Towards a Shared and Equal Citizenship in Israel: Political, Legal, Identity-Based, and Symbolic Reconstructions

Im my lecture I argue that the Palestinian Arab citizens in Israel are both de facto and de jure located since decades outsides the borders of the Israeli citizenship. This is a direct effect of the ideological principles of the establishment of the state (the political Zionism) as well as the nature of the state of Israel and its relationship with its "non-Jewish" citizens. This relations can be summarized in an escalation of dispossession during the last seven decades: first, in the year 1948 where we are talking about dispossession from their homeland. The second type of dispossession happens thoughout the decades of being citizens of the state of Israel and attempting to keep their national belonging and identity to the Palestinian people. The third and last stage of this continual escalation concentrates on the recent political developments within the Israeli political system, i.e here specifically the Basic Law of Nationality; as well as the boarder political and public discourse of the participation of an Arab political party in the new coalition.

I claim that the description of unequal citizenship between the Jewish majority and the Arab minority in Israel represents a Jewish hegemony and superiority with racist institutional as well as symbolic discrimination, and I suggest at the end of my lecture processes of deconstructions in terms of political, legal, identity and symbols I believe are needed to be discussed and reconstructed in any attempt to rebuild a new reality of shared citizenship, sharing in power and eventually new Israeli identity and state-national symbols.