Summary
Molavi’s term, adapting Yasemin Soysal’s concept of an incorporation regime, for the system by which Israel places its inhabitants in differentiated legal categories and incorporates Palestinian-Arab citizens through a citizenship framework that excludes them (Stateless Citizenship (2013), PDF p.21, p.38).
Details
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The regime favours Jews and does not treat inhabitants equally; Jewish privilege and dominance stretches over ‘Israel proper’ and the Occupied Territories, and its maintenance depends on placing non-Jewish inhabitants in various legal classifications arranged according to a spatial logic — refugees outside, occupied residents, East Jerusalem residents, and citizens — each with differing sets of privilege and protection (PDF p.21).
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Its citizenship regime is shaped by Zionist ideology nurturing sophisticated policies of exclusion working in tandem with limited inclusion in all areas of social life; Jewish identity is automatically merged with Israeli citizenship and provides a broader scope of rights irrespective of formal citizenship (PDF p.24).
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The concept of an incorporation regime as outlined by Soysal is used to show how self-conceptions of nationhood and statehood are inscribed in the citizenship regime of a state (PDF p.38).
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Israeli policy within the regime has, since the inception of the state, been shaped by the objective of effective control and exclusion, realized through the active application of the principles, tools and discourse of citizenship (PDF p.23).
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Chapter 1’s conclusion gives Yasemin Soysal’s definition in full: an incorporation regime refers to “patterns of institutional practices and more or less explicit cultural norms that define the membership of individuals and/or groups in the society and differentially allocate entitlements, obligations and domination” (Soysal 1994, 36, at PDF p.61). Molavi’s Zionist incorporation regime produces intense juridico-political, socio-cultural and economic mechanisms of exclusion whose racialized frameworks work in conjunction, intersect and fuel one another, so that treatment in isolation from one another is ineffective (PDF p.62).
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Chapter 2 examines the regime at the legislative level — the post-2009 discriminatory laws, from the land amendments and the Admissions Committees Law to the Nakba Law, the NGO funding law, the Ban on Boycotts Law and the proposed loyalty oath — and then, following As’ad Ghanem, at the declarative, structural and operational levels: the absence of constitutional equality, the Law of Return and Citizenship Law (1952) substructure, exclusion from decision-making and the judiciary, and the criminalization of Arab political participation from October 2000 through the Azmi Bishara and Haneen Zoabi cases to the Ameer Makhoul case (PDF p.70-103).
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Chapter 2 completed in Stateless Citizenship (2013) (part 3): at the operative and budgetary level, Palestinian citizens are denied proportional representation and access in budgets, resources and land allocations; Zionist organizations hold quasi-governmental status serving Jews only, and budgetary discrimination runs through education (2008 illiteracy of 13.4 percent for Arab women against 3.4 percent for Jewish women), religious-site funding (135 officially recognized holy sites in early 2007, all Jewish), health and employment (2008 average gross household salary of 8,818 NIS for Arab citizens against 14,242 NIS for Jewish-Israeli households) (PDF p.107-113).
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Its land configuration rests on the Absentee Property Law and the 1960-1961 Israel Lands laws administering JNF-controlled land on JNF principles, so that 93 percent of Israel’s territory is under direct state control while before 1948 Palestinian-Arabs owned and/or cultivated some 93-94 percent of the land in geographical Palestine (PDF p.113-117).
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The chapter closes by structuring the regime as an Apartheid state system — see Apartheid (PDF p.118-126).
Related pages
Stateless Citizenship (2013), Stateless Citizenship, Judaization, Yasemin Soysal, As’ad Ghanem