266 E. WEIZMAN in sustaining the violent logic of any settler colonial project, and with it the privileges of the settler community. What was achieved thus far by brute force alone is now regulated into the settler state’s legal infrastructure. In the words of Kauanui and Wolfe (2012, 241): . . . once the Natives have been violently suppressed [. . .], the colonizers have to establish a colonial society in their place, on their land. To do that, you have to have a system of laws and regulations – the playing field has got to look level. [. . .] A rule of law has to be applied and applied consistently; otherwise the incoming settler society would get out of order. Analysis of the Zionist colonial project in Palestine requires seeing the 1948 war as a moment of ‘law-making violence’ (Benjamin 2009). Territorial conquest forged new demographic realities, enabling the establishment of the new polity and the laying of its legal foundations. Establishment of the state retroactively legitimated Israel’s founding violence since it embodies a claim of new lawmaking authority’ and also because it was ‘used in the service of a public interest defined by the nascent settler sovereign’ (Erekat 2019, 54). But violence does not merely lay the foundation for a new legal system and citizenship in the new polity, nor does it cease to exist thereafter. Indeed, the legal system is one of the most powerful institutions at the hands of the state to construct its legitimacy, internal coherence and, most importantly, to build capacity for sustaining its power structures. After its constitution, state law distinguishes between legally permissible and imper­ missible violence. The legally prescribed violence is occasionally mobilised against impermissible forms of resistance/violence that seek to fundamentally challenge state law. Permissible violence receives immediate justification, as the law declares the obliga­ tion to respect it and gives authority to the regime to enforce it, also by force (Derrida 1990). Thus, violence is the other side of law, according to the instructions and limita­ tions determined in law and by law (Benton 2009). While this is true for any state or regime, it is particularly valuable to think about the link between law and violence in the context of settler colonial states, and in particular Israel. Mazen Masri’s The Dynamics of Exclusionary Constitutionalism (Masri 2017a) highlights the role of law, and the state’s judicial system more broadly, as an integral part of maintaining hierarchical settler colonial social relations and the violent logic of the settler colonial project. This is important since ‘the constitutional order [. . .] controls the creation, transformation and exercise of political power’ (p. 193) while also regulating and normalising state violence and shielding it with legitimacy. These processes of ‘legalisation’ and application of the ‘rule of law’ do not change the logic of the settler colonial project, but rather: [T]he way in which remaining Natives are eliminated shifts – it becomes more legal and more genteel. It looks better. [. . .] The rhetoric shifts radically, but the outcome remains consistent with elimination (Wolfe in Kauanui and Wolfe 2012, 241). Establishing the rule of law in a given territory is an all-encompassing project grounded in the definition of ‘the people’. Those who belong to ‘the people’ are now given formal membership in the state and accorded social privileges that also regulate their status within the polity. Citizenship, according to Isin and Turner (2007, 14) is ‘both a legal status that confers an identity on persons and a social status that determines how economic and cultural capital are redistributed and recognised within society’.