Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel's Liberal Settler State


March 21, 2013

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Prof. Shira Robinson's new book, Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel's Liberal Settler State (Stanford University Press, 2013), analyzes the paradoxical status of the Palestinian Arabs who managed to remain in or return to the new state of Israel following the 1948 war and the creation of the state of Israel. Offered immediate suffrage rights and, in time, citizenship status, they nonetheless found their movement, employment, and civil rights restricted by a draconian military government put in place to facilitate the colonization of their lands. The book traces how Jewish leaders struggled to advance their historic settler project while forced by new international human rights norms to share political power with the very people they sought to uproot.