israeli hostipitality115 hostage of the one invited, of the guest” (Derrida 2000, 9). The host can only remain a host so long as she/he is recognized as such by the guest. And, upon engaging with the conditional hospitality, or ‘hostipitality’, of the host, the guest simultaneously acknowledges her/him as master of the household, the city, the state, and – as in the case of Palestinian-Arabs and Jews – the land. The hold of the host on this space is intimately connected to and directly fuelled by the acknowledgment and participation of the guest in maintaining their status as host. So, there would be no host if there were no guest, and vice versa. The destructive capacity of the welcome of the sovereign of the household carries with it a dynamic that is similarly present in other minority categorizations. The political-historical understanding of a population in the consciousness of both the ruling establishment and the community itself is shaped through engagement with the act of hospitality. The guest adopts a descriptive self-categorization whose parameters is laid out by the host and is forced to struggle with socio-cultural inconsistencies and conceptual ambiguities as side effects. Palestinian-Arab recognition of, and engagement with, the hospitality of the Jewish state implies an acknowledgment that this population “remains the patron” and has “a right, a duty, [and] an obligation” to receive, lodge, or give asylum to the Palestinian-Arab community (Derrida 2000, 4). The extension of the welcome of the Jewish state is therefore contingent on the preservation and reproduction of its authority. As Derrida explains: It does not seem to me that I am able to open up or offer hospitality, however generous, even in order to be generous, without reaffirming: this is mine, I am at home, you are welcome in my home, without any implication of ‘make yourself at home’ but on condition that you observe the rules of hospitality by respecting the being-at-home of my house, the being-itself of what I am (Derrida 2000, 14, emphasis added). This dynamic also holds for the Jewish-Israeli assumption of guest-status on the land. Again, in both cases recognition of and compliance with the hospitality of the Other is a renunciation of their understanding of their own status as host, or their indigeneity. This results in a notable oscillation from a hospitable to a hostile interaction between the host and the guest. Israeli ‘Hostipitality’ Liberal-Zionist arguments rooted in the contention that Jews are the masters of the land, categorize Palestinian-Arabs as minorities or, at best,