CITIZENSHIP STUDIES 265 fault line of being anticolonial while remaining colonisers/settlers. I conclude with concrete lessons from historical and contemporary decolonisation struggles that teach us that settler solidarity and co-resistance must centre indigenous struggles and take leadership from them, in a way that accepts the uncertainty of the (settlers’) future after decolonisation. At the same time, this mode of practice may also contain within it the possibility that through the construction of allyship and solidarity such a future might exist. Beginnings: settler colonialism and the violence of settler citizenship In the aftermath of the 1948 war in British Mandatory Palestine between the Zionist Jewish community and the Palestinians, the Zionists gained the upper hand. The estab­ lishment of the State of Israel in 1948 was a culmination, albeit not the end, of the colonial project pursued by the Zionist movement since the late 1800s with a view to settling the ‘biblical land of Israel’ with Jews (Erekat, 2019, 54). Rather than being a miraculous achievement, the Zionist victory in 1948 was the outcome of years of political and military preparation by the Zionist movement in Palestine and globally that facilitated a situation in which a minority population managed to prevail, and to become the majority in the newly established polity – the State of Israel (Robinson 2013). In the words of Erekat: What began as British Prerogative (establishing a Jewish national home in Palestine) and was later enshrined into international law and policy (in the Mandate for Palestine) now became embodied in the legitimacy and legal standing of the Israeli state. (2019, 54). The violence of the 1948 war was immense. Around 1% of the Jewish population died. Yet their vulnerability pales into insignificance when compared with the catastrophe that befell the Palestinians. Jewish-Zionist forces conquered nearly 78% of Mandatory Palestine and expelled some 750,000 Palestinians from the boundaries of the newly established state. Palestine ‘had been wiped off the map, and the designated Arab state [in the partition plan] fell into virtual oblivion’ (Robinson 2013, 27). The war was a turning point for the Zionist movement. The Jewish community reversed the minority status of Palestine’s Jews, a demographic reality that had concerned Zionist leaders for decades, by forging an understanding that removal of the existing Palestinian population would be essential for the establishment of the envisioned ‘Jewish state’ (ibid., 11). The Zionist project that sought to revolutionise Jewish life and to create a new Jew and a new Jewish nation in its ‘ancestral land’ now formalised itself into a state, a system that needed the legitimating guise of the rule of law, and within it, the regularisation of the relationship between the new state and the individual via the institution of citizenship (Masri 2017a). As a settler colonial project, the practices of the Zionist movement are not unique. The physical elimination of indigenous presence and culture has been an integral part of the constitution of settler societies in different continents around the globe alongside estab­ lishment of new polities and articulations of the ‘rule of law’ (see Erekat 2019; Simpson 2014; Wolfe 1999, 2006, inter alia). Once established as a state, law plays an integral part