who was legal and who was illegal. In the words of Dov Yosef: “When we publish the citizenship law and a person is found not to be a citizen, we can then deport him.”81 As the cabinet discussions reveal, citizenship operated as tool of ethnic cleansing. Israel’s citizenship regime continues to perform this function by denying citizenship to Palestinian refugees and to Palestinians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. At the same time, to achieve this goal, Israel had to extend citizenship to a small minority of Palestinians, making future mass expulsion more difficult. This was the price Israel had to pay to ensure that the smallest possible number of Palestinians would remain within its territory. As history shows, despite the desire of settler states to see all natives vanish, elimination is never total or completely triumphant. Nonetheless, settler states strive to keep the number of natives in the territories they control to a minimum. In the Israeli case, citizenship was central to this endeavor. Ben Gurion knew that he could not overturn the government’s decision. Instead, he stalled work on the law while trying to reduce the number of Palestinians in Israel and to make changes to the status of Palestinians in Israel. As Robinson shows, village sweeps intensified and deportation operations accelerated, targeting Palestinians categorized as “illegal aliens.” In the absence of a citizenship law, a semi-citizenship status was regulated through a differentiated regime of identification documents, constituting citizenship as an instrument of colonial control that allowed the government to monitor and manage the Palestinian population. Importantly, Ben Gurion introduced temporary residence permits in an attempt to register as many ’48 Palestinians as possible, including those whom the 1948 census enumerated as temporary rather than permanent residents.82 In the meantime, he also objected to measures that implied further formalization of the status of Palestinians in Israel and the expansion of their rights. When it was time for Israel’s second general election in 1951, Ben Gurion opposed enfranchising more Palestinians beyond those registered in the 1948 census—even though tens of thousands of Palestinians were not registered at that time. He took this position despite the 1949 armistice agreements with Jordan, which added more than thirty thousand Palestinians to Israel’s population.83 The idea that more Palestinians would be considered citizens or enjoy suffrage rights was, for Ben Gurion, a threat to the integrity of the Jewish state. As he stated: 24 Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3533490