colonialism. In his work on the United States, Kunal Parker demonstrates how citizenship and immigration laws have regulated who is an insider and who is an outsider, who naturally belongs and who is foreign. The United States, as Parker shows, not only rendered racialized outsiders (those seeking to immigrate to the country) as foreigners, but also did the same with certain insiders—including indigenous peoples. As he writes, “[t]he history of immigration and citizenship law thus encompasses two intimately conjoined histories: that of the country’s absorption and rejection of those from beyond its limits and that of its simultaneous efforts to render foreign those within its limits.”41 Parker’s claim undermines the common view of citizenship as a “positive good.” The acquisition of citizenship, he asserts, is not the story of gradual inclusion as per the common convention. It is, rather, “a story about being rendered less foreign. Over the centuries, insiders . . . have acquired legal statuses and rights that rendered them less like the aliens with whom they once shared much.”42 While Parker sustains the legal distinction between citizens (those who formally enjoy a citizenship status) and aliens (those who are yet to acquire formal citizenship), others have introduced an understanding of alienage as a sociopolitical category that can be sustained even after the formal extension of citizenship. Mae Ngai, for example, distinguishes between two types of alienage: illegal alienage, which applies to those who have the status of illegal aliens under the law; and alien citizens, referring to those who have acquired citizenship but continue to be presumed foreign in public and state discourses.43 Alien citizenship, Ngai points out, “flowed directly from the histories of conquest, colonialism, and semicolonialism.”44 Following a similar sociopolitical understanding of alienage, Peter Prince argues that, Australia’s citizenship regime not only considered non-Europeans as aliens, but it also did the same with indigenous peoples—despite their official status as British subjects.45 As this article suggests, the story of citizenship in Israel has included producing alienage and “making foreigners” (to borrow Parker’s and Ngai’s terminology). This process has involved the production of Palestinian refugees, and Palestinians who remained in their homeland but were not considered lawful residents by the Israeli state, as illegal aliens. At the same time, the extension of Israeli citizenship to some Palestinians did not eradicate conditions of alienage. Palestinian citizens became alien citizens and they continue to be viewed as such. 16 Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3533490

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