18 introduction Organization of the Book This book has a modest objective. It is neither a historical nor a legal study, though it certainly draws on other such publications, nor does it merely seek to point to the deficiencies in the rights of citizenship provided to non-Jews in Israel. In addition, this book does not historically or sociologically compare exclusionary dynamics in the Israeli citizenship regime to those of other settler-colonial societies in the West; though future scholarly undertakings of this kind could serve as a natural extension of the present research.24 Working from the above, my interest lies instead in outlining the relation of non-identification and rejection between Palestinian-Arab identity and modern political Zionism so as to examine its constituent effects on the kind of citizenship regime that emerges. Simply put, the objective of this book is to examine how the historical relation of exclusion embedded in the traditional model of citizenship is realized and transformed in Israel’s racialized citizenship regime. To this end, this book is divided into six chapters. Chapter One begins the discussion by examining the relations of inclusion and exclusion embedded in the institution of citizenship. I outline the development of citizenship and point to the kinds of relations that can be formed between the subject and political society through various citizenship regimes. Looking at a range of definitions, I explain in this chapter that the notion of citizenship was not always deemed to be politically tied to a (city-)state framework. The concept of the ‘citizen’ and the evolution of a universalizable political subject are understood to be dissolving pre-existing and exclusive social, cultural and tribal affinities. Initially occurring within the context of ancient and pre-modern cities, and later expanding into state-based forms of political organization, social collectives struggled over the use of, and access to, resources. As such, our modern understanding of social rights in the form of citizenship rights is a product of a series of conflicts and competitions between different social groups with different access to and investment in the juridicopolitical order. All in all, what surfaces from ancient, pre-modern and modern readings of citizenship is the necessary Otherizing that lies at the root of the concept and process of citizenship. Influenced by Giorgio Agamben’s seminal analysis of the state of exception (a concept explained in Chapter Six of this book), the Otherizing effects of citizenship are here 24 See footnote 9 above.