Lana Tatour now just like immigrants. They had to prove lawful residence in the country for three and five years, which many Palestinians struggled to do. They also had to demonstrate “some knowledge of the Hebrew language.”111 While the Law of Return immediately categorized Jewish settlers, who for the most part had no knowledge of Hebrew when they arrived in the country, as citizens under the Law of Return, Palestinian natives had to know the language of the settlers (despite the formal status of Arabic as an official language).112 In a Knesset discussion, Yaacov Klivnov, the chair of the legislative committee on the Citizenship Law, defended the language requirement: As for the Hebrew language requirement, if a person applies for citizenship in Israel without having the natural right to become one, which means that he is essentially asking the state to extend its generosity and welcome him as a naturalized citizen, then it will be only just to ask him to have a certain level of knowledge of the Hebrew language.113 Demands for language proficiency are never neutral, as language is a key signifier of national identity. The revival of Hebrew was vital to the Zionist project of forging the Jewish nation.114 Foregrounding the dominance of the settler language through citizenship and immigration laws was central to the naturalization of settlement and settler nationalism. In Israel, as in other settler states, the language requirement became a barrier to naturalization. While other settler states, such as Australia, used language skills as a racial tool to exclude non-European migrants,115 in Israel the demand for language proficiency was a tool against the native population itself. In fact, Israel still uses language proficiency tests to deny citizenship to Palestinians from East Jerusalem, claiming that they fail to exhibit adequate knowledge of Hebrew.116 The naturalization of Palestinians proceeded slowly. In the years that followed the law’s passage, Palestinians submitted thousands of citizenship applications. But according to Ministry of Interior figures, the Israeli state only naturalized 218 Palestinians between July 1952 and January 1959.117 It was estimated that the number of Arabs who were not citizens of Israel but who could be eligible to apply for naturalization, provided that they settled their residence status as legal, was about thirty-three thousand.118 By the late 1960s, the number of stateless Palestinians in Israel had reached sixty thousand.119 Thousands of cases reached the courts. The citizenship status of some was settled in the late 1960s, following Israel’s decision to join the 31 Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3533490