to shape the Law of Return and the Citizenship Law. Therefore, this article situates the making of the Israeli citizenship regime in the broader history of citizenship making in Anglophone settler colonial contexts, focusing on the relationship between settler colonial domination, race, and citizenship. It shows that in Israel, as in other settler polities, citizenship has figured as an institution of domination, functioning as a mechanism of elimination, a site of subjectivation, and an instrument of race making. What ties these different modalities of domination together is the argument that the Israeli state constituted racial subjects, space, and citizenship in relation to each other in intimate ways. Citizenship transformed space from Arab/Palestinian to Jewish,6 rendered settlers indigenous, and produced Palestinian natives as alien. The racialization of the territory as Jewish7 was intertwined with the production of new legal and political subjects.8 While the Israeli citizenship regime viewed Jewish settlers as natural, authentic subjects of citizenship who were therefore entitled to automatic semi-birthright citizenship, it perceived Palestinian citizenship as a benevolent act by the state. The Israeli state thus designed its citizenship regime to function as the legal embodiment of wider processes of settler indigenization and native de-indigenization, in which “settlers and their polity appear to be proper to the land”9 and natives become foreign invaders. When it comes to ’48 Palestinians, citizenship has become the commonsense way of conceptualizing them in both scholarly work and activist circles. State, academic, and public discourse continue to describe ’48 Palestinians as Israeli Arabs, Arab citizens of Israel, and Palestinian citizens of Israel. These phrases, in both their conservative and progressive iterations, do not merely describe the legal status of ’48 Palestinians. They connote an identity to which Israeli citizenship is inherent. This focus reflects a wider acceptance of the liberal notion that citizenship is key to political membership and subjectivity and to the fulfillment of political, civil, and social rights. Citizenship is measured against its inclusionary ideal. Accordingly, the citizenship of Palestinians in Israel—like the citizenship of other indigenous and racialized populations— has been conceptualized in terms of its lack or incompleteness. Thus, many scholars and commentators describe this citizenship as a partial, hollow, and empty category—a citizenship devoid of substance. Others characterize it as a fragile and vulnerable citizenship, a second-class citizenship, an inferior citizenship, or a differentiated citizenship.10 10 Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3533490

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