sovereignty in these territories by creating facts on the ground. The participation of Palestinians in the elections further foregrounded the legitimacy of a de facto annexation. Israel planned its first parliamentary elections in the context of a state with neither citizens nor defined borders. In the absence of a citizenship law, residency became the criterion that defined eligibility to vote. To determine who was a resident, Israel conducted a census under a seven-hour curfew on 8 November 1948. The census included a registry of the population and a registry of Arab property.59 The former prepared the ground for Israel’s war on “infiltration” or what Robinson calls the war on return, as it prevented the return of Palestinian refugees to their homes.60 The latter facilitated the mass confiscation of Palestinian land and property, which was later declared “absentees’ property” under the 1950 Absentees’ Property Law.61 With no citizenship law, the census became a semi-citizenship law in itself.62 It defined who could be recognized as a lawful resident and served as the basis for the voter list. The census was not a neutral bureaucratic act. It was rather an instrument of statistical extermination, a genocidal practice by which the settler state sought to reduce the number of indigenous peoples in official statistics through the production of administrative categories that encoded difference between settlers and natives, as well as among natives themselves.63 Canada, Australia, and the United States used blood quantum criteria to distinguish between indigenous full-blood persons, viewed as a dying race, and half-caste persons who were considered assimilable.64 Israel, in contrast, divided Palestinians—based on the census and later, in 1954, also under the Prevention of Infiltration Law65—into two categories: legal and illegal. The aim was to limit the number of Palestinians who could be considered lawful residents. The census automatically excluded Palestinian refugees. It differentiated between Palestinian refugees and ’48 Palestinians, but it also divided ’48 Palestinians into legal and illegal residents based on the criterion of registry. The census did not enumerate all Palestinians under Israeli rule. Only sixty-nine thousand of an estimated one hundred thousand Palestinians at the time of the census were registered.66 Palestinians in parts of the Galilee were not registered; nor were the thousands of Palestinians in prison camps, or the thirteen to fifteen thousand bedouin in the Naqab. Even in the areas that were surveyed, the census left thousands of Palestinians unrecorded.67 20 Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3533490