was with Mada al-Carmel, which has served both as an institutional base and a unique intellectual climate whereby I was able to examine the precarious situation of the Palestinian population in Israel. What began as a fourmonth internship at Mada al-Carmel has over the years developed into long-standing and deeper friendships and political alliances. Here the expertise, warmth and intellectual generosity particularly of my dear friend and mentor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, but certainly also of Janan Abdo, Einas Odeh-Haj, Nadim Rouhana, Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, Mtanes Shihadeh and Himmat Zu’bi have been indispensable. Others who have given of themselves friendships, insight and daily assistance include Aleen Marshy-Akleh, and Sister Rita and Sister Honourine whose company and affection compelled me to return to Haifa.

Taken together, my continued work with Palestinians inside Israel has taught me that as an exclusionary legal category, the historical link between the included and excluded in citizenship has often been made from the viewpoint of the former. Part of challenging this tendency therefore involves grounding the study of the Israeli incorporation regime within the standpoint and experiences of the excluded, namely the Palestinian-Arab citizenry. To this end, my examination of the exclusionary dynamics embedded in the concept of citizenship and its particular realization in the Jewish state makes active reference to academic research, analysis and statistics documented by organized segments of the Palestinian community. Here I would like to thank Hassan Jabareen and Rina Rosenberg at Adalah, and Nadim Rouhana at Mada al-Carmel for permitting the respective re-publication of selections of The Democratic Constitution and The Haifa Declaration. My analysis of Israeli society and citizenship in this book has also been informed by the expressions of daily experiences, narratives, thoughts, feelings and struggles of Palestinians, which have throughout the years been shared with me by members of the community. If this book is able to capture even part of the political spirit, intention and drive of the above persons and organizations then it will have been worth the effort.

LIST OF FIGURES

1. Painted over graffiti in the predominantly Arab district of Wadi Nisnas

LIST OF FIGURES xvii

Nablus e

WEST BANK e Beer el-Sabi’ (Be'er Sheva)

Palestinian population density Jewish population density

IB > 5000 per km? IB > 5000 per km?

Figure 2. Approximate distributions of Jewish and Palestinian populations in Israel-Palestine in 1945 (Village statistics, PLO Research Center. Courtesy of Ahmad Barclay, 2010, arenaofspeculation.org).

xviii LIST OF FIGURES

Tel Aviv &

Palestinian population density E > 5000 per km?

>5

<5

Jewish population density H > 5000 per km?

= >10

>25

<5

Figure 3. Approximate distributions of Jewish and Palestinian populations in Israel-Palestine in 2009 (Population Estimates by the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics and the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. Distribution of settlers by West Bank governorates for individual settlements from Peace Now. Courtesy of Ahmad Barclay, 2010, arenaofspeculation.org).

Introduction

That the Israeli incorporation regime favours Jews and does not treat its inhabitants equally has been extensively outlined and supported with rich academic scholarship on the subject. Serious scholars and observers will not deny that Jewish privilege and dominance stretches over ‘Israel proper’ and the Occupied Territories, regardless of actual residency or legal origin.! Key to the maintenance of this system of domination and exclusion is the placement of Israel's non-Jewish inhabitants according to various legal classifications. All Palestinian-Arabs living within the Israeli incorporation regime are divided into various categories, each with differing sets of privilege and protection arranged according to a spatial logic. Expectedly, the Palestinian refugees living outside the parameters of the State of Israel are denied any share of its structures and frameworks. Next comes residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip who live under a military occupation; the latter of whom further endure a debilitating blockade, and all of whom lack formal membership with the state but are nevertheless subject to the laws and spatial arrangements of its settler-colonial regime. Then we have residents of occupied East Jerusalem who have the right of mobility in the country, but who lack formal civic membership with the state. And finally, there are those Palestinian-Arabs within ‘Israel proper who hold Israeli citizenship and maintain civic relations with the state along with some entrenched rights; but again, remain excluded insofar as they do not have a Jewish national identity.” It is the Palestinian citizens of Israel, the segment of the divided Palestinian nation who comparatively has the most (though still limited) inclusion in the Israeli civic, social, and political regime that this book will focus on.

