introduction17 region of alien autocratic regimes, a defender against irrationality and irreverence of life surrounded by infidels, a tower of strength and stability fuelling American industry, readers of the same book(s) and lovers of the same culture. …. In this scheme of things, it seems, Israel must be European, presumably white. But in keeping with contemporary racial americanization, with born again racism, Israel’s whiteness is transparent, virtual, invisible. Israelis occupy the structural positions of whiteness in the racial hierarchy of the Middle East. Arabs, accordingly – most notably in the person of Palestinians – are the antithesis…(Goldberg 2008, 32–33, emphasis added). Within this arrangement, what makes the process of palestinianization explicitly racial – and, by extension, what reveals the racial configuration of Zionism – is, argues Goldberg, the reality that Palestinians are treated not as if a racial group, not simply in the manner of a racial group, but as a despised and demonic racial group. …. Palestinians in particular, and Arabs more generally, are treated directly as a subjugated race. Beaten in the name of devaluating stereotypes, concentrated in camps in the name of generalized security, displaced in the name of biblical right …, killed in the name of retributive justice, Palestinians are ordered in the name of race rendered see-through, of a category in denial, of a conception unmarked because of a history cutting too close to the bone (Goldberg 2008, 42–43). As such, although my book does not itself undertake a critical analysis of race, it is premised on the above understanding of modern political Zionism (hereafter ‘Zionism’) as a racial ideological construct for the State of Israel. However, to be clear, this approach is not meant to reproduce race-based readings of social and political conflicts, but rather, it aims to use the lens of critical race theory to highlight the racialized structures of exclusion that delimit Zionism – and by extension, Israeli citizenship. Though, when looking inward, Zionism is often more likely to mobilize the ethno-national and religious identity of the Jewish people, its treatment and placement of non-Jews outside of this arrangement functions more like a racialized structure of exclusion. Hence, my reference to the racialized configuration of the Israeli incorporation regime throughout this book seeks to point to this central feature of Zionism. With this, I also hope to complicate politically softer and less divisive concepts such as ‘discriminatory’ and ‘differential’ to explain what are basically racist conceptual and practical frameworks of Zionist ideology. As the founding ideology of Israel (and a continuous source of inspiration for its contemporary legal, political and social realizations), Zionism is read and treated here as an ideological construct that seeks an exclusivist identity for its Jewish constituents through the promotion of suspicion and marginalization of its racialized Palestinian-Arab Other.