Legality and [Dis]membership: Removal of Citizenship and the Creation of "Virtual Immigrants" in the 1967 Israeli Occupied Territories.

Stratification of residency rights between colonizer and colonized is one of the hallmarks of citizenship in settler-colonial states. Studies of colonial ethno-national territorial projects have largely focused on the ways in which military force is used to facilitate expulsion and dispossession of colonized populations. I argue that contemporary forms of settler-colonialism have come to rely on legal techniques, and on immigration law in particular, to achieve desired demographic transformations. This paper investigates the way in which immigration and residency laws have obstructed the realization of the right to leave and to return to one's country by focusing on the case of Israel-Palestine. I first lay-out the complex regime of residency that has developed under Israeli law since 1967 and which prevents Palestinians who have established a "center of life" outside of Israel from returning to live in Israel-Palestine. I then discuss the way in which national courts, by refusing to consider the relevance of international legal norms such as the right of return, have legitimated and extended these principles. This assertive reliance on legal formalism and legal fictions occludes considerations of internationally recognized human rights, including the right of return. In this context, colonized populations are vulnerable to being legally recast as 'aliens' or 'virtual immigrants' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]