Today, one-fifth of Israel’s citizen population is Palestinian-Arab.? Totalling more than 16 million citizens and constituting around

1 Though it is beyond the scope of this book, it is important to mention that there is also extensive and multifaceted discrimination among Jews of various national and ethnic backgrounds in Israel (for more, see Shohat 1999, 5-20; Abu 2011, 11-134).

2 What this spatial arrangement may mean for the importance, implications and applicability of Occupation Law for examining the Israeli occupation regime has been nicely outlined in the online article by Darryl Li, “Occupation Law and the One-State Reality,” Jadaliyya, August 2, 201, http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/2295/occupation-law-and -the-one-state-reality.

3 Similar to the work of other scholars, the terms “Palestinian-Arabs,” “Palestinians,” and “Arabs” will be used interchangeably in this book to refer to the citizen collective within

20.5 percent of Israel’s total population, the vast majority of Palestinian citizens are Muslim, though there is also a significant Christian as well as a Druze community.* Around 200,000 of this population are Arab Bedouin citizens,> members of the indigenous Palestinian community who remained on their lands in the Nagab (Negev) region, and around 360,000 Arab citizens are classified as internally displaced persons® referring to those who either fled or were driven from their villages and towns by the Zionist forces before the creation of the State of Israel, or by institutions following its establishment, and who remained within its borders. Despite their respective socio-economic differences, the collective situation of the what is often called ‘Israel proper’ (the pre-1967 borders of the State of Israel). This terminology is used to highlight that, while the Arab community (including its Bedouin and Druze communities) has Israeli citizenship, it also has a shared history and collective experience with Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, refugee camps and those abroad, and a language and culture shared with those in broader Arab societies.

4 Moti Bassok, “Israel’s population stands at 7.8 million with 2012 around the bend,” Haaretz, December 29, 201, http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/israel-s-population -stands-at-7-8-million-with-2012-around-the-bend-1.404388.

5 Today the Arab Bedouin citizens are the most disadvantaged citizens in Israel and have, since the establishment of the State of Israel, faced a systematic state policy of home demolitions, displacement and dispossession. In September 2011, the Netanyahu government formally approved the Prawer Plan which while officially claiming to ‘formalize the status of Bedouin settlements’ in the Naqab (Negev), practically calls for the mass expulsion of the Arab Bedouin community in the Naqab (Negev) area. Representing the Bedouin community, Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, reports that “[i]f fully implemented this plan will result in the forced displacement of up to 70,000 Arab Bedouin citizens of Israel and the destruction of 35 ‘unrecognized’ villages.” Despite intense rejection of the plan by Arab Bedouins along with international condemnation of the initiative, the Prawer Plan was placed back on the agenda on January 27, 2013 by the Israeli Cabinet who approved new recommendations put forward by Minister Benny Begin. See Prime Minister’s Office [State of Israel], “Cabinet Approves Minister Benny Begin’s Recommendations on Formalizing the Status of Bedouin Settlement in the Negev,” Press Release, January 27, 2013, http://www.pmo.gov.il/English/MediaCenter/Spokesman/ Pages/spokebedu270113.aspx; Adalah: The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, The Arab Bedouin of the Naqab: Myths and Misconceptions, 2012, http://adalah.org/Public/ files/English/Publications/myths%2oflyer%2ocampaign.pdf and “Demolition and Eviction of Bedouin Citizens of Israel in the Naqab (Negev) — The Prawer Plan,” http:// adalah.org/eng/?mod=articles&ID=1589.

