6 introduction expansion?­These are the kinds of questions that notable scholars have emphasized. By and large, the academic literature has tried to make analytical ‘sense’ of what it is that has led to a deepening internal and disparate disconnect between de jure and de facto citizenship for Arabs in Israel. To this end, critical social scientists will often correctly point to an absence of rights, identification and representation with formal Israeli citizenship. In doing so, scholars have described the Israeli citizenship of the Palestinians in a variety of ways, including: one-way citizenship, hegemonic citizenship, illusory citizenship, shrinking citizenship, ghettoized citizenship, hollow citizenship, mere citizenship, something less than citizenship, and a citizenship emptied of real content. But on the question of how the space for Palestinian citizenship has (d)evolved, (de)generated, or been (re)drawn, the existing literature has mainly focused on the structural, institutional, conceptual, sociological, legal, racialized, historical, economic, and gendered tendencies within the Israeli incorporation regime. Broadly speaking, the existing literature on the exclusionary dynamics of Palestinian citizenship has mainly taken the form of depicting it as missing something – as an incomplete or partial citizenship whose structure cannot be used to sustain a liberal democratic society. Taken together, the question of how this deprived Arab citizenship is formed and maintained, and the kinds of relations of exclusion that are created, is often answered by describing the rights, freedoms, resources, benefits, and discourses that are absent, exclusionary or made inaccessible. This book does not contest these observations. On the contrary, it is upon the impressive and rich critical scholarship on Palestinians in Israel that this book is based. Working from this literature, the purpose here is instead to conceptualize an analytical framework for understanding how the dynamics of exclusion in Palestinian citizenship have developed. To this end, it is argued that the means, the actual medium, through which, by which, and from which marginalized Palestinian existence is maintained in Israel is citizenship itself. As the chapters outline, it is the provision of citizenship, the very inclusion within the Israeli citizenship regime that creates the inherent contradictions and paradoxes of Arab citizenship in a Jewish state. So, in contrast to other Western nation-states, the Israeli citizenship regime inverts the relation of exception embedded within the classical model of liberal citizenship.9 It is Palestinian inclusion within the 9 Importantly, certain features of the relation of exclusive-inclusion (as explained in Chapter Six) integral to Israeli citizenship may appear to readers as also being characteristic of the citizenship regimes to which indigenous populations are faced in the West,