ABSTRACT
In October 2013 the Israeli Supreme Court rejected a petition by an Israeli group campaigning for the separation of state and religion to replace the word “Jewish” with “Israeli” on ID cards and population registry documents, and to thus include Palestinian citizens of Israel in the term “Israeli nationality”. Israeli ID documents feature an “ethnicity”, or “nationhood”/ nationality (le’om in Hebrew), category, with the most common being “Jewish” and “Arab” (for Palestinian citizens of Israel). The Court ruled that the existence of an Israeli nationality has not been “objectively proven” and that “Jewishness is not only a religion but also a nationality [and] is a foundational principle of Zionism” (White 2013). Salman Masalha (2013) argues that Palestinian citizens of Israel already claimed “Israeli” nationality in the 1950s, yet, paradoxically, the term “Israeli”, used in Israeli passports, does not feature on Israeli ID cards, enabling the state’s policing agents to differentiate and categorize racially. The court’s rejection of the existence of Israeli nationality in favor of the separate national identities “Jewish” and “Arab”—contradicting the ethnic equality claim of Israel’s Declaration of Independence-illustrates the exceptionality of the settler-colonial racial state that is Israel-Palestine.