€ Just under half of the Bedouin population live in dozens of villages that remain unrecognized by the Israeli government as well as in several new recognized townships. The internally displaced Palestinians in Israel do not receive international protection, representation or assistance since UNRWA ceased to operate within the borders of Israel in 1952. An Inter-Agency Forced Displacement Working Group led by the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has, since 2008, been assigned with the protection of displaced Palestinian-Arabs, but the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights reports that “[t]hese recent efforts have yet to achieve tangible solutions, particularly in the areas of prevention of new forced displacement, medium and long-term protection and durable solutions’ (see Badil 2013, xviii).

Palestinian-Arabs in Israel is, at best, paradoxical. On the one hand, they are denied both national-membership, as non-Jews, and state identification, given Israel’s legal, political and social self-definition as a state for the Jewish people. On the other hand, this community is also distanced from the rest of the Palestinian population through the same legal, political and social dimensions. As it stands, the State of Israel continues to deny the existence of its Palestinian-Arab citizenry as an indigenous population, a national group, or even a national minority. Far from integration into the Israeli regime, Palestinians are placed in a paradoxical situation where, as Arab citizens of a Jewish state, they are both inside and outside, host and guest, citizen and stateless.

In examining the case of Jewish and Palestinian-Arab citizens, questions of ‘who is the guest’ and ‘who is the host’, the interchangeability of these roles and the violent dynamics between them, become particularly relevant to understanding the development of their relationship. Given the subjective nature of collective consciousness, it is immensely difficult to agree not only when but also even whether a collective or a host — and therefore a guest — has emerged. The problem that follows from this is not merely how to account for or justify sharp differences in the range of socio-political, economic, cultural, linguistic, or legal rights bestowed to the collective. It is also one of how to discern the type of collective that has developed in relation to its Other. That said, we cannot consider the collective evolution of the Palestinian citizenry of Israel without assessing the kind of citizenship regime within which they are placed. However complex these determinations may be, it is clear that Israeli (ab)uses of citizenship perpetrated in the process of placing Arabs within their multifaceted system of control have situated these people on the periphery of both Israeli and Palestinian society. It is also clear that, rather than pursuing the absorption or integration of the Arab citizenry, Israeli policy has, since the inception of the state, been shaped by the objective of effective control and exclusion.” Equally clearly, this objective has been realized, insofar as it has succeeded, through the active application of the principles, tools and discourse of citizenship.

7 See Lustick (1980). Many analysts, this author included, view the ultimate and ongoing objective of the Zionist project (and its policies of exclusion and control) as one of completing the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian-Arabs left unfinished in 1948 in the entire area of Mandate Palestine. This reading is repeatedly confirmed not only through Israeli land laws that dispossess and expel Palestinians from their lands, but also through threats of mass attacks and collective punishment of Palestinians that surface in statements made through news outlets, quasi-official documents and policy- and decision-makers.

The institution of citizenship often represents the intersection of identity and the law, and is the locus of constitutionally based articulations of membership in the state. It is understood as a legal status providing privileges of social membership in a political community and, in the process, producing dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. Broadly conceived as a mechanism of civic incorporation within a political community, citizenship is often a contested space for individual and collective group rights and decision-making. Comprised of different readings of membership and its accompanying rights, the kind of citizenship provided to a collective thus reflects the various group relations that exist within that state. As such, the notion of citizenship is one of the most valuable prisms through which one can analyze conceptions of statehood. Indeed, diverse struggles among individuals and groups shape the content, structures and boundaries of citizenship, which in turn form a definition of the political community and the dynamics of political life. Different types and degrees of rights granted to a citizen population often reflect how states use citizenship to incorporate social groups into their structures while simultaneously (re)drawing or (re)forming social categories. And, as a result of state practices of granting differential citizen-access to rights and responsibilities, various patterns of citizenship are (re)shaped, (re)created and reinforced.

