from citizenship to stateless citizenship159 have citizenship in any meaningful way is not only misleading, but in many ways even inaccurate. In one of the first impressive publications by an Arab citizen of Israel, Sabri Jiryis’s The Arabs in Israel (1976) provides important material on the subordinate socio-economic, educational and political development of Palestinians in Israel from the British Mandate to Zionist rule until the 1970s.17 Thoroughly documenting the legal and political foundations of the Israeli Military Government (1948–1969) as borne from security laws during the British Mandate, Jiryis’s book points to a systematic policy of neglect and targeted formal and informal mechanisms of disenfranchisement that arose after the establishment of the State of Israel. The book also rather meticulously examines the colonial vocabulary of the Zionist movement, and points to the ethnically exclusivist practices and policies that accompanied the “redemption” and “liberation” of the land (Jiryis 1976, Chs. 4 and 5). Indeed, the expropriation of Arab land through an exclusivist security discourse and oppressive “strong-arm” policy figures prominently in Jiryis’s detailed account of the Arab experience inside Israel, pointing to commonalities in the Palestinian encounter with the Zionist colonial project. Perhaps most important for our purposes is that Jiryis concludes the book with a bold reading of Arab citizenship in Israel that remains remarkably relevant to contemporary discussions. He states: A basic fact that emerges from a study of the history of the last quarter of a century is that the Arab in Israel has been, and continues to be, a ‘different’ citizen, ‘non-Jewish’, belonging to the goyim and excluded from the rights enjoyed by Jewish citizens. This distinction, which affects every aspect of Arab life, has been officially implemented from the establishment of Israel to the present. … [And where] necessary, additional provisions have been drafted to protect the Zionist character of the state (Jiryis 1976, 235). Though not theoretically based, in connecting well documented statements and facts about the aims of the Zionist colonial project that place it alongside earlier European colonial schemes, Jiryis’s book served as a tool for other critical social scientists to examine theoretically the internal colonization of the Arabs in Israel. Published in 1979, and referring to the important contributions made by Jiryis, one of the first notable theoretical accounts of Arabs in Israel from Western academia was The Palestinians in Israel: A Study of Internal Colonialism by sociologist Elia Zureik. Written in an intellectual and 17 In his foreword to Jiryis (1976), Noam Chomsky also pointed to the significance of the publication for the study of Arabs in Israel.