of settler colonialism and advanced the genocide of indigenous peoples. In Canada, Australia, and the United States, for example, citizenship and enfranchisement were tied to a civilizational assimilative mission. Indigenous peoples often had to relinquish their indigenous status or prove that they were sufficiently civil and cultured in order to be enfranchised and gain freedom of movement.31 Enfranchisement, settler states believed, would advance the elimination of indigenous peoples through their absorption into settler society and into whiteness. In Israel, citizenship as elimination took a different form. There, the racial logics of the Zionist settler project rendered assimilation irrelevant. Zionism, as Wolfe argues, “rigorously refused, as it continues to refuse, any suggestion of Native assimilation . . . Zionism constitutes a more exclusive exercise of the settler logic of elimination than we encounter in the Australian and US examples.”32 In Israel, as I show, citizenship has functioned as an instrument of ethnic cleansing, a way of seeking to deny Palestinians the right to return to their land. As discussions in the Israeli cabinet make clear, the decision to extend citizenship was motivated by a desire to solidify the demographic outcomes of the Nakba (the expulsion and displacement of seven hundred and fifty thousand Palestinians in 1948) by denying the possibility of citizenship to as many Palestinians as possible. At the same time, for the Palestinians who did remain under Israeli control, the possibility of obtaining citizenship and residence status was a matter of survival. Without it, they faced the threat of being deported by the state to neighbouring countries. In the second half of the twentieth century, however, settler states began to take the citizenship of indigenous peoples more seriously. This process coincided with the rise of the international human rights regime and Third World decolonization processes.33 Consequently, citizenship assumed more meaningful forms, affording indigenous peoples (at times) the right to movement, (some) protections, and (limited) access to rights. As a result, indigenous peoples, including the Palestinians in Israel, began mobilizing their citizenship to gain recognition of their rights through litigation, lobbying, and public and international advocacy. While this development is significant, it does not preclude an understanding of citizenship in relation to, and as an institution of, domination. Allowing a space for the analytical usefulness of domination requires us to displace liberal readings of citizen- 14 Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3533490