Inclusion Through Exclusion ― How Young Immigrant Israelis in the Nationalist Yisra'el Beitenu Party Read Israeli Citizenship

How do young people from immigrant families become engaged in politics? Anja Schmidt-Kleinert examines the case of young Israelis who are actively engaged with the nationalist Yisra’el Beitenu party, led by the Israeli minister of defense, Avigdor Lieberman. She explores how the activists present Israeli citizenship in a way that is exclusionary to non-Jewish citizens and analyzes their strategy to actively construct a sense of belonging to Israeli society or, more precisely, to the Jewish collective by (re-)producing ethnonationalist discourse.

Anja Schmidt-Kleinert is a research associate in the Department of Political Science at the Philipps University of Marburg, Germany. She received her doctoral degree from the University of Bielefeld, Germany, and specializes in the political extreme right, citizenship studies, and discourse studies.