22
introduction
citizens of Israel remain stateless in the Jewish state. The design of Israel’s
incorporation regime demarcates Palestinian-Arab access to citizenship
rights and representation while its character repudiates their status within
the state as citizens of that state, rendering this community stateless
citizens.
In Chapter Six, the final section of this book, I examine the anatomy of
the concept of stateless citizenship. I begin by clarifying that the anomaly
of Israeli citizenship is not rooted in its non-inclusive underpinnings.
Indeed, the citizenship regimes of other states are also non-inclusive insofar as they are based on a necessary Otherizing. Instead, what sets the
Israeli citizenship regime (along with the particular peripheral placement
of Palestinian-Arabs within it) apart is the specific mechanisms of Israeli
citizenship and the exclusionary dynamics of its internal relations. In
other words, the movement or transition into a relation of exclusion in the
Israeli incorporation regime is conducted through, done by and generated
from the bestowal of citizenship itself. In the greater part of this chapter I
explain that the conceptual, political, ideological and even legal implications of stateless citizenship can be understood through an examination
of three separate yet related ambiguities and dynamics that emerge from
this form of citizenship. The stateless citizenship of the Arabs in Israel
generates an exclusive inclusion whereby the bodies of this community
become the borders of the state, is a condition of and conditional to
Israel’s stable and perpetual state of emergency, and forms a situation
where the Palestinian-Arab population coexist as citizens without actually
existing. These three-pronged paradoxical elements of an exclusive inclusion, a stable and perpetual state of emergency, and coexistence without
existence are here delineated. With this, the concept of stateless citizenship illuminates the specific mechanisms that are particular to Israeli citizenship. In other words, it centres our analytical gaze on the extraordinary
circumstance that it is actually through the inclusion within a citizenship
regime that Arabs in Israel are deemed stateless.
Select target paragraph3
Connect to a paragraph
Connect to an entity
Disable highlights
Add to table of contents