israeli hostipitality111 The embedded Otherizing in the welcome of the host makes hospitality a “passage across the threshold or the frontier,” so that recognition of the hospitality of the Other is immediately moulded into an acknowledgment that the Other is “the patron, the master of the household” (Derrida 2000, 4, 13). And this welcome or greeting of the host is conditional upon the maintenance of the authority of the host in her/his own home (Derrida 2000, 13). Prior to the offer of welcome, an offer that is always already conditional, the sovereignty of the host over the space and its bounty must be confirmed. Derrida asserts: There is almost an axiom of self-limitation or self-contradiction in the law of hospitality. As a reaffirmation of mastery and being oneself in one’s own home, from the outset hospitality limits itself at its very beginning, it remains forever on the threshold of itself (Derrida 2000, 14). This notion of mastery gives shape to hospitality so that the host now becomes the acceptor of the presence (and even existence) and behaviour of the Other. In other words, hospitality “gives, it offers, it holds out, but what it gives, offers, holds out, is the greeting which comprehends and makes or lets come into one’s home, folding the foreign Other into the internal law of the host” (Derrida 2000, 17). We do not know what hospitality is because the reification of the role of the host as a sovereign is requisite to its practice. “It is always about answering for a dwelling place, for one’s identity, one’s space, one’s limits, for the ethos as abode, habitation, house hearth, family, home,” explains Derrida, and the extension of knowledge toward the Other as an unknown, as a foreigner or stranger, already motions “the circles of conditionality that are family, nation, state, and citizenship” (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000, 149–151; Derrida 2000, 8). So there is an element of not-knowing that is key in genuine hospitality, in a welcome that does not reproduce the notion of mastery. Derrida plays with the roles of the host and its perennial Other, the guest: he switches them, dilutes their solid framework, shakes the cores of their categorical constructs, and renders their ideological peripheries malleable. He contends that … the master of this house, the master in his own home, the host … can only accomplish his task as host, that is, hospitality, in becoming invited by the other into his home, in being welcomed by him whom he welcomes, in receiving the hospitality he gives (Derrida 2000, 9). Here the relationship between the inviting and the invited is deepened and the dependent dynamics between the two surface. Hospitality confines the role of the host for he “becomes almost the hostage of the one