presented itself as the only authority with the right to confer both citizenship and nationality on all subjects with legal claims to belong to colonized Palestine. These illegal acts are strategically obscured by a series of laws, the most significant of which are the 1950 Law of Return, the 1952 Nationality Law, and the 2018 Jewish Nation-State Law. In 1950, the new Israeli regime promulgated the Law of Return, which offered every Jew across the world the right to immigrate to the new Jewish state. This law was followed by the 1952 Nationality Law, which confirmed nationality for Jews worldwide under the Law of Return. As such, in 1952, the Israeli regime effectively promulgated Jewish nationality globally. In this way, while Israel may have a citizenship regime in place for non-Jews to acquire Israeli citizenship through birth in 1948 territories, it remains a state for Jewish nationals above all. This was reaffirmed in the 2018 Jewish Nation-State Basic Law, which stated that the right to national self-determination is “unique to the Jewish people.” Consequently, the Israeli apartheid regime has ensured that Palestinians who have acquired Israeli citizenship can never become incorporated as nationals of the state, making it easier to denaturalize them. Moreover, to forestall any exiled Palestinians seeking citizenship rights as former subjects of the British mandate, which had issued British Palestinian passports, the 1952 law retroactively repealed any citizenship conferral prior to the establishment of the Israeli state in May 1948. Thus, the Israeli regime effectively reset citizenship laws upon its establishment, rendering obsolete all existing documents related to Palestinian nationality and citizenship. This is illegal under international law, which requires that any “successor state” confer the nationality of a given territory on the peoples connected to it. The Israeli regime also ensured that no Palestinian expelled in 1948 can qualify for Palestinian nationality or Israeli citizenship, since they are neither Jewish nor can 6 The Case for Palestinian Nationality www.al-shabaka.org the palestinian policy network