Such social and political struggles over the content, structures and boundaries of citizenship are key to contemporary Israeli political life. In the case of Israel, its citizenship regime is shaped by a Zionist ideology that nurtures sophisticated policies of exclusion with its respective systems of control. These policies of exclusion work in tandem with limited inclusion in all areas of social life. In Israel, the Jewish state is not only a source of identity but it is also the guarantor of rights. This is because Jewish identity in Israel provides an entirely new and much broader scope of rights irrespective of formal citizenship. Put differently, Jewish identity is automatically merged with Israeli citizenship. Understandably, such a conception of social membership impacts and (re)shapes the boundaries of participation, representation and inclusion for its Arab and other non- Jewish citizens. Indeed, access to the home, the city, the state and the land itself in the State of Israel in the form of civic identification, claims, rights and membership, is deliberately designed to exclude the non-Jewish community.

8 This point was elaborated upon in Kimmerling (1999, 339-363). For a more detailed account of how the Zionist incorporation regime fuses Jewish and Israeli identity, see Chapter Five.

Yet this is not to suggest that the citizenship regime in Israel is non-inclusive whereas the citizenship regimes of other states are inclusive. As this book argues, there is an intrinsic and categorical Otherizing that lies at the root of the very concept and process of citizenship. This involves the formation and use of an Other, a non-member or outsider who is excepted from but maintained within the social arrangement. Thus, it is far from the case that the citizenship regime in Israel is an anomaly because its citizenship framework is ensconced in a relation of exception. Instead, what sets the Israeli citizenship regime apart, what constitutes the particular peripheral placement of Palestinian-Arabs within it, is the specific mechanisms of Israeli citizenship and the exclusive dynamics of its internal relations.

Citizenship is, for the most part, a modern notion; major social and revolutionary movements in the West such as the American War of Independence and the French Revolution have shaped its inclusive and exclusive dynamics (Turner 2002, 271). While incorporating some of this intellectual tradition, contemporary Israeli citizenship is a particular amalgamation of the expansionist mentality of late nineteenth century European colonialism, nationalism and Zionism, and twentieth century wars and settlement projects. This book seeks to deconstruct the mechanisms that are particular to the Zionist citizenship regime. It looks at the inherent dynamics of exclusion within the Zionist citizenship framework that not only place it apart from traditional citizenship regimes, but also render any meaningful citizenship by its Arab population an impossibility. Indeed, only until relatively recently has this segment of Palestinian-Arab society, the Arab citizens, received serious scholarly attention. For the most part, the precarious situation of Arab citizens within the Zionist citizenship regime has been treated by mainstream voices as an internal problem, a domestic Israeli concern, and as a case of troubled state-minority relations. But the recent scholarly efforts of prominent critical Arab, Jewish and Western social science researchers to investigate the Palestinian citizens of Israel have begun to drastically challenge these assumptions. By exposing the Zionist fusing of ‘Jewish’ and ‘Israeli’ identity, and its practical and theoretical effects on Arab citizenship, these scholars have paved the way for new generations of researchers to build on their impressive sociological research on Palestinians in Israel.

The existing academic literature has, thus far, largely focused on the question of what Palestinian citizenship entails. What are the levels of domination in Israel? What kinds of rights and privileges are provided to Arabs by virtue of their citizenship? What is the relationship between Arab citizenship and the modern Zionist project of Judaization and expansion? These are the kinds of questions that notable scholars have emphasized. By and large, the academic literature has tried to make analytical ‘sense’ of what it is that has led to a deepening internal and disparate disconnect between de jure and de facto citizenship for Arabs in Israel. To this end, critical social scientists will often correctly point to an absence of rights, identification and representation with formal Israeli citizenship. In doing so, scholars have described the Israeli citizenship of the Palestinians in a variety of ways, including: one-way citizenship, hegemonic citizenship, illusory citizenship, shrinking citizenship, ghettoized citizenship, hollow citizenship, mere citizenship, something less than citizenship, and a citizenship emptied of real content.

