INTRODUCTION That the Israeli incorporation regime favours Jews and does not treat its inhabitants equally has been extensively outlined and supported with rich academic scholarship on the subject. Serious scholars and observers will not deny that Jewish privilege and dominance stretches over ‘Israel proper’ and the Occupied Territories, regardless of actual residency or legal origin.1 Key to the maintenance of this system of domination and exclusion is the placement of Israel’s non-Jewish inhabitants according to various legal classifications. All Palestinian-Arabs living within the Israeli incorporation regime are divided into various categories, each with differing sets of privilege and protection arranged according to a spatial logic. Expectedly, the Palestinian refugees living outside the parameters of the State of Israel are denied any share of its structures and frameworks. Next comes residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip who live under a military occupation; the latter of whom further endure a debilitating blockade, and all of whom lack formal membership with the state but are nevertheless subject to the laws and spatial arrangements of its settler-colonial regime. Then we have residents of occupied East Jerusalem who have the right of mobility in the country, but who lack formal civic membership with the state. And finally, there are those Palestinian-Arabs within ‘Israel proper’ who hold Israeli citizenship and maintain civic relations with the state along with some entrenched rights; but again, remain excluded insofar as they do not have a Jewish national identity.2 It is the Palestinian ­citizens of Israel, the segment of the divided Palestinian nation who comparatively has the most (though still limited) inclusion in the Israeli civic, social, and political regime that this book will focus on. Today, one-fifth of Israel’s citizen population is Palestinian-Arab.3 Totalling more than 1.6 million citizens and constituting around 1 Though it is beyond the scope of this book, it is important to mention that there is also extensive and multifaceted discrimination among Jews of various national and ethnic backgrounds in Israel (for more, see Shohat 1999, 5–20; Abu 2011, 111–134). 2 What this spatial arrangement may mean for the importance, implications and applicability of Occupation Law for examining the Israeli occupation regime has been nicely outlined in the online article by Darryl Li, “Occupation Law and the One-State Reality,” Jadaliyya, August 2, 2011, http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/2295/occupation-law-and -the-one-state-reality. 3 Similar to the work of other scholars, the terms “Palestinian-Arabs,” “Palestinians,” and “Arabs” will be used interchangeably in this book to refer to the citizen collective within