from citizenship to stateless citizenship179 men and women, enabling them to control and monopolize epistemological production, whereas the marginalized Other such as Palestinians and Mizrahi Jews tend to be relegated to an inferior position with much less access to power and resources, negatively affecting their production of knowledge and human capital development (Abdo 2011, 8–9). Perhaps most important for our purposes here is that Abdo focuses her examination of the processes of exclusion, racialization and exploitation that simultaneously disenfranchise women in Israel through a critical feminist reading of citizenship. The relations of exclusion that produce and reproduce the inferior status and development of women in Israel, mainly Palestinian and Mizrahi Jewish, but to some extent also Ashkenazi Jewish women, are made possible and reinforced by the structure of Israeli citizenship. As such, an examination of the gendered and racialized boundaries of citizenship in Israel is, for Abdo, part and parcel of any genuine challenge to Israel’s state system and its policies and practices of exclusion. Stateless Citizenship Of course, we have not exhaustively examined all of the kinds of social science research on the Palestinians in Israel, nor have we covered all of the formulations of Palestinian citizenship put forward by scholars and theorists. Yet, from the above small sampling of the scholarship on Arab citizens, and specifically on the dynamics of their citizenship, we already have a range of impressive analytical and conceptual paradigms at hand that seek to outline the practical and theoretical effects of the Zionist fusing of ‘Jewish’ and ‘Israeli’ identity on Arab citizenship. As shown above, the academic literature has largely focused on the question of what Palestinian citizenship entails: What are the levels and sublevels of citizenship in Israel? What kinds of rights and privileges are provided to Arabs by virtue of their citizenship? What is the relationship between Arab citizenship and the project of Judaization? Between Israeli citizenship and Jewish ethno-nationalism? Between a systematically stratified citizenship and Arab political, cultural, economic and social (under) development? By and large, the academic literature has tried to make analytical sense of what has led – through a multifaceted range of exclusionary legal, social and political developments since Israel’s founding – to a deepening internal and disparate disconnect between de jure and de facto citizenship for the Arabs in Israel. In doing so, it has described the Israeli citizenship of its Palestinian population as a one-way citizenship,­ hegemonic citizenship, illusory citizenship, shrinking citizenship, ghettoized

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