108 chapter three importance when it comes to the framing of state–minority relations. In examining the case of Jews and Palestinian-Arabs, questions of ‘who is the guest’ and ‘who is the host’, the interchangeability of these roles, and the violent dynamics between them, become particularly interesting and relevant to understanding the development of their relationship. Given the subjective nature of collective consciousness, it is not only enormously difficult to agree when, but sometimes even whether a collective or a host – and therefore a guest – has emerged. From this, the problem is not merely how to account for or justify sharp differences in the range of sociopolitical, economic, cultural, linguistic, or legal rights bestowed to the collective, but how to identify the type of collective which has developed in relation to its Other. From Hospitality to Derridean ‘Hostipitality’ Derrida’s inquiry into the aporia of hospitality starts with Immanuel Kant. In Toward a Perpetual Peace: A Philosophic Sketch, Kant provides a set of articles for preventing conflict through a pacific federation of liberal republics. In arguing that the right of world citizens shall be “limited to the conditions of universal hospitality,” Kant shows that part and parcel of his account of the state, sovereignty, citizenship, and residency is the relation of hospitality (Kant 2002, 441). Treated as an indispensable and urgent practice for the maintenance of peace rather than a recommended or prescribed conduct toward the Other, hospitality is expounded as … the right of a stranger not to be treated with hostility when he arrives on someone else’s territory. He can indeed be turned away, if this is done without causing his death, but he must not be treated with hostility, so long as he behaves in a peaceable manner in the place he happens to be in. The stranger cannot claim the right of a guest to be entertained, for this would require a special friendly agreement whereby he might become a member of the native household for a certain time. He may only claim a right of resort, for all men are entitled to present themselves in the society of others by virtue of their right to communal possession of the earth’s surface (Kant 2002, 441, emphasis added). The language of rights employed by Kant becomes immediately apparent. Hospitality is limited to the right of a visitor, a figure that is contrasted with that of a citizen or resident on whose sovereign political territory the right of hospitality – of a temporary occupation of the space – is extended. Derrida writes, “…we are thus in the space of right, not of morality and politics or anything else but of a right determined in its relation to