No citizenship without loyalty In recent years, Israel’s concerns about challenges to the state’s Jewishness are intensifying, and these concerns have become manifested in new discriminatory laws which enact exclusive nationality, as well as uninhibited governmental and public debate about the benefits of forcibly transferring “Arabs”. In 2010, influential Israeli ministers spoke openly about transferring the Palestinians, rescinding their citizenship and ethnically gentrifying their towns as the strategy for the Jewish state in the next decade.143 The Yisrael Beiteinu party, led by Minister of Foreign Affairs Avigdor Lieberman, has lobbied for loyalty laws to restrict the Palestinian minority’s political activities. In the past two general elections, Lieberman campaigned under the slogan “No citizenship without loyalty”.144 This mantra is becoming more dominant in the Israeli governmental mentality, visible in the various proposed bills for legislative change. For example, a proposed amendment to the Nationality Law requires all persons seeking to naturalize, as well as Israeli citizens applying for their first identity cards (obligatory at the age of 16), to declare an oath of loyalty to Israel as a “Jewish, Zionist, and democratic state.” This bill seeks to further marginalize the Palestinian citizens’ status by forcing them to affirm and accept their institutionalized legal and political inferiority by contractually delegitimizing their cultural and political identity.145 Conclusion As a result of a sustained policy of discrimination and exclusion – in place since the creation of the State of Israel – citizenship status does not protect Palestinians from undermined rights in their homeland. Since 1948, Israel created and maintained a complex matrix of discriminatory land, planning and military laws and regulations which aim to seize control of Palestinian land and legalize displacement of hundreds of thousands of its inhabitants. The Israeli legal system’s targeting of Palestinians through the land is paired, necessarily, with a citizenship, residency and population registration system that is manifestly discriminatory. Palestinian citizens of Israel hold constitutional rights derived from Israel’s Basic Laws and are not protected by international humanitarian law, 143 Ilan Pappe, The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of Palestinians in Israel (Yale University Press: New Haven, 2011), 7. 144 Jonathan Cook, “Court Nixes Push for Israeli Nationality,” Aljazeera, October 18, 2013, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2013/10/court-nixes-push-israeli-nationali ty-20131017115755321289.html. 145 BADIL, Occasional Bulletin No.26: Israel’s Discriminatory Laws. 54