Summary
The imagined Israeli civic identity — ‘Israeli-Arabness’ or ‘Arab-Israeliness’ — that Stateless Citizenship (2013) treats in Chapter 3 as a tool of Israeli Hostipitality: the Zionist state’s attempt to narrowly incorporate its Palestinian citizenry on condition of accepting Jewish domination (Stateless Citizenship (2013), PDF p.136-137).
Details
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The particular kind of Arab citizen invited by liberal Zionists to act as a constituent of its democracy, the ‘Israeli-Arab’, is a de-Palestinianized Arab who is named ‘Arab’ so as not to be Palestinian but is, at the same time and through multifaceted systems of control and exclusion, prevented from becoming a full Israeli as an Arab (PDF p.137).
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The category clouds the foundation of the Zionist state in the rigid binary classification of peoples into Jewish and non-Jewish; despite opting for inclusion under ‘Israeli Arab’, Palestinian-Arabs continue to exist under the category of non-Jew at a social and legal level, so that ‘Israeli-Arab’ becomes “a self-contradictory concept” (Derrida 2005, 5, as quoted, PDF p.137).
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Acceptance of the identity would liberate the Jewish-Israeli host from the temporariness of its host status and entrench its self-conceived indigeneity, while locking Palestinian-Arabs into a guest status dependent on permission, interrogation and compliance; its auto-immunizing and self-contradictory components render its realization nonviable (PDF p.138-139).
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In Chapter 4 the identity reappears in Alexander Yakobson and Amnon Rubinstein’s account: the identity of ‘Israel-Arab’ is meant to solve the paradoxical existence of Palestinian citizens of a Jewish state, the authors asserting that an Arab citizen can call herself ‘Israeli’ without giving up her national identity while also asserting that the name Israel is “anything but neutral” (Yakobson and Rubinstein 2009, 7, 142, as quoted, PDF p.149).
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In Stateless Citizenship (2013) Chapter 4, Rashid Bey in Altneuland is read as the prototype: the de-Palestinianized Arab, vividly content to integrate into an explicitly Jewish society, corresponding to the ‘new Arab’ demanded today — citizens called ‘Israeli-Arabs’ are “named Arabs so as not to be Palestinians but, at the same time, they cannot be full Israelis as Arabs”, included only narrowly as ‘non-Jews’ after accepting Jewish domination (PDF p.153-155). Chapter 5 adds Rouhana’s label analysis (1997, 111-112) and Bishara’s formulation that “in order to be Arab-Israeli, the Israeli-Arab has to be part of his rejection” (PDF p.170, p.188).
Related pages
Stateless Citizenship (2013), Hostipitality, Stateless Citizenship, Indigeneity