introduction3 Palestinian-Arabs in Israel is, at best, paradoxical. On the one hand, they are denied both national-membership, as non-Jews, and state identification, given Israel’s legal, political and social self-definition as a state for the Jewish people. On the other hand, this community is also distanced from the rest of the Palestinian population through the same legal, political and social dimensions. As it stands, the State of Israel continues to deny the existence of its Palestinian-Arab citizenry as an indigenous population, a national group, or even a national minority. Far from integration into the Israeli regime, Palestinians are placed in a paradoxical situation where, as Arab citizens of a Jewish state, they are both inside and outside, host and guest, citizen and stateless. In examining the case of Jewish and Palestinian-Arab citizens, questions of ‘who is the guest’ and ‘who is the host’, the interchangeability of these roles and the violent dynamics between them, become particularly relevant to understanding the development of their relationship. Given the subjective nature of collective consciousness, it is immensely difficult to agree not only when but also even whether a collective or a host – and therefore a guest – has emerged. The problem that follows from this is not merely how to account for or justify sharp differences in the range of socio-political, economic, cultural, linguistic, or legal rights bestowed to the collective. It is also one of how to discern the type of collective that has developed in relation to its Other. That said, we cannot consider the collective evolution of the Palestinian citizenry of Israel without assessing the kind of citizenship regime within which they are placed. However complex these determinations may be, it is clear that Israeli (ab)uses of citizenship perpetrated in the process of placing Arabs within their multifaceted system of control have situated these people on the periphery of both Israeli and Palestinian society. It is also clear that, rather than pursuing the absorption or integration of the Arab citizenry, Israeli policy has, since the inception of the state, been shaped by the objective of effective control and exclusion.7 Equally clearly, this objective has been realized, insofar as it has succeeded, through the active application of the principles, tools and discourse of citizenship. 7 See Lustick (1980). Many analysts, this author included, view the ultimate and ongoing objective of the Zionist project (and its policies of exclusion and control) as one of completing the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian-Arabs left unfinished in 1948 in the entire area of Mandate Palestine. This reading is repeatedly confirmed not only through Israeli land laws that dispossess and expel Palestinians from their lands, but also through threats of mass attacks and collective punishment of Palestinians that surface in statements made through news outlets, quasi-official documents and policy- and decision-makers.