israeli hostipitality113 arrival of the Other pushes beyond the liberal-democratic (and Kantian) notion of restricted hospitality, which instructs us to welcome the guest insofar as we are citizens and residents of a country and can claim ownership over the space. Derrida’s thoughts on hospitality require us to rethink the laws and protocols of the common, of the public, of the Other – and thus – of the self. Oscillating between Host and Guest Embedded ambiguities in the concept and nature of collective consciousness complicate our ability to determine when a collective – a host and thus its perennial Other – has manifested. And with our identification of a host subject, whether individual or collective, arises another, and perhaps more difficult, two-pronged task of, first, determining the kind of host that has emerged, and, second, giving reasons for stark variations in rights and benefits granted to this host subject in relation to the guest at the sociopolitical, budgetary and economic, cultural, linguistic, religious and/or legal levels. In the case of Palestinians and Jewish-Israelis, both lay claim to a certain indigeneity, or host-status, in defining their relationship with the space. Putting questions of the justifiability of the respective claims aside here, and without claiming the legitimacy or equal validity of both claims, I would like to examine the kinds of host-guest categories that are projected by both collectives. To begin, Palestinians assert their indigeneity on the basis of their historical and political ties and continued centurieslong majority status on the land prior to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. The continued presence of Arabs in the area of Mandate Palestine is a historical fact well-documented by Palestinian, Israeli and international scholars, the rejection of which can only be symptomatic of a case of historical denial. With the creation of Israel, the remaining 10 percent of the Arab population were distinguished from other Palestinians by the fact that they stayed on their lands. And these were lands that had, in a short period of diplomacy at the newly established United Nations, been legally re-categorized as belonging to a Jewish state. Despite the violent expulsions and mass flight caused by the organized Zionist military forces, the Palestinian collective remaining in their historical homeland were immediately, and involuntarily, granted Israeli citizenship. It is the children and grandchildren of this indigenous Arab population who found themselves living in a Jewish state that constitute today’s Palestinian