The legal and political mechanisms of systematic exclusion goes hand in hand with the public rhetoric of Israeli official and their stated desire to further exclude Palestinian citizens of Israel. Palestinian citizens of Israel became stateless citizens or ‘Present-Absentees’. Although the latter was originally bureaucratically coined to refer to Palestinian internal refugees within Israel, it is an accurate representation of wider Palestinian existence in Israel whereby “the land on which they live is their homeland, but the dominant culture is not their culture and the country is not their country”.153 The result is that citizenship becomes the only form of belonging that Palestinians can hold onto, allowing a sense of fake equality based on the simple, almost lexical definition of ‘citizens’ as being the ‘members of the same country’. Palestinian citizenship is thus devoid of any symbolic or ideological identification with Israel.154 Israel applies a policy of minimal fairness towards the Palestinians who are not inclined to leave voluntarily in parallel with privileging Jewish migration into Israel. In other words, a policy with the purpose of altering the demographic composition of Israel. According to the Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities of the former Commission on Human Rights, “… the effect or purpose of altering the demographic composition of a territory, particularly when that ideology or policy asserts the dominance of a certain group over another,” 155 constitutes a crucial element of forced population transfer. 153 Yasir Suleiman and Ibrahim Muhawi, eds., Literature and Nation in the Middle East (Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 34. 154 Makhoul, “Seismography of Identities: Literary Reflections of Palestinian Identity Evolution in Israel between 1948 and 2010.” 157 Al-Khawasneh and Hatano, The Human Rights Dimensions of Population Transfer Including the Implantation of Settlers, Preliminary Report Prepared for Commission on Human Rights SubCommission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, Forty-Fifth Session, 27–32. 56