the government of the newly formed Turkish republic signed the Treaty of Lausanne, officially delineating the borders of the republic. In exchange for the Allies’ recognition of Turkish sovereignty, Turkey relinquished all its imperial claims to its former territories, including the Arab provinces, now under European colonial mandates. Consequently, former Arab subjects of the Ottoman Empire ceased to be Ottoman nationals, including those residing abroad. While article 34 of the Treaty of Lausanne made provisions for this, enabling individuals to declare the nationality “of the territory of which they are natives,” Britain contravened the treaty, as it had promised the Zionist Federation to establish a Jewish “national home” in Palestine in the 1917 Balfour Declaration. As a result, it needed to ensure the steady flow of Jews to Palestine and their naturalization through residence as Palestinian subjects of the British Mandate for Palestine. British authorities thus legislated the first ever Palestinian citizenship ordinance in order to issue Palestinian citizenship documents to Jewish settlers. To be sure, this was in accordance with article 7 of the Mandate for Palestine, which stated that the Government of Palestine shall enact a nationality law with “provisions framed so as to facilitate the acquisition of Palestinian citizenship by Jews who take up their permanent residence in Palestine.” In July 1925, Britain promulgated the Palestinian Citizenship Order-in-Council, which regulated Palestinian citizenship during the mandate. While the ordinance required British authorities to extend Palestinian citizenship to all qualifying applicants, they instead prioritized conferring the status on tens of thousands of incoming Jewish settlers (through jus domicile) at the expense of tens of thousands of Palestinian migrants (who had jus sanguinis and jus soli rights to citizenship). To justify this practice, British authorities regularly cited Palestine’s limited economic “absorptive capacity,” as well as the migrants’ inadequate proof of an intention to reside permanently in Palestine, absence from Palestine since before 1920, or, 4 The Case for Palestinian Nationality www.al-shabaka.org the palestinian policy network