2022 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 4(1) between and yet distinct from both Palestinians inside the Green Line 8 and Palestinians elsewhere in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and in exile, Jerusalemite Palestinians are native residents on the settler colony’s most coveted lands. Jerusalem can be characterised as the most active Zionist settler colonial frontier. Here, settler construction and Indigenous elimination are a daily struggle, with a documented plan to maintain a quantitatively specific demographic superiority of settlers9 and the near-constant, ongoing, forcible expulsion of multiple Palestinian neighbourhoods from the city.10 Jerusalem’s status as a settler colonial frontier informs the Palestinian experience in the city, which, together with the rest of historic Palestine, has been subjected to ongoing Zionist settler colonialism since the late 19th century.11 While franchise colonialism, such as British colonialism in India, is characterised by the external domination and exploitation of colonised peoples and natural resources, settler colonialism aims to displace and replace the Indigenous people(s) on the land with a population of foreign settlers.12 Due to the land’s central value in settler colonialism, it operates within what Patrick Wolfe has theorised as the ‘logic of elimination’ of the native, a process that is justified through overt and tacit assumptions of cultural and racial superiority. 13 Yet, in none of its geographies has settler colonialism achieved complete native elimination and thus has produced, in a dialectic with native resistance, different shades of statelessness or ‘othering’ and a subjugated status for Indigenous peoples across North America, 8 9 10 11 12 13 Palestinian cities have been a stage for colonial violence and Indigenous resistance in diverse ways, particularly since 1948. The term ‘urbancide’ has been used to describe the annihilation of urban centres in Palestine. Some cities, such as Safad and Tiberias, have been completely emptied of their native Palestinian people and were transformed into Jewish settler cities. Nazareth, the only city to survive the Nakba with an almost intact Indigenous population, was the target of massive land confiscation and Jewish settlements being built on its lands. It became crowded with internally displaced Palestinians from neighbouring villages. Coastal cities like Jaffa, Haifa and Akka were emptied of the vast majority of their Palestinian inhabitants, while the minority that remained was ghettoised. Jewish settlers became the majority in these cities, which were later called ‘mixed cities’. In these urban spaces, Palestinians fought to preserve their existence in their homeland and maintain their political, social and cultural identity, while adapting and negotiating their economic, social and political rights in a framework of settler colonial citizenship. For more on this, see Dan Rabinowitz and Daniel Monterescu, ‘Reconfiguring the “Mixed Town”: Urban Transformations of Ethnonational Relations in Palestine and Israel’ (2008) 40(2) International Journal of Middle East Studies 195. See also Leena Dallasheh, ‘Persevering through Colonial Transition: Nazareth’s Palestinian Residents after 1948’ (2016) 45(2) Journal of Palestine Studies 8; Leena Dallasheh, ‘Nazarenes in the Turbulent Tide of Citizenships: Nazareth from 1940 to 1966’ (PhD Thesis, New York University, 2012); Nadim N Rouhana and Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, ‘Settler-Colonial Citizenship: Conceptualizing the Relationship between Israel and its Palestinian Citizens’ (2014) 5(3) Settler Colonial Studies 205. Nur Arafeh, ‘Which Jerusalem? Israel’s Little-Known Master Plans’, Al Shabaka (Web Page, 31 May 2016) <https://al-shabaka.org/briefs/jerusalem-israels-litte-known-master-plans>; ‘Israel: Jerusalem Palestinians Stripped of Status’, Human Rights Watch (Web Page, 8 August 2017) <https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/08/08/israel-jerusalem-palestinians-strippedstatus> (‘Israel: Jerusalem Palestinians Stripped of Status’). ‘Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan: Ongoing Nakba and Israeli Dispossession of Palestinians’, AlHaq (Web Page, 27 May 2021) <https://www.alhaq.org/advocacy/18442.html>; Patrick Kingsley and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad, ‘Israel Evicts Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah Area of Jerusalem’, New York Times (online, 19 January 2022) <https://www.nytimes.com/ 2022/01/19/world/middleeast/israel-palestine-jerusalem-eviction.html>. Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 (Metropolitan Books 2020). Patrick Wolfe, ‘Structure and Event: Settler Colonialism, Time, and the Question of Genocide’ in Dirk Moses (ed), Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History (Berghahn Books 2008) 102, 103. Wolfe (n 5) 387. 90