170 chapter five according to the ethos of the state (and the Law of Return), every Jew can become a citizen at any point in time. All of this renders the difference between the actual and potential (Jewish) citizen marginal and blurs the concept of borders (Zreik 2008, 140). The blurring of the distinction between the actual and potential citizen, and by association the actual and potential member of Israeli society, points directly to the Zionist project of Judaization that delineates and restricts Arab citizenship. In his examination of the structural constraints on any meaningful Israeli citizenship for the Arab community, Oren Yiftachel also points to Israel’s ethnocratic structure to account for the inability of Palestinian citizens to convert their de facto citizenship, their formal inclusion as Israeli citizens, into a substantive and equal inclusion. In a 2002 article, Yiftachel points to the “shrinking space of citizenship,” linking it to legally and politically entrenched ethnic separatism in Israel. He writes: Like most ethnocratic states, whose main project is the ethnicization of contested lands, institutions and resources, Israel is now facing an increasing challenge from an alienated and frustrated Arab public, fuelled by the illusions of ‘democracy’ and ‘equal citizenship’. …. Indeed, given the ongoing occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and the strengthening of Jewish settlement in these regions, the actual existence of an Israeli state (and hence citizenship) can be viewed as an illusion. Israel has ruptured, by its own actions, the geography of statehood, and maintained a caste-like system of ethnic-religious-class stratification. Without an inclusive geography and universal citizenship, Israel has created a colonial setting, held through violent control and a softening illusion of a nation-state and democratic citizenship (Yiftachel 2002, 44, emphasis added). For Yiftachel, democratic citizenship for Arabs is an illusion that reproduces (and is reproduced through) intensifying policies of oppression. On the one hand, it is generated from the wavering, undetermined and ambiguous parameters of the state itself, its geography, borders, jurisdiction, inhabitants, and represented citizenry. On the other hand, this chimera of democratic citizenship simultaneously provides internal and international legitimacy to expansionist and exclusionary Zionist policies and practices, thereby maintaining a complex system of unequal citizenship. In a more recent article, published in 2009, Yiftachel continues to point to ways in which the increasing oppression and exclusion of Palestinians, with or without Israeli citizenship, contributes to the political instability of the state and, by extension, its citizenship regime. The de-Arabization policies of the Zionist hegemonic project, he explains, outweigh Israel’s official allegiance to democratic principles and determine the aims,