Lana Tatour Warhaftig’s solution allowed Israeli leaders to have their cake and eat it, too. As Ben Gurion commented: “I suggest that the citizenship law will apply in practice only to non-Jews, without needing to mention that . . . it will apply to everyone except for Jews.”94 The cabinet, however, knew very well that the distinction between citizenship and immigration policies in those countries was artificial: race determined both. As in other settler colonial polities, in Israel, immigration and citizenship laws went hand in hand, producing “new categories of racial difference.”95 As with migration, the imposition of legal disabilities restricted racialized minorities’ access to citizenship. The right of Jews to immigrate to Palestine under the Law of Return guaranteed their immediate and automatic entitlement to citizenship under section 2 of the Citizenship Law (citizenship by return), while Palestinians faced legal disabilities that impeded their entitlement to residence and citizenship. Fundamentally, the decision to create two laws enshrined Jewish superiority and Jewish exclusive right to the land, self-determination, and sovereignty. As stated by Ben Gurion: There needs to be a naturalization law, but not for the Jews. A Jew who comes to settle in the country is automatically a citizen; he is guaranteed the right to be a citizen in advance. I differentiate here not in the laws, but in the rights towards this country. The others are granted the right to be here only by an act of benevolence, but not the Jew. He is entitled. That is by basic assumption.96 This statement became the underpinning logic of Israel’s citizenship regime and the rationale that guided the drafting of both the Law of Return and the Citizenship Law. The two laws came to embody a racial distinction between Jews, as natural and authentic subjects of citizenship, and Palestinians, whose citizenship was the result of the state’s benevolence. Importantly, they signify the indigenization of settlers and the de-indigenization of natives. Together, the two laws transform settlers into natives, while rendering Palestinian natives alien. Nicola Perugini terms this process “settler colonial inversions—the mimic transformation of the settler subject into the indigene, and of the Palestinian indigene into the settler.”97 The elimination of the native, as he points out, “passes through the erasure of the settlers’ identity as settlers.”98 27 Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3533490