Lana Tatour As Anat Leibler shows, the census effectively established differentiated statuses of citizenship, defined through residence. The first category was Jewish citizenship. The census automatically categorized Jews as lawful residents, regardless of whether census officials had counted them on the day of the census. The second category was a Palestinian citizenship, with residence status dependent on registry at the day of the census. A third category of “present-absentees” referred to Palestinians whom Zionist militias or Israeli forces had expelled from their homes but who remained in territories controlled by Israel.68 Finally, the fourth category referred to Palestinian refugees who were excluded altogether from Israeli citizenship because they were not in the country during the first census. The census categorized registered Palestinians as lawful residents entitled, in principle, to food rations, suffrage rights, and protection from deportation. This protection, however, was not total: in some cases, registered Palestinians also faced deportation.69 The state deemed unregistered Palestinians, including Palestinian refugees who attempted to cross the borders and return as well as unregistered ’48 Palestinians, as infiltrators. Infiltration (histanenut in Hebrew) became a dominant discursive and legal frame that criminalized Palestinians seeking to return to, or remain in, their homes as “illegal aliens.”70 Criminalization was a manifestation of the de-indigenization of Palestinians and their production as invaders, trespassers, and foreigners in their own homeland, as well as the de-indigenization of the territory itself. As Yinon Cohen and Neve Gordon argue, criminalization also rests on the production of the space itself as exclusively Jewish.71 The Battle over the Citizenship Law As elaborated above, in the absence of a citizenship law, the legal status of Palestinians was determined in accordance with residence. Yet residence status, like suffrage, is not the same as citizenship. In the absence of a citizenship law, the question of citizenship remained open and depended on the resolution of the “Arab problem.” The main dilemma Israeli leaders faced was the extent to which the creation of an Israeli citizenship would compromise Israel’s demographic and territorial interests. As the discussions in the cabinet reveal, Israeli leaders were divided over whether it was necessary to legislate a citizenship law. At the same time, with the nullification of Palestinian citizen- 21 Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3533490