CHAPTER FIVE FROM CITIZENSHIP TO STATELESS CITIZENSHIP When we say ‘Jewish independence’ or ‘Jewish state’ we mean Jewish country, Jewish soil, we mean Jewish labour, we mean Jewish economy, Jewish agriculture, Jewish industry, Jewish sea. We mean Jewish safety, security, independence, complete independence, as for any other free people. David Ben-Gurion, 1947, before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine (quoted in Lustick 1980, 88). Negotiations and bargaining over citizenship, or patterns of inclusiveness and exclusiveness, are, as Israeli political scientist Baruch Kimmerling says, “not only related to who gets what but also to who is what and who can decide who is what” (Kimmerling 2002b, 181–195). The complex dynamic of citizenship and its ability to contribute to the formation of socio-civic and political identities resurfaced in an important debate covered by Kimmerling. This debate took place in 1985 between writer and Arab citizen of Israel, Anton Shammas, and Jewish-Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua, and was later revisited by the two in 1992. Addressing the question of the Jewishness of Israeli identity and citizenship, and in a response to Shammas’s accusation against Israel that it marginalized the Arab population’s collective identity, along with its social, cultural and political spheres, Yehoshua asserted: I am suggesting to you … that if you want to exercise your full identity, if you want to live in a state that has a Palestinian character with a genuine Palestinian culture, arise, take your chattels, and move yourself one hundred yards eastward, into the independent Palestinian state, that will be established alongside Israel (Kimmerling 2002b, 181–182). To this, Shammas responds “I have no intention to leave my motherland and my father’s home, for the country Yehoshua will show me,” and goes on to describe his political (and indeed, personal) project: What I’m trying to do – mulishly, it seems – is to un-Jew the Hebrew language, to make it more Israeli and less Jewish, thus bringing it back to its Semitic origins, to its place. This is a parallel to what I think the state should be (Kimmerling 2002b, 182).