  &   Contesting ethnic immigration: Germany and Israel compared F         entangled as victim and perpetrator during th century’s darkest hour, Israel and Germany adopted curiously similar policies of ethnic immigration after World War II. Both states welcomed newcomers as ‘immigrants’, that is, for permanent settlement and membership in the national community, only if they qualified ex ante as co-ethnics, that is, members of the state-defining majority nation. This sets an interesting counterpoint to the reverse development in the new settler nations, such as Australia or the United States, which shifted after World War II from ethnicity and race to culturally neutral criteria of immigrant admission, most notably individual skills and family unification. This is not to deny the fundamentally different perceptions of these immigrations in both cases, most notably the denial by Israel and Germany that their ethnic immigrations were ‘immigration’ at all, but rather the ‘return’ of co-ethnics. However, this self-perception conflicts with the fact that in each instance we are dealing with the admission by a state of non-citizens (or ‘aliens’) for more than temporary stays on its territory, which in common sense, as well as in international migration law (Plender ), constitutes ‘immigration’. Despite basic similarities, ethnic immigration in our two cases is marked by sharply differing trajectories: while Jewish immigration to Israel shows no sign of weakening, the parallel ‘return’ of ethnic Germans to Germany has, in principle, come to an end, in a law of  that limits the status of ethnic Germans to persons born before . The purpose of this article is to account for this variation, emphasizing differently structured political spaces for contesting ethnic immigration as an explanatory variable. We thus offer an interpretation of ethnic immigration that differs from the conventional perspective on the underlying type of immigration policy, which links it ‘straight-line’ to deep-seated and relatively fixed ethnic conceptions of nationhood (for  Christian J, European University Institute (Florence). Zeev R, Hebrew University (Jérusalem). Arch. europ. sociol., XLIII,  (), -—-//-$. per art + $. per page ©  A.E.S.   &   Germany, see Brubaker ; for Israel, see Weiss ). However, our stress on the political mechanisms that either shore up or undermine ethnic immigration is not to deny the important role of ethnic understandings of nationhood in the setting-up of ethnic immigration policies; only they tell us a little about the further course and the sources of possible contention surrounding ethnic immigration policies. In the first part, we offer a brief phenomenology of ethnic immigration policies, and identify some shortcomings of linking them too closely to ethnic conceptions of nationhood. Secondly, we trace the different origins and justifications of ethnic immigration in Israel and Germany. While ethnic conceptions of nationhood were clearly involved in the ideological articulation and legitimization of ethnic immigration in both cases, geopolitical factors were no less important for getting ethnic immigration started—the perceived demographic need for Jewish immigrants in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict in Israel, World War II consequences, and the Cold War in Germany. In a third step, we argue that the change or persistence of this geopolitical context and different historical connotations of ethnic immigration in both cases explain the different directions that ethnic immigration took in the s. Due to these factors, there was more political space in Germany than in Israel for an effective contestation of ethnic immigration policies. Describing and explaining ethnic immigration policies While there has been considerable recent theorizing on the determinants of ‘normal’ immigration policies, such as interest-group pressure (Freeman ), autonomous legal systems (Joppke ), subnational mobilization (Money ; Karapin ), and supranational norms and regimes (Jacobson, ; critical Guiraudon and Lahav, ), the specificities of ethnic immigration policies have largely escaped scholarly attention. Hence, it may be worthwhile to delineate some characteristics of this type of immigration policy. Israel and Germany’s policies of ethnic immigration are part of a larger family of immigration policies that screen newcomers according to ethnic, racial, or national-origins criteria. Such schemes differ along at least three dimensions (). First, some ethnic immigration policies screen according to the citizenship (in the formal sense of nationality or () These dimensions are inductively derived from a study of eight countries, which is currently being conducted by Christian Joppke.  :    state membership) of the would-be immigrant, while others select on his or her ethnicity proper. Selecting on citizenship is categorical and generic, based on the simple presence or absence of the requisite state nationality (). By contrast, selecting on ethnicity proper draws the state into the murky terrain of examining individual ‘identity’ claims, which is an altogether more elaborate—and problematic—procedure than the former. Moreover, the latter creates an incentive on the part of would-be migrants for ‘creative ethnic reidentification’ (Brubaker : ), even for fabricating the requisite ethnicity, for which one may assume the legal and moral threshold to be lower than for fabricating passports. In fact, the multiplication of ‘false’ co-ethnics would pose a serious challenge to both the German and Israeli ethnic immigration policies in the s, opening the space for what we call ‘restrictive’ contestation. Secondly, some ethnic immigration policies give preference to certain ethnic or national-origin groups according to their putative proximity (but essential difference) to the state-bearing nation, whereas others are based on the putative sameness of immigrant group and state-bearing nation. Examples for ‘proximity’ are the U.S. national origins quota of  (see King ), the preference for Italians in early postwar French immigration policy (see Viet ), or the still effective preference for ‘Hispanic’ or ‘Lusophone’ immigrants in Spain and Portugal, respectively. All of these were or are justified in terms of the ‘assimilability’ of immigrants and preserving the ‘homogeneity’ of the receiving society. An example of ‘sameness’ concerns ethnic Germans and Jews, who are believed to be not similar to but identical with the state-bearing nation. Whereas proximity schemes are justified in terms of homogeneity and assimilation, and thus in terms of state and society interests, sameness