But on the question of how the space for Palestinian citizenship has (d)evolved, (de)generated, or been (re)drawn, the existing literature has mainly focused on the structural, institutional, conceptual, sociological, legal, racialized, historical, economic, and gendered tendencies within the Israeli incorporation regime. Broadly speaking, the existing literature on the exclusionary dynamics of Palestinian citizenship has mainly taken the form of depicting it as missing something — as an incomplete or partial citizenship whose structure cannot be used to sustain a liberal democratic society. Taken together, the question of how this deprived Arab citizenship is formed and maintained, and the kinds of relations of exclusion that are created, is often answered by describing the rights, freedoms, resources, benefits, and discourses that are absent, exclusionary or made inaccessible.

This book does not contest these observations. On the contrary, it is upon the impressive and rich critical scholarship on Palestinians in Israel that this book is based. Working from this literature, the purpose here is instead to conceptualize an analytical framework for understanding how the dynamics of exclusion in Palestinian citizenship have developed. To this end, it is argued that the means, the actual medium, through which, by which, and from which marginalized Palestinian existence is maintained in Israel is citizenship itself’ As the chapters outline, it is the provision of citizenship, the very inclusion within the Israeli citizenship regime that creates the inherent contradictions and paradoxes of Arab citizenship ina Jewish state. So, in contrast to other Western nation-states, the Israeli citizenship regime inverts the relation of exception embedded within the classical model of liberal citizenship.? It is Palestinian inclusion within the

9 Importantly, certain features of the relation of exclusive-inclusion (as explained in Chapter Six) integral to Israeli citizenship may appear to readers as also being characteristic of the citizenship regimes to which indigenous populations are faced in the West,

Zionist citizenship regime that produces their multifaceted exclusion. Here the concept of stateless citizenship becomes a useful analytical framework. Through its various internal paradoxical dynamics, stateless citizenship helps us understand the particular mechanisms and levels of (in-)existence and (non-)representation to which Arabs in Israel are subjected. It is through Israeli citizenship that Arabs are deemed stateless; it is through inclusion within the Israeli citizenship regime that they are excluded. And it is the associated conceptual and political dynamics of this provision of citizenship that the notion of stateless citizenship seeks to emphasize and analytically deconstruct.

A NEW CHAPTER OF PALESTINIAN HISTORY

A brief look at their particular historical development and placement in the Israeli regime is key to understanding the existing political, social, conceptual and identity-based contradictions faced by Palestinian citizens of Israel. Indeed, an overview of their specific historical experiences accounts for the oscillation between the Palestinian, Arab and Israeli parts of their identities. As a Jewish national movement that developed out of the propagation of Jewish immigration to and settlement in historical, or Mandate Palestine, Zionism has largely been a territorial and demographic success. By now, the military campaigns leading up to the 1948 Nakba, or catastrophe, have been widely documented." The events of the 1948 war resulted in the forced displacement and devastating rupture of the indigenous Palestinian community.!! Mass expulsions of Palestinian Arabs began in including in Canada, Australia, and the United States. For instance, the exclusion of Palestinians through an inclusion into the Israeli citizenship regime can reasonably be placed alongside campaigns for the incorporation of Aboriginal or indigenous communities in the citizenship systems of the mentioned settler-colonial states. As I reaffirm below, a historical and sociological comparison of the Israeli citizenship regime with those of other settler-colonial societies in the West is beyond the scope of this book. However, as the discussions and analysis in the prospective chapters will show, many dynamics illuminated in the concept of stateless citizenship appear particular to the Jewish state. Nevertheless, future scholarly undertakings on this issue could serve as a useful extension of the present discussions.

10 For instance, these scholars have contributed to the impressive body of knowledge concerning the 1948 war and laid the grounds other critical examinations of the Zionist- Palestinian conflict: Abu Sitta (2001); Finkelstein (2003); Flapan (1987); Khalidi (1988) and (2005a); Lehn and Davis (1988); Masalha (1992); Morris (2004); and Pappé (1992), among others.