Israel’s Politics of Citizenship

Abstract

Israel has absorbed considerable numbers of non-olim immigrants since the 1990s. This phenomenon has posed new challenges to the state’s highly restrictive and ethnic citizenship policy, resulting in the emergence of a new phase in its politics of citizenship, which this article seeks to describe and analyze. By employing the methodology of political claims analysis—based on newspaper articles reporting attempts to expand immigrants’ access to Israeli citizenship between 1994 and 2013—and an in-depth study of one specific struggle over immigrants’ status, spanning the years 2003–2006, it shows that Israel provides a much narrower, although by no means closed, ‘opportunity structure’ for enabling immigrants to access citizenship when compared to developed liberal democracies.