ABSTRACT
This chapter historicizes the explicit refusal of the state’s Jewish legislators to consider the merits of turning the country into a genuine republic. It begins by chronicling how an ethno-racial hierarchy of citizenship was embedded in Israel’s DNA from its birth in 1948. This arrangement created a legal and political bifurcation between nationals and citizens: between the country’s newfound Jewish majority, which arrogated for itself the rights to the state, and the country’s newfound Palestinian minority, which was granted a set of discrete rights – mainly suffrage and the right to not be deported – within it. The analysis then turns to explore how the contradictions emerging from the colonization of the West Bank and Gaza Strip since 1967 have entrenched the division between Jewish nationals and Arab citizens, while also paralyzing Israel’s political system. Although Israel has deprived non-citizen Palestinians in the occupied territories of any civil or political rights, their current and future status is inextricably linked to that of their enfranchised compatriots within the state’s 1949 armistice lines, and vice versa.
