Lana Tatour What is the rush? We already have 100,000 Arabs with voting rights. That is enough and we do not need, nor is it our duty, to add to that number. This is a matter not of equal rights, but of civil rights. Civil rights are not pregiven. We made an exception for the Jew. When he comes here, to his country, he immediately becomes a citizen. But with non-Jews conditions must be set, as is done in every other state.84 Similarly, when a draft of the Entry into Israel Law suggested the transformation of tens of thousands of Palestinians from temporary to permanent residents, which also meant the addition of forty thousand Arabs to the voter list, Ben Gurion was furious: “Why the rush to give all Arabs permanent residence? Why do you care if an Arab has a temporary residence permit? I do not understand this urgency.”85 In retrospect, although it appears that Ben Gurion lost the battle over the citizenship law, Israel’s current citizenship regime reveals that in fact his vision triumphed. Territorial expansion remains the guiding logic of Israel’s policies. And since Israel is the effective sovereign power in Palestine, on both sides of the Green Line,86 the Israeli state denies citizenship to the vast majority of Palestinians under Israeli rule. If anything, the status that Ben Gurion envisaged was a combination of the current status of the Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and the residence status of Palestinians in East Jerusalem. The latter case is particularly relevant. With the occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967, Israel introduced a permanent residency status. Despite being named “permanent,” this status can in fact be awarded or taken away at the interior minister’s discretion—and mostly the latter. Since 1967, Israel has applied a policy of creeping transfer, revoking the residency status of nearly fifteen thousand Palestinians.87 Ben Gurion’s vision was precisely that: leaving the majority of Palestinians in a condition similar to that of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, while creating a vulnerable and revocable residency status for those registered in the first census. Settler Indigenization and the Making of Alien Citizens The decision to draft a citizenship law, as discussed above, was motivated by an aspiration to solidify the outcomes of the 1948 war and to advance Israel’s war on infiltration. The drafting of the law, however, proved difficult. Guided by an “imperative to establish a colonial rule of difference within 25 Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3533490