from citizenship to stateless citizenship173 Peled holds that the “tension” within the Israeli political system is not merely accounted for by distinguishing Israel’s Jewish character from its democratic form of government. He contends that “it would be more useful to understand Israeli political culture as comprised not of two constitutional principles – liberalism and ethno-nationalism – but of three – republicanism, liberalism and ethnicity” (Peled 1992, 432). The liberal reading of citizenship stresses the individual, universal, autonomous and equal character of the subject, whose status and access to rights and privileges do not require an active or hands-on engagement with their citizenship and where the state exists on behalf of all of its citizens. In contrast, explains Peled, the republican conception of citizenship involves direct participation in and active engagement with citizenship in the form of a political and moral purpose, shared among all members, in reproducing, protecting and developing the common good of the society. And it is exactly this kind of civic engagement that Peled argues is denied to Arab citizens of Israel: The only solution … for people who cannot acquire full republican citizenship is to grant them a residual, truncated status, similar to the liberal notion of citizenship as a bundle of rights. Bearers of this citizenship as status do not share in attending to the common good but are secure in their possession of what we consider essential human and civil rights. Precisely this type of citizenship is possessed by Israel’s Arab citizens (Peled 1992, 434, emphasis added). But it is not full liberal citizenship that is bestowed to Palestinians in Israel. As we know, the State of Israel does not, nor does it claim to, represent all of its citizens – Arab and Jew alike. Using statements by Zionist representatives just before the state’s establishment and reviewing the political and conceptual logic of David Ben-Gurion, Peled argues that though national discrimination was not officially on the agenda, there nevertheless remained a “gap between the Arabs’ formal citizenship status and their actual treatment (in this early period) as an occupied enemy population” (Peled 1992, 432). As a result, Israeli citizenship comes in two distinct democracy’ … or ‘ethnocracy’ … or even singularist ethnocracy … all tend to dismiss the central feature of the Israeli state, namely, its settler-colonial character. …. After all, ethnocentric approaches provide softer, less politically charged concepts to describe what are basically racist policies and practices embedded in the Zionist ideology on which Israel has been – and continues to be – founded.” For this reason, Abdo pushes forward the need to adopt “more apt descriptions and characterizations of the Israeli state” so as to remind scholars of their responsibility to “dig deeper into the racist nature of their own upbringing –­ Zionism” (see 2011, 16–17, 19).