the israeli incorporation regime51 that directly discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel, Adalah: The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel (hereafter ‘Adalah’) writes: The current constitutional situation has allowed the State of Israel to enact laws that are either discriminatory on their face, in that they relate only to the rights of Jews in Israel or abridge the rights of Arab citizens of the state, or use neutral language and general terminology but have a discriminatory effect on Arab citizens.9 Indeed, Arab citizens of Israel were a major topic in the 2009 election campaigns that brought in the previous eighteenth Knesset and saw one of the most right-wing government coalitions in the history of Israel come to power. That administration has since been topped by the recently elected nineteenth Knesset featuring an even more right-wing government coalition that includes religious and ultra-orthodox Jews, along with a disproportionately high representation of Jewish settlers of the West Bank in the parliament.10 The rise of right-wing representation in the Knesset has, since 2009, introduced numerous discriminatory laws that target Palestinian-Arab citizens of Israel, along with Palestinians in Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and the Palestinian refugee population. These new refugee land laws and bills – which continue to surface on a regular basis11 – are too many to mention here, but there are a few that deserve special attention: 9 Adalah: The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, The Inequality Report: The Palestinian-Arab Minority in Israel, March 2011: 14, http://www.adalah.org/upfiles/2011/ Adalah_The_Inequality_Report_March_2011.pdf. 10 Though beyond the scope of this book, it is worthwhile to mention that racist policies targeting the Palestinian citizenry are not only limited to Israeli right-wing, ultra-­nationalist or orthodox political parties. For instance, widely conceived as a centrist political party, Yesh Atid (The Future Party) is nevertheless in agreement with the parties on the extreme right on most of the major political and social issues in the country. This includes, among others, support for demographic engineering to maintain a Jewish majority, legally sanctioned Jewish domination in all spheres of society, vehement opposition to the proposed paradigm of Israel as a ‘state for all its people’, as well as support for illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank. In fact, during the 2013 Knesset elections, Yesh Atid even launched its election campaign in the illegal Ariel settlement, the fourth largest of its kind in the West Bank. For more, see Neve Gordon, “Yair Lapid: The southern man and his cosmopolitan ghetto,” Al Jazeera English, February 12, 2013, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/ opinion/2013/02/2013211112856254494.html. 11 An updated list of the existing legislation which specifically targets Palestinian citizens and affects the community disproportionately is provided by Adalah: The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, New Discriminatory Laws and Bills in Israel, June 2012 (the source of much of what follows), http://www.adalah.org/Public/files/English/ International_Advocacy/New_Discriminatory_Laws_June_2012_Update.pdf.