2022 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 4(1) the settler collective via the regime of Israeli citizenship that is itself a form of domination37 nor have they been allowed to achieve sovereignty as part of the collective right of the Palestinian people to self-determination. Palestinians in Jerusalem are further shut out from the decision-making process, given the severe obstacles imposed by the Israeli occupying authorities on their ability to vote in and run for Palestinian Legislative Council elections. 38 Expelled from the political sphere, they are alienated from the decisions that shape their environment and drive their colonial dispossession. While Palestinian residents of Jerusalem are entitled to vote in the Israeli occupation’s municipal elections, the vast majority of them refuse to do so on the basis that this would legitimise the occupation and illegal annexation of their city.39 Additionally, while the state blocks upward mobility in the dearth of education and job opportunities, Palestinian Jerusalemites cannot safely relocate to achieve higher education or seek employment for fear of having their Jerusalem residency status, and thereby their right to live in their city with the associated access to healthcare and social services, arbitrarily revoked. 40 Thus, the same precarious residency status that limits much of their life opportunities is simultaneously an asset to be guarded carefully in order to maintain the ability to live in one’s own city. This is the architecture of engineered entrapment and settler colonial statelessness, where the Indigenous Palestinian people are forced to live in a militarised environment, subject to ‘death zone[s]’ and ‘killing boxes’,41 without any legal tools for escape. Simultaneously, any Jewish person born anywhere in the world is automatically entitled to Israeli citizenship and can move to Jerusalem or other parts of historic Palestine. Meanwhile, millions of Palestinian refugees, including those in refugee camps in East Jerusalem and the rest of the occupied Palestinian territory, continue to be denied their inalienable right to return to their homes of origin. 42 Thus, the Israeli apartheid entraps Palestinians wherever they reside, fragments and dispossesses them and enables a legal infrastructure for the maintenance of Zionist settler colonialism and its eliminatory logic. 43 Despite some similarities, the case of Palestine has additional, important distinctions from the other aforementioned settler colonial contexts. As elsewhere, the Zionist settler colonisation of Palestine has produced a population of colonised subjects who remained on their land. Some Palestinians were subjugated as native citizens of the settler colony, while others became stateless non-citizen subjects, expelled from the settler polity but living under its military occupation and control. A large population of Palestinian refugees, displaced persons and exiles are also stateless, living within and outside of their historical homeland. While other settler 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 Lana Tatour, ‘Citizenship as Domination: Settler Colonialism and the Making of Palestinian Citizenship in Israel’ (2019) 27(2) Arab Studies Journal 8. ‘Free, Fair Palestinian Elections, Must Include East Jerusalem: UN Experts’, UN News (online, 26 July 2021) <https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/07/1096442>. Munir Nueseibah, ‘Municipal Elections in Occupied Jerusalem: Why Do Palestinians Boycott?’ in Jürgen Mackert, Hannah Wolf and Bryan Turner (eds), The Condition of Democracy (Routledge, 1st edn, 2021) 151. Danielle Jefferis, ‘Institutionalizing Statelessness: The Revocation of Residency Rights of Palestinians in East Jerusalem’ (2012) 24(2) International Journal of Refugee Law 202, 222. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, ‘Unchilding and the Killing Boxes: Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding, by Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019’ (2020) 23(3) Journal of Genocide Research 490, 495. ‘Palestine Refugees’, UNRWA (Web Page) <https://www.unrwa.org/palestine-refugees>. Shalhoub-Kevorkian (n 1), 15–16; see also Rania Muhareb and Pearce Clancy, ‘Palestine and the Meaning of Domination in Settler Colonialism and Apartheid’ (2021) 6(6) República y Derecho 1. 94