Israel's Politics of Citizenship

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.