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 Pales­ tinian statehood is largely symbolic, many also called it ‘the last chance to save the two-state settlement’.2 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. If a 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 twostate 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.