168 chapter five and sources used in the Political Monitoring Reports, reveals the broadbased readership for which they are intended. Formulating Palestinian Citizenship Over the years, critical social science research on Palestinians in Israel, some of which has been outlined above, has produced various formulations of Arab citizenship, its dynamics and relations of exception. The formulations of Arab citizenship I will examine below work from the premise that, in tune with the mentioned Israeli court decisions and legislations passed by the Knesset, the state’s professed democratic principles are merely auxiliary to its Jewish self-definition. The conceptualizations constructed in the existing scholarship seek to outline how, for the Palestinian citizens of Israel, the Zionist hegemonic project of Judaization defines and delimits Israeliness as a Jewish-Zionist state of being. A state of being which, by definition and political practice, rejects constituent elements of Palestinian-Arab existence. As formulated by Dr. Azmi Bishara: Israeliness does not distinguish the Arabs in Israel from the rest of the Arabs in the same way that it distinguishes the Jews in Israel from the rest of the Jews, because from the very onset, Israeliness has been Jewish-Zionist and rejected the Arab and even perceives itself as such. In order to be ArabIsraeli, the Israeli-Arab has to be part of his rejection.26 Paradoxically, the constituents included in the Zionist national project are not limited to those within or even legally tied to Israel itself; whereas those who are actually within the state and legally bound to it are not actually viewed as its constituents. Given this reality, Bishara considers the citizenship given to Arabs in Israel to be incidental citizenship and the citizenship given to Jews to be substantive or essential citizenship.27 This is because Israeli citizenship was not designed for Arabs: it did not intend to include Arabs, and only granted citizenship status to certain members of this community who happened, by chance or circumstance, to remain on their land during and after the Nakba. Recounting Israel’s self-definition, Bishara states: 26 Quoted in Jabareen (2002, 202). 27 Azmi Bishara, “Israel, Palestine, and the Question of Citizenship,” Lecture at St. Anthony’s College, University of Oxford, Oxford, February 6, 2004) Revised PDF epublication. http://www.sant.ox.ac.uk/events/lecturesarchive/Bishara.pdf.