268 E. WEIZMAN citizenship in settler colonial states works to include those immigrants (settlers) who arrive in the new territory, and exclude, negate, marginalise and eliminate those who were there before, even if they might be granted formal status as citizens in that state. Such was the case in the formation of citizenship laws in Israel. As Masri argues, ‘citizenship and the immigration regime is probably one of the areas where settlercolonialism’s imprint on the Israeli constitutional order is most palpable’ (2017, 77). To that end, The Law of Return 1950 and the Citizenship Law 1952, serve to regulate access to citizenship for Jewish immigrants and their families – the backbone of the Zionist colonial project in Palestine.5 By so doing, they ground a racial distinction between Jews and Palestinians, while fostering indigenisation of Jewish settlers and de-indigenisation of Palestinian natives. In this respect citizenship is a site of sub­ jectivation through which both settlers and natives are produced (Tatour 2019, 10).6 Considering the foundational violence that led to the establishment of the state of Israel, settler citizenship is thus intrinsically bound to violence, the imprints of past violence and mechanisms of present violence sustained by the presence of the settlers as hostile occupiers of the land of others. In the words of Kotef (2020a, 14), ‘There is not an “I”, in the case of the settler, without dispossession, if not elimination, of natives, and so the effort to stabilize identity [. . .] is inextricable from this violence’. It is interesting to pause and reflect about the meaning of ‘political identity’ and its ties to the concept of ‘citizenship’. Thinking about political identity in the Israeli context inevitably entails discussion of nation and nationality. The State of Israel is a ‘nation state’ in which the nation is defined in racial terms (Jewish), and the right to self-determination of the Jews is perceived as axiomatic (Azoulay and Ophir 2012; Ram 2011).7 National identity and collective memory are structured and rooted in the ideological, bureaucratic and military spheres, in schools and households, in the work place and in the army, thus becoming firmly established in the subjectivity of the people. Accordingly, the commitment of the citizens to the state means commitment to the existence of the Jewish state (Azoulay and Ophir 2012; cf. Bishara 1996). In 2018, this idea was specifically enshrined in law by the Basic Law: Israel – The Nation State of the Jewish People which declares that Jews are the only people who have the right to self-determination in the State of Israel. Considering this, we can assert that the political identity of Jewish-Israeli citizens is racial-national, one that equates the nation to the state, the cultural to the political. Where does it leave citizenship? As Bishara explained in his illuminating discussion on nation and nationality, ‘when the nation is theoretically identified with nationality, there is no space left for civil society [. . .]. Nationality is [thus] the only recognised community’ (Bishara 2006, 346).8 Indeed, for Jewish-Israelis, nationality, or national belonging, acts as both an identity and a legal category that provides the full range of privileges and rights, including access to land, political and economic rights and of course, right to self-determination. Citizenship is accordingly a taken-for-granted secondary identity with only limited legal significance, since its rights and privileges are racially allocated. Following from that, we can determine that the binary of the settler colonial condition creates also a binary of citizenship in the settler state, between what Rouhana Nadim and Sabbagh-Khoury (2015) termed ‘settler colonial citizenship’ – which is imposed on the