from citizenship to stateless citizenship175 And adjustments in the particular incorporation regime of a nation-state usually reflect changes in inter-group attitudes, interactions and relations of power – all of which affect the dominant reading(s) of citizenship. Similar to Peled’s argument in 1992, the authors again reassert that, as a constitutionally ethnic state, the practice of Israeli citizenship is constituted by liberal, republican, and ethno-national elements superimposed on each other. Together, these discourses of citizenship function to legally, socially, and politically limit Palestinian-Arab access to citizenship as non-Jewish citizens – each expanding and retracting in stages thereby resulting in waves of differential allotment of obligations, privileges and domination. The hierarchical citizenship framework of today’s Israel is rooted in this interaction (and, as the authors would contend, even cooperation) between the discourses, explain Shafir and Peled: First, the liberal discourse of citizenship functioned to separate the citizen Jews and Palestinians from non-citizen Palestinians in the occupied territories and abroad, whether these Palestinians were conceived of as refugees or as stateless, non-citizen subjects of Israel’s military occupation. Then the ethno-nationalist discourse of inclusion and exclusion was invoked (often under the guise of the republican discourse), in order to discriminate between Jewish and Palestinian citizens within the area of the sovereign State of Israel. Lastly, the republican discourse was used to legitimate the different positions occupied by the major Jewish groupings: Ashkenazim versus Mizrachim, men versus women, secular versus religiously orthodox (Shafir and Peled 2002, 22). We should note that the inclusion of Soysal’s analytical schema is particularly useful here. Its various parameters allow the authors to consider Israel’s “multiple and hierarchical citizenship” framework from social, political, economic, cultural and institutional lenses to show how such fragmented citizenship legitimates (and is legitimated by) its “complex incorporation regime.” However, the sophisticated analysis of Shafir and Peled is made problematic in their deficient reading of the aims and objectives of the political Zionist project, and its claims to liberal principles. Despite stating that citizenship ought to be understood as the ‘entire mechanism or regime of incorporation of subjects’, the authors seem to neglect the existential and epistemological exclusions embedded in even the liberal-Zionist framework of the state and its social membership. Indeed, this is a tendency that also surfaces in their argument that Israel’s citizenship regime is genuinely composed of the varying – and one can even say conflicting – discourses of democratic liberalism, Jewish ethnonationalism, and civic republicanism.