from citizenship to stateless citizenship177 reading of citizenship, its features and dynamics that is projected by the above formulations of Arab citizenship in Israel. Each of these scholarly accounts depict the citizenship provided to Arabs in Israel as lacking a symbolic feature, deficient in a range of provisions, or bereft of any genuine substance. In other words, there is something missing in the membership provided to Arab citizens so that characterizations of it as a complete or real citizenship cannot be sustained. The focus, therefore, is often on the rights, freedoms, resources, benefits, discourses and symbolisms that are lacking, absent, exclusionary or made inaccessible. The citizens without citizenship paradigm is most impressively and extensively applied by Nadim Rouhana, and attorney and Palestinian citizen of Israel, Nimer Sultany. Their reading of Arabs as citizens without citizenship distinguishes between the dynamics of de jure and de facto membership in Israeli society and links the precarious situation of Arab citizenship to the rise of a ‘new Zionist hegemony’. For the authors, what is specifically ‘new’ about this discourse is that this hegemony involves an intensification of rooted ideological and political components of Zionism. This includes a reasserted emphasis on Israel’s exclusively Jewish foundations, an aggressive rejection of any contradiction between its simultaneous Jewish and democratic character, and an intensified security discourse, among other elements.30 Here formerly right-wing extremist politics have entered into more mainstream Israeli political spaces which have thereby adopted more antagonistic readings on the above topics. This new Zionist consensus, prevalent across the Israeli political spectrum, effectively reshapes the dynamics of Israeli citizenship so that any “meaningful citizenship” is denied to Arab citizens through government policies, public discourse, official symbols and legislation. Rouhana and Sultany explain that … the goals of the policy shift are clear: to bolster the Jewish character of the state while reducing the status of the Arab citizens to something less than citizenship, but in ways not dramatic or abrupt enough to disrupt Israel’s democratic image abroad or its own comforting illusions about itself as ‘Jewish and democratic’ (Rouhana and Sultany, 2003, 19–20, emphasis added). In other words, the intensification of the rooted ideological and political elements of Zionism – even in its most liberal form – shrinks and repeatedly reconfigures the margins and parameters of Palestinian existence, thereby rendering Israeli citizenship “a conditional privilege to be 30 See Rouhana and Sultany (2003) and also Sultany (2003).