158 chapter five recognized final-status issues including illegal Jewish settlements, the return of refugees, recognized borders and the status of Jerusalem.16 As Cook points out, rather unlike other nation-states, Israel is not asking its Palestinian counterparts to recognize its territorial borders, sovereignty or even its democratic identity. Instead, it is strictly asking for formal recognition of its ‘Jewish’ character. Research on Palestinians in Israel: An Overview The relationship between Palestinian-Arabness and Zionism, founded on an interaction of political rejection and non-identification, has produced a range of critical scholarship. This research, from Arab, Jewish and Western sources, has sought to conceptualize the particular features, uses and dynamics of the citizenship bestowed to Palestinian-Arabs in Israel. Put together, these scholars are attempting to deconstruct the internal contradictions and paradoxes that arise, both conceptually and in practice, with the state’s provision of Israeli citizenship to Palestinian-Arabs on the one hand, and with its unabridged fusing of ‘Israeli’ and ‘Jewish’ identity and nationhood on the other. The scholarly literature largely agrees that the most important factor in delineating the contours of the relationship between Israel and Palestinian-Arab citizens is the constitutional and practical ethnic exclusivity of the state. Viewing this selfdefinition­as a significant determinant of the relationship between the State of Israel and the Palestinian-Arab community, most critical scholars agree that Israel’s institutional and structural components leave them with mere citizenship status, or citizenship in the law. As a result, most scholars point to a paradox that emerges with the simplistic designation of this community as citizens with a citizenship. They argue that the self-identification of the state as an essentially Jewish state, with a Jewish identity, and a demographic caveat requiring a Jewish majority within the territories of Israeli control complicates, but does not cut, political, national, identity and membership ties between the state and the Palestinian-Arab citizenry. From this, many continue to posit that, in the case of the Palestinian-Arabs in Israel, the constitutional self-definition of the state as Jewish, and its repeated need for the adoption of structural and institutional policies of dominance and control, essentially repudiates the citizenship of this community. As such, to say that Arabs in Israel 16 Cook, “Israel’s Jewishness.”