14 introduction as an institutional and intellectual base, Palestinian citizens began working more with academics, union leaders and political representatives in their communities to strengthen their demands for equality, genuine representation and democratic citizenship. Today, Palestinian civil society in Israel continues to be one of the most (if not the most) important tools for challenging Israel’s discriminatory policies and hierarchical citizenship regime. As we will see in Chapter Two, during periods of intense political, social and legal instability since the second Intifada, Palestinian civil society in Israel has remained a key avenue for political discussion and organizing. Taken together, the various chapters in the history of the remaining Palestinian-Arabs, and their interactions with the State of Israel, reflect an oscillation between the Palestinian, Arab and Israeli parts of their identities. They constitute the ongoing transformation of this community in Israel as a collective formed by political and ideological circumstances that are different, though not separate, from those of the broader Palestinian nation. A Word on Zionism My interest in Zionism as an ideological and political movement intensified as my examination of the situation of Palestinian-Arab citizens of Israel progressed. As Israeli historian Shabtai Teveth, also one of the few official biographers of Israel’s first Prime Minister and founding father, David Ben-Gurion, explains: Zionists called the complex issues surrounding relations between Arabs and Jews in Palestine ‘the Arab question’. [But] Ben-Gurion noted that this was an ‘imprecise definition’. He recognized that this ‘tragic question of fate arose only as a consequence of Zionism, and so was a ‘question of Zionist fulfillment in the light of Arab reality’. In other words, this was a Zionist rather than an Arab question, posed to Zionists who were perplexed about how they could fulfill their aspirations in a land inhabited by an Arab majority (Teveth 1985, vii, emphasis added). The paradoxes at the base of Arab membership in the Jewish state become increasingly apparent the more one grows to understand the intrinsic ­conceptual, ideological and political non-existence and invisibility of Palestinian-Arabs in the Zionist mindset. And so, any examination of Palestinian presence in the Israeli citizenship regime must include an account of the development of modern political Zionism. As the forthcoming chapters will show, it is the conceptual, political and ideological tenets of modern Zionism that underpin Israel’s citizenship regime today.