178 chapter five conferred by the state” (Rouhana and Sultany, 2003, 14). The development of this ‘new Zionist hegemony’ has therefore formed an understanding shared by both Palestinian-Arab and Jewish-Israelis that the citizenship of Arab citizens is “not real,” that it is a “citizenship emptied of real substance;” or alternatively “that the Arabs are in effect citizens without citizenship” (Rouhana and Sultany, 2003, 10, 19). The citizens without citizenship paradigm has also been applied to feminist, gendered and critical race theorizing of Israeli citizenship to illuminate the particular levels of marginalization and exclusion affecting Palestinian women citizens of Israel. A recent scholarly contribution with such a reading is Women in Israel: Race, Gender and Citizenship (2011) by Arab feminist Nahla Abdo. As mentioned in Chapter Two, Palestinian women face discrimination on three distinct yet connected levels: as members of an underdeveloped minority, as women living in Israel, and as women in Palestinian society. Each of these dynamics works to compromise the social, political and economic welfare of Palestinian women, and in turn, reflects the kind of citizenship made available to this community. From an incisive anti-racist and anti-colonial feminist perspective, Abdo analyzes the disproportionate effects of Zionist mechanisms of economic disenfranchisement, legal and constitutional exclusion, geographic confinement, social inferiority, and political and civic under-representation on marginalized women citizens of Israel. From this, she develops a theory of gendered exclusion that is applicable to the situation of Palestinian women at large. Abdo writes: What actually differentiates the status of Palestinian women in Israel from their counterparts in other parts of the Middle East is the ambiguous relationship they have with the type of state imposed on them as their own. Palestinian women citizens find themselves in a unique position where the self-defined Jewish state became the only force which accorded them partial and inferior citizenship status while simultaneously removing them from the nation-state (Abdo 2011, 39). Again, and key to the citizens without citizenship paradigm, the notion that there is something lacking in the kind of citizenship offered to Palestinian women in Israel resurfaces. Abdo looks closely at the structural, institutional and operational dynamics of the state as part of a settler-colonial regime that grants partial and inferior citizenship to marginalized women both in the Palestinian community and within the Jewish, especially the Mizrahi, community. Abdo points out that [t]he hierarchical state of citizenship that is expressed in the differential distribution of rights allocates more power, access and resources to Ashkenazi