Israeli laws thus distinguish between citizenship and nationality. Jewish people are “nationals and citizens” of Israel, whereas Palestinians can only attain the status of “citizen” of Israel. In practice, Jewish people all over the world are given “the automatic right, by virtue of being Jewish, to immigrate to Israel and acquire Israeli citizenship [but] Arab Palestinians, on the other hand, face restrictions in acquiring such citizenship”.127 Thus, under Israel’s legal regime, only “Jewish nationals and citizens of Israel” constitute the privileged group of Israeli citizens who have full access to human rights. Palestinians who meet the criteria of the 1952 Nationality Law are accorded the status of “citizens of Israel” Citizenship is only available to them and their descendants if they were present in Israel between 1948 and 1952, which effectively excluded all the refugees who were expelled during the 1948 Nakba. Palestinians could not, and cannot, become “nationals” of Israel because they are not Jewish and because “Israeli nationality” is not recognized by Israeli law.128 The status of “citizen of Israel” is a second-class citizenship status with limited protection of an individual’s human rights. Palestinians who did not meet the criteria of the 1952 Nationality Law because they were outside the country or in territory controlled by Israeli-defined ‘enemy forces’ at certain cutoff dates, are excluded from Israeli citizenship and consequently made stateless by the law.129 Today, the descendants of the 750,000 Palestinian refugees of 1948 suffer from statelessness and/or a lack ofnationality.130 The 1992 Israeli Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty states that Israeli laws should serve the protection of “human dignity and liberty, in order to establish in a Basic Law the values of the state of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state”.131 Thus, the right to dignity must be interpreted within the context of Israel as a ‘Jewish and democratic state’, bringing with it all that such an interpretation implies – namely the privileged status of Jewish citizens.132 Moreover, the recently proposed Basic Law: Israel the National State of the Jewish People (2011), aims to constitutionally enshrine the principle that the Jewish character of the state is superior to its democratic character.133 127 BADIL and COHRE, “Ruling Palestine”. 128 BADIL and COHRE, “Ruling Palestine”, 57. 129 See: Jacky Khoury, “Israel Bagins Revoking Citizenship of Four Arabs,” Haaretz, May 5, 2009, http:// www.haaretz.com/news/israel-begins-revoking-citizenship-of-four-arabs-1.275419; John Quigley, “Family Reunion and the Rights to Return to Occupied Territory.” 130 BADIL, Survey of Palestinian Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons, 2010-2012. 131 Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty. 132 BADIL, Occasional Bulletin No.26: Israel’s Discriminatory Laws. 133 Ibid. 50