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 defence, Avigdor Lieberman. She explores how the activists present Israeli citizenship in a way that is exclusionary to non-Jewish citizens and analyses their strategy to actively construct a sense of belonging to Israeli society or, more precisely, to the Jewish collective by using the ethno-nationalist public discourse.


Anja Schmidt-Kleinert (PhD), born in 1979, is a research associate at the Department of Political Science at the Philipps University of Marburg, Germany. She received her doctorate degree in Sociology from the University of Bielefeld, Germany, and specialises in the political extreme right, citizenship studies, and discourse studies.