from citizenship to stateless citizenship149 At first glance, nothing is wrong or contradictory in this definition. After all, it sounds precisely like ‘French and democratic’ or ‘German and democratic’. After all, a Jew who was entitled to French or German citizenship, but needed to keep his or her ethnic or religious identity became a ‘French-Jew’ or ‘Jewish-French’, etc. …. Nevertheless, taking into account that Israel is a ‘Jewish state’, can we even consider a fusion of ‘Jewish-Christian’, or ‘JewishMuslim’, or ‘Jewish-Buddhist’? These ‘impossible combinations’ are almost inconceivable to the ‘Jewish-Israeli’ ear – and by the way why not a ‘JewishJew’? …. It is not accidental that the inscription on the rubric of my official ID card is ‘nationality (leom): Jewish’ and not ‘citizenship: Jewish’ or even ‘Israeli’. This is simply because neither Jewish nationalism in its Zionist incarnation nor the Israeli state were able to invent or construct a purely secular or a civil national identity (Kimmerling 2002b, 187–188). Echoing the notion that Israel has been thoroughly unable to form a more liberal and identity-indifferent civic entity Shammas states: My nationality, according to the Israeli Ministry of the Interior, is ‘Arab’; and my Israeli passport doesn’t specify my nationality at all. Instead, it states on the front page that I am an Israeli citizen …. If I wrote ‘Arab’ under Nationalité in the French form, I would be telling the truth according to the state that had issued my identity card and my passport, but then it might complicate things with the French authorities. On the other hand, writing ‘Israeli’ under Nationalite is worse still, because in that case I would be telling a lie; my passport doesn’t say that at all, and neither does my ID (Kimmerling 2002b, 193). Here he continues to explain that the problem may be internal to the language of ethno-national identity itself: I do not know many people in the Middle East who can differentiate between ‘citizenship’, ‘nation’ (leom), ‘nationalism’ (leumit), ‘nationalism’ (lemanut), people (Am) and nation (umah). In Arabic as in Hebrew, there is no equivalent for the English word ‘nationality’ (Kimmerling 2002b, 193). To Shammas, even at the level of nomenclature, in a Jewish state there is no possibility for an Israeli nationality. Israel is a Jewish state, and the Jewish state becomes a state of the Jewish people; citizenship in a Jewish state becomes Jewish citizenship; and nationalism in a Jewish state becomes Jewish nationalism. Indeed, this was affirmed in a 2002 report by Miloon Kothari, the Special Rapporteur on adequate housing as a component of the right to an adequate standard of living. Kothari explained that: Nationality status in Israel is not linked to origin from, or residence in a territory, as is the norm in international law. Rather, the basic theocratic character of the Israeli legal system establishes ethnic criteria as the grounds for the enjoyment of full rights. The Israeli Citizenship Law (ezrahut), officially