40 chapter one The potentially destructive capacity of minority categorizations and the problematic elements in the attempt to draw a sharp distinction between the categories of indigenous peoples and national minorities produce various difficulties. Discursive categories in international legal texts have the power to mould the historical and political understanding of the population in the consciousness of both the ruling establishment and the community itself. In doing so, minority categorizations create moral inconsistencies, conceptual ambiguities, and fragile political frameworks (Kymlicka 2008, 10). For Kymlicka, the real difficulty is not whether the subject is autonomy-seeking indigenous peoples or integration-seeking minorities, but rather the moral and political inconsistencies following from a sharp distinction in rights between the two types of groups. He argues that “whatever arguments exist for recognizing the rights of indigenous peoples to self-government also apply to the claims for selfgovernment by other vulnerable and historically disadvantaged homeland groups” (Kymlicka 2008, 10). Kymlicka contends that outside the core cases of European immigrant or colonial-settler states, the very distinction between indigenous peoples and other homeland minorities is problematic. “In a familiar sense,” he argues, “no groups in Africa, Asia, or the Middle East fit the traditional profile of indigenous peoples,” as all of the homeland minorities in these regions were merged into larger states dominated by neighbouring populations rather than into European settlerstates (Kymlicka 2008, 12). As such, for Kymlicka, these groups are more in conjunction with the profile of European national minorities than with indigenous peoples in occupied lands. Alternatively, using a more critical conceptual lens that views group categorizations in the context of colonial rule, all homeland groups including the dominating majority group can be classified as indigenous in relation to the colonial rulers. From this perspective, the homeland groups and the dominant groups in post-­ colonial states are “indigenous” in a historical and political capacity. That said, in the case of Israel, and important to my prospective examination of Israeli citizenship, Kymlicka makes reference to the work of Arab political scientist Amal Jamal who argues that the Israeli national project should be considered and included as a European settler-colonial state.10 Thus, with this inclusion, the Palestinians both inside and outside of Israel’s imagined borders would meet the traditional definition of an indigenous people. Taken together, and despite the distinctions made between different 10 See Amal Jamal, “On the Morality of Arab Collective Rights in Israel,” Adalah’s Newsletter 12 (April 2005), www.old-adalah.org/newsletter/eng/apr05/ar2.pdf.