CHAPTER SIX THE ANATOMY OF STATELESS CITIZENSHIP To recap, the project of stateless citizenship is not to examine the Israeli citizenship of Palestinians through an account of what is lacking, absent, missing or deficient, in terms of rights, benefits, identity and representation. That much follows under the rubric of the what of Arab citizenship which has, as mentioned, been extensively documented and addressed by critical Palestinian and Israeli social science research. Instead, the intention here is to analyze the how; namely the conceptual and political dynamics of Israeli citizenship itself, as both a theoretical and practical notion. And when we begin our analysis from the condition of Arabs with Israeli citizenship, we realize that the problem extends from the racialized structures of Zionism to the ways in which the existing relations of exclusion in classical liberal citizenship are employed, reversed and enhanced by the Israeli incorporation regime. Thus, central to my account of the purpose, dynamic and structure of Israeli citizenship will be a focus on the embedded relations of exclusion in the concept of citizenship itself. Evident from the small sampling of the existing scholarship in the previous chapter is that the deficiencies and contradictions of the citizenship offered to Israel’s non-Jewish population have been extensively documented. That the Palestinian citizens of Israel are not placed on an equal conceptual, ideological, political or even legal footing with their Jewish counterparts1 is no longer uncharted academic or political territory. Indeed, at a very rooted level, and despite their citizenship status, the Palestinian citizens of Israel remain stateless in the Jewish state. Thus far, my examination has shown that the mechanisms of control and exclusion developing out of the Zionist incorporation regime shape both the changing settler-colonial boundaries of the Israeli polity and, by extension, its hierarchical citizenship framework. The design of Israel’s incorporation regime demarcates Palestinian-Arab access to citizenship rights and 1 The use of the term compatriots would be misleading here because, as explained, the State of Israel is, by its self-definition, not theirs (it does not belong to the Arabs). Arabs and Jews in Israel do not exist as equal countrymen and countrywomen; they are not ‘with’ the ‘homeland’ and they are excluded from (or do not share in) the existential, ideological, political and legal makeup of the state. As such, it is more apt to say that, in the Zionist framework, Jewish citizens are the counterparts of the Palestinian-Arab citizenry.