4 introduction The institution of citizenship often represents the intersection of identity and the law, and is the locus of constitutionally based articulations of membership in the state. It is understood as a legal status providing privileges of social membership in a political community and, in the process, producing dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. Broadly conceived as a mechanism of civic incorporation within a political community, citizenship is often a contested space for individual and collective group rights and decision-making. Comprised of different readings of membership and its accompanying rights, the kind of citizenship provided to a collective thus reflects the various group relations that exist within that state. As such, the notion of citizenship is one of the most valuable prisms through which one can analyze conceptions of statehood. Indeed, diverse struggles among individuals and groups shape the content, structures and boundaries of citizenship, which in turn form a definition of the political community and the dynamics of political life. Different types and degrees of rights granted to a citizen population often reflect how states use citizenship to incorporate social groups into their structures while simultaneously (re)drawing or (re)forming social categories. And, as a result of state practices of granting differential citizen-access to rights and responsibilities, various patterns of citizenship are (re)shaped, (re)created and reinforced. Such social and political struggles over the content, structures and boundaries of citizenship are key to contemporary Israeli political life. In the case of Israel, its citizenship regime is shaped by a Zionist ideology that nurtures sophisticated policies of exclusion with its respective systems of control. These policies of exclusion work in tandem with limited inclusion in all areas of social life. In Israel, the Jewish state is not only a source of identity but it is also the guarantor of rights.8 This is because Jewish identity in Israel provides an entirely new and much broader scope of rights irrespective of formal citizenship. Put differently, Jewish identity is automatically merged with Israeli citizenship. Understandably, such a conception of social membership impacts and (re)shapes the boundaries of participation, representation and inclusion for its Arab and other nonJewish citizens. Indeed, access to the home, the city, the state and the land itself in the State of Israel in the form of civic identification, claims, rights and membership, is deliberately designed to exclude the non-Jewish community. 8 This point was elaborated upon in Kimmerling (1999, 339–363). For a more detailed account of how the Zionist incorporation regime fuses Jewish and Israeli identity, see Chapter Five.