the anatomy of stateless citizenship185 neighbouring Arab states or abroad. For instance, during the ethnic clashes in the port-city of Acre in 2008, the Israeli security establishment had border guards pulled from the Ramallah area of the West Bank and sent to Acre.3 While the same specialized border units tasked with dealing with non-citizen Palestinians in the West Bank were dispatched to deal with Israel’s Palestinian citizenry, the official discourse from local political figures nevertheless remained one of coexistence and cohabitation among Jewish and Arab citizens.4 We certainly do not see the same attempts by Israeli political and public figures to calm military and civilian violence by calling for coexistence with the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. The multifaceted and mutually amplifying mechanisms of control, racial exclusion, systematic marginalization, and underdevelopment with which Palestinians citizens are faced are therefore discernible from the measures against non-citizen Palestinians. What this indicates, and what is outlined in this chapter, is that while all Arab Palestinians are excluded from the Israeli incorporation regime, the logic of the relation of exclusion faced by Arab citizens differs from that of non-citizen Palestinians. Conversely, the statelessness of Arab citizens is characterized by the fact that though they possess a recognized and legally supported citizenship status in Israel, but are not represented by it at an ideological, existential, institutional and political level. The State of Israel is, by its self-definition, not theirs. This makes them stateless in that they have formal membership but, as nonJews, are not a part of the self-definition of, nor are they embodied by, the State of Israel. Taken together, such differences highlight the Zionist regime’s particular use of citizenship in transferring the Palestinian-Arab population within Israel into a condition of statelessness. And this is where the concept of stateless citizenship becomes a particularly useful paradigm: it is able to analytically frame and illuminate the mechanisms through which this statelessness is achieved (how it is produced) and maintained (how it is preserved). Abdo reminds us that the contradictions and contestations that serve as a defining feature of every nation-state are exaggerated and magnified in a settler-colonial state such as Israel. A hierarchical citizenship framework emerges as a result of this legally enshrined regime of racialized domination, and can be understood 3 Ma’an News Agency, “Israeli border guards pulled.” 4 The fact that these were army units tasked with securing Israel’s borders illustrates how Arabs in Israel are also imagined as being located at the conceptual borders of the state, perpetually limited to its peripheries.