98 chapter two Because the Israeli government prohibits any permanent physical or structural development in unrecognized villages, residents are unable to legally (re)build or repair existing homes, roads, educational and health facilities, community centres, or sewage systems. Developing any of these elements on one’s own property is accompanied by a constant threat of eviction and demolition, which prevents many inhabitants of unrecognized villages from building new homes or developing existing ones. As a result, unrecognized villages are usually very congested with high population densities as more than one family usually resides in a single house. Israeli Apartheid: Beyond South Africa Citizenship in Israel is funnelled through comprehensive policies of exclusion and their respective systems of control, paired with limited inclusion in all socio-political spheres.116 This incorporation regime, maintained through an uneven allocation of resources, rights and representation in Israeli society, is legitimated through the way in which social membership is conceived and granted within the state. As pointed to in this book, in the case of Israel, the Jewish state is not only a source of identity but it is also a particular guarantor of rights (Kimmerling 1999).117 This is because Jewish identity in Israel provides an entirely new assemblage of rights irrespective of formal citizenship. Put differently, Jewish identity is automatically merged with Israeli citizenship. Like other incorporation regimes, Israeli citizenship is composed of “concentric circles” within which the boundaries of civic status for the Palestinian community are distinctly rigid given their peripheral location (Shafir and Peled 1998, 412). And so, this community is limited to a rigidly defined citizenship located in the periphery, as any possibility for movement toward the centre requires a social mobility that is systematically denied to it by virtue of the self-definition of the state as ‘Jewish’. In other words, the fruition of social mobility requires more rights and greater access to resources which, when denied, reduces Arab citizenship. An examination of Israel’s formal and informal practices reveals that its incorporation regime is structured in the form of an apartheid state system: legally enshrined systematic discrimination maintaining the dominance 116 A similar formulation is made by Ghanem (1998, 431). 117 For an in-depth account of how the Zionist incorporation regime fuses Jewish and Israeli identity, see Chapter Five.