from citizenship to stateless citizenship181 outside of the realities on the ground to which all of the above scholars point. To call it without citizenship is to blur the reality that the Arab lack of a genuine interaction with the Jewish state is a condition brought about precisely via their bestowal of citizenship. It is the very bestowal of citizenship, the actual inclusion within the Israeli incorporation regime, that produces the internal contradictions and paradoxes embedded in any Arab membership in the Israeli political and social system. Had the Arabs in Israel – the forgotten Palestinians of 1948 who remained in their homeland upon which the Jewish state was subsequently formed – not been granted Israeli citizenship, the discussion about and approach to the question of Israeli citizenship would have been very different. In such a situation, the relation of the Palestinian-Arab with the Israeli citizen regime would perhaps have been characterized as a strict exclusion, as something outside and forever peripheral to the Israel regime. But as we already know, this is not the case. However truncated, the forgotten Palestinians have been granted Israeli citizenship and are, at least formally, part of the Israeli civic body. This is where the concept of stateless citizenship becomes a useful conceptual and analytical framework for understanding the various dynamics and levels of (in-)existence and (non-)representation to which Palestinians in Israel are subjected. Though the above scholars disagree on the particular kind of incorporation regime Israel has, differ in their analysis of mechanisms of power and control, and have contrasting understandings of the true aims of the Zionist project, they nevertheless agree that the movement of interaction between the State of Israel and its Palestinian citizenry is one of exclusion and non-reciprocation. This interaction results in a situation where the empowerment, expansion and common good of the Zionist regime not only fails to encompass Palestinian-Arab subjects, but is inevitably structurally and conceptually achieved to their disadvantage. However, what is left out of the discussion of how Palestinians are excluded from the Israeli political regime is that this movement or transition into a relation of exclusion is conducted through and generated from citizenship. Again, it is the provision of citizenship itself, the actual inclusion within the exclusionary Israeli citizenship regime that creates the inherent contradictions and paradoxes of Arab citizenship in a Jewish state. In other words, it is through the granting of Israeli citizenship that Arabs are deemed stateless; it is through inclusion within the Israeli citizenship regime that they are excluded. As such, it is the associated conceptual and political dynamics of this provision of citizenship that the paradigm of stateless citizenship seeks to emphasize and analytically deconstruct.