from citizenship to stateless citizenship151 Rouhana deconstructs the three-pronged construction of Israeli policy and law through an analysis of the internal contradictions of Israel as a Jewish state, as a democratic state, and as a state with security needs, to illustrate the practical and conceptual mechanisms through which Palestinian-Arabs are excluded from the national identity of the state (Rouhana 1997, 44–64). From this, the forces internal and external to the state – including Israel’s ethnically exclusionary policies and laws against its Arab citizens and the broader Palestinian-Zionist conflict – are used to outline the confusing and contradictory dynamics of Arab collective identity in Israel. Rouhana explains that … their Israeli identity was devoid of the essence that holds collective identity together – the affective axes, which include belonging and connect all layers to the self-definition core. Thus the Arabs in Israel were left with an identity that could be neither fully Israeli nor fully Palestinian (Rouhana 1997, 202). And reasserts: [T]he identity of the Arabs in Israel is doubly incomplete. Although it is true that they are both Israelis and Palestinians, neither of these identities is complete. … [Yet] their Israeli identity is incomplete in a different way – it lacks the exact same components that engulf their Palestinian identity (Rouhana 1997, 219, emphasis added). Rouhana points out that the multifaceted separation between Arabs and Jews at the level of national symbols, narratives, institutions, structures and discourses generates two distinct and unrelated collective identities. This situation is reinforced with the legal and political absence of an ‘Israeli’ nation – a point I will revisit below – and results in a situation where both Arabs and Jews have an incomplete and deficient Israeli collective identity. Of course, both are deficient in different ways. Considering seriously the possibility of a “multilaterally accepted identity” negotiated among opposing groups, Rouhana dedicates the latter part of his book to various structural political options for the development of a genuine collective Israeli identity (Rouhana 1997, 23, see also chapters 11 and 12). Here he posits a bi-national state and concludes that Israel must dispose of its ethnic exclusivity as a Jewish state in order to be both a democratic state accessible to all of its citizens and residents, and to construct a meaningful and united collective Israeli national identity. Working from Rouhana’s assessment that the Arab citizens of Israel are “partial Israelis and partial Palestinians” and that both identities are “incomplete,” As’ad Ghanem’s book examines what he calls the “distressed