Lana Tatour determines that “the exercise of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish People.”3 It enshrines the existing state symbols, such as the flag and the national anthem; confirms Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel; demotes Arabic from an official language to one with “special status”; and legalizes the ongoing practice of establishing Jewish-only settlements. Eight months after the law’s enactment, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated: “Israel is not a state of all its citizens. According to the basic nationality law we passed, Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people—and only it.”4 Defending the Nation-State Bill, Netanyahu added: “The Arab citizens have twenty-two nation states around them, and they do not need another.”5 Both the law and Netanyahu’s statements drew attention to the citizenship status of ’48 Palestinians (known also as Palestinian citizens of Israel). The Basic Law was perceived by many to be a testament to the status of Palestinians in Israel as second-class citizens. This inferior status, however, is neither new nor simply a byproduct of discrimination or marginalization that contradicts liberal ideals and conceptions of citizenship. Rather, the inferiority of ’48 Palestinian in the Jewish state has been ingrained in and inherent to Israel’s citizenship regime from its outset. To understand the vulnerability of Palestinian citizenship in Israel, we need to turn to history. Accordingly, this article traces the making of the Israeli citizenship regime. It considers how the question of citizenship has been intimately tied to geopolitical considerations of territory and sovereignty, as well as to processes of subjectivation. The article focuses on the period between 1948 and 1952, the period in which the 1950 Law of Return, which governs Jewish entitlement to citizenship, and the 1952 Citizenship Law, which governs the status of ’48 Palestinians, were enacted. I am interested in what this formative period, in which the constitutional cornerstones of Israel’s citizenship regime came into being, can tell us about Palestinian citizenship in Israel and about the institution of citizenship in settler colonial contexts more broadly. We are often told that Israel’s citizenship regime, which guarantees Jewish preference in access to citizenship, is rooted in Israel’s unique position as the state of the Jewish people. The story of citizenship making in Israel is by no means exceptional, however. New archival evidence presented in this article reveals that Israeli leaders consciously drew on citizenship and immigration laws in Australia, the United States, Canada, and South Africa 9 Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3533490