The power asymmetry between Israelis and Palestinians is shaped by the unequal condition of statehood and statelessness within a twentieth-century international order that increasingly organized political legitimacy through the nation-state. As older imperial, multinational, and pan-national frameworks weakened, peoples became most politically visible through state-recognized nationality, territorial sovereignty, citizenship, and borders.

Statelessness is one of the most profound experiences Jews and Palestinians share, and it is also at the heart of what separates them. After some of the most catastrophic periods in their history, Jews reconstituted themselves most securely through Israel and, differently, through the United States and other diasporic centers. Palestinians, by contrast, continue to live statelessness as an immediate political condition, or as an unstable minority status within Israel. That condition is especially jarring given that it unfolded in a region where Arab majorities and pan-Arab idioms often promised protection against colonial partition, foreign rule, and political fragmentation.

There was no obvious reason Palestinians, or the wider Arab world, would accept Zionist settlement and state-building in Palestine, especially as these developed under British imperial rule. Nor was it surprising that, after Palestinians lost their territorial majority through war and displacement, their national cause came to be recognized by postcolonial movements, international institutions, and international law. Yet international recognition has not prevented occupation, statelessness, settlement,........

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