Lana Tatour A wider epistemological assumption underpins these understandings: that the inherent goal of citizenship—its intrinsic purpose—is to safeguard rights, ensure equality, and promote inclusion. In this reading of citizenship, exclusion is an anomaly. It is the failure of citizenship. Citizenship is viewed as a journey, a movement from “nonpolitical society to political society.”11 It involves, as Danielle Allen points out, “metaphors of ‘lines’ that can be crossed and horizontal notions of ‘inside and outside.’”12 Even when the literature demonstrates how histories of gendered, racial, and class-based exclusions are constitutive of the making of modern citizenship, accounts still code these histories as a story of the transition of excluded populations from the outside to the inside, from exclusion to inclusion.13 This telos illustrates how citizenship functions as “both a normative and empirical concept.”14 Consequently, we see failures of citizenship addressed through a normative quest to develop a more substantive, meaningful, and inclusionary vision of citizenship (a multicultural notion of citizenship is one prominent example of this endeavor; another is sexual citizenship).15 Thus, citizenship per se is not problematized, only its deficiency. It is (re)produced and normalized as a virtue to be nourished and expanded, something we ought to realize, transform, and imbue with meaning. Despite the limits of citizenship, citizenship discourse calls upon us to hold onto its potential, not only out of necessity or because it guarantees us, in Arendtian terms, the right to have rights and protection from statelessness,16 but also out of a genuine belief in citizenship as an institution. And yet, it continues to fail us. The failure of citizenship to deliver on its promise stresses the need for a radical rethinking of the very nature of citizenship in the context of settler colonialism. To apprehend the limits of citizenship and to understand its discontents, we need “to raise the issue of history.”17 As Gurminder Bhambra points out, citizenship “is not only to be understood in terms of abstract categories of membership and rights but also in terms of the historical narratives that frame its initial conceptualizations.”18 Turning to the history of citizenship making in settler colonial contexts, including in Israel, indicates that citizenship is not failing. It is doing what it was created to do: normalize domination, naturalize settler sovereignty, classify populations, produce difference, and exclude, racialize, and eliminate indigenous peoples. Since the second half of the twentieth century, citizenship has become the central institution that regulates the legal and political status of indigenous 11 Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3533490