simply, their “patent undesirability.” On March 8, 1937, two decades into Britain’s occupation of Palestine, the Government of Palestine reported that more than 28,000 Jews had been issued Palestinian citizenship documents between 1931 and 1936, and that out of a total of 4,941 citizenship documents granted in 1936, 4,847 were for Jews. By contrast, about 9,000 applications for citizenship had been submitted from Palestinians in Latin America alone by 1937; of those, not more than 100 were accepted. Palestinian migrants across the Americas, who amounted to roughly 40,000 by 1936, effectively became stateless Palestinian nationals carrying obsolete Ottoman documents. Over the course of its 30-year occupation of Palestine, Britain persistently manipulated nationality by denying it through citizenship. And although Britain violated the Treaty of Lausanne in doing so, the League of Nations left the administration of Palestine entirely to the discretion of the British Crown. The governance of Palestine effectively fell outside of international law. Palestinian Nationality Under the Israeli Regime The Israeli regime’s ongoing contravention of international law since 1948 in denying millions of Palestinians throughout the world their rights to Palestinian nationality has its roots in a similar practice predating it by three decades. To wit, upon its creation, the new regime swiftly denied the 750,000 Palestinians who were exiled in 1948 their rights to Palestinian nationality; it did this again following its expulsion of 300,000 Palestinians from Palestine in 1967. Like its predecessor, the Zionist regime has deliberately manipulated citizenship and nationality in order to fulfill its demographic goal of securing a Jewish state. That is, like British mandate authorities, the Israeli regime has continually 5 The Case for Palestinian Nationality www.al-shabaka.org the palestinian policy network