Lana Tatour Sovereignty, Territoriality, and the Question of Palestinian Suffrage in Israel Today, it is commonly accepted—including in settler colonial states—that citizenship awards, at least in principle, the right to vote. But suffrage and citizenship in Anglophone settler colonies did not emerge as interrelated rights. Neither British subjecthood nor national citizenship status entitled indigenous peoples the right to vote. In the United States, while the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act extended citizenship to all Native Americans, some states continued until the late 1950s to ban Native Americans from casting a ballot.46 Native Americans as well as African Americans continue to face racial discrimination in voting due to state legislation. 47 The Australian citizenship regime also denied federal voting rights to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, despite their status as British subjects under the Commonwealth Franchise Act 1902, with some states also denying the franchise in their own jurisdictions. It was only in 1962 that federal voting rights extended to all Aboriginal peoples, with the state of Queensland sustaining its ban on Aboriginal voting until 1965.48 In Israel, during the first four years of the state and up until the enactment of the Citizenship Law in 1952, the question of suffrage was disassociated from that of citizenship, since the status of Israeli citizenship did not yet formally exist in domestic law. Some Palestinians thus held suffrage rights though formally they were not citizens. It was only with the enactment of the Citizenship Law that suffrage rights and citizenship status would become interlinked and citizenship status would automatically bestow the right to vote. As will be discussed later, however, earlier enjoyment of suffrage rights did not automatically guarantee citizenship status under the Citizenship Law. As a result, the enactment of the Citizenship Law denied citizenship to a significant number of Palestinians who voted in Israel’s first elections in January 1948 and/or in the second parliamentary elections in July 1952. In the period between 1948 and the enactment of the Citizenship Law in 1952, Israel was a state without citizens. This absence of national citizenship was not unique to Israel. In fact, settler colonies such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand created their own national citizenship only in the mid-twentieth century. Unlike Israel, however, Anglophone settler colonies sustained the imperial legal status of British subjects, a de facto citizenship, for significant 17 Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3533490