schemes are couched as the right of the ethnic migrant, to be held against the receiving state. In the German case, the right of return is a constitutional right, enshrined in Article  of the Basic Law; in Israel, it is formally a statutory right, but ideationally a natural right that precedes the existence of the state. Finally, some ethnic immigration policies restrict eligibility according to the time and place in which ethnic claims are raised, while others do not. On this dimension the German and Israeli cases ultimately take opposite positions. The German Law of Return was designed as a temporary remedy for the consequences of war and expellation, cover() Examples of citizenship (or country-oforigin)-based ethnic immigration policies are the national origins quota in place in the United States until , or—to quote some contemporary examples—the preferences in Portuguese and Spanish immigration and nationality laws and policies for citizens from Lusophone and Hispanic countries, respectively.    &   ing only ethnic Germans caught in the Soviet Empire, who were deemed to be persecuted for being German. By contrast, Israel’s Law of Return is a permanent, state-constituting provision, applying to every Jew in the world, independently of their individual or group-specific persecution. In its expansiveness and state-defining quality, the Israeli ethnic immigration is unique in the world. This introduces the main objective of this article, which is to account for the resilience of Israel’s ethnic immigration, and the demise-inprinciple of Germany’s. Reference to their different intended designs is, of course, at best the beginning of an answer, not the answer itself. Examples abound where notionally temporary and categorically limited rights and entitlements are expanded and perpetuated by the very clientele and vested interests created by these provisions, thus crossing out the originally limited purpose of the underlying policy (for the case of minority voting rights in the U.S., see Thernstrom ). The very fact of divergent outcomes in Israel and Germany casts doubt on a culturalist account of ethnic immigration, which links the latter to deep-seated and relatively static ‘ethnic’, as against ‘civic’, understandings of nationhood. In an otherwise superbly subtle normative discussion of immigration policy as a political community’s quintessential act of collective self-determination, Jules Coleman and Sarah Harding () argue (and defend) that Israel and Germany (along with Japan) accept immigrants, if they accept them at all, according to ethnic criteria, because these states happen to adhere to an ethnic conception of political community. By contrast, the United States or Canada select newcomers according to individualistic criteria, such as skills and family ties, because they happen to adhere to a civic or strictly ‘political’ conception of political community (). Even the stellar and highly differentiated analysis by Rogers Brubaker () succumbs to the pitfalls of a culturalist explanation when he claims that Germany’s ‘marked openness toward ethnic Germans’ (p.) derives from the German ethnocultural idiom of nationhood. He links the emergence of different idioms of nationhood to specific historical conditions of state-building () Cultural determinism of this sort is admittedly more widespread in normative political theory than in empirical sociology. In normative political theory the argument is as follows. Borders, while arbitrarily set, do not lack moral significance. They allow political communities to flourish, which in turn provide security, meaning and liberty to the individual. These communities are necessarily bounded and particularistic, and they are free  to select new members that reinforce their respective self-conceptions. Primordial reasoning on the normative dimension of immigration policy can be found both among communitarians (Walzer ) and—more implicitly—among some liberals (Kymlicka ). An excellent critique of the ‘genteel vision of politics’ underlying Kymlicka’s (implicitly primordialist) account is Laitin (). :    processes, but once crystallized, these cultural understandings of nationhood become rather rigid and function in his model as allpowerful causal factors. As a consequence, although Brubaker recognizes empirical pressures on the linkage between the ethnocultural idiom of nationhood and ethnic immigration, he cannot conceptually account for them within his overall culturalist approach (). The problem is not the insistence on the cultural conditioning of a state’s immigration policies—this conditioning exists (as we shall see). Rather, the problem is the assumption of a ‘straight line’ between reified and fixed identities and policies, which leaves out other important variables that may influence these policies. Drawing a direct linkage between (ethnic or civic) conceptions of nationhood and immigration policy suffers from what Brubaker (b: ) himself has later called the ‘realism of the group’, that is, the misconception of political communities or nations as real entities with wills and intentions, or—to use Ruth Benedict’s () terms—as ‘personalities writ large’. National identities may be invoked, Bourdieuian style, by individuals and groups who try to impose their preferred immigration policies in a liberal democracy, but ‘identities’ do not as such generate the policies commensurable with them. How could we otherwise explain that the classic new settler nations, now torch-bearers of non-ethnic, and thus universalistic immigration policies, not too long ago subscribed to blatantly ethnic, even racial, criteria of immigrant selection? () Cultural accounts of ethnic immigration revolve around a reified opposition between ‘ethnic’ and ‘civic’ nationhood. In this they follow a central streak in the nations and nationalism literature, from Hans Kohn () to Liah Greenfeld () and Rogers Brubaker (), which has classified Israel and Germany (along with Japan) as proverbially ethnic states, with a preconstituted ‘nation’, conceiving of the state as its tool of representation and protection. In contrast, in ‘civic’ states, where the nation is a creature of the state and thus is politically and territorially conceived (). As writers such as Anthony Smith (: ) have long () Much less sophisticated culturalist accounts are to be found in Schnapper () and Fulbrook (). () For the United States, the recent historiography of immigration and citizenship has shown that there are, at best, ‘multiple traditions’ (R.Smith ) of nationhood that can give rise to widely divergent immigration and citizenship laws and policies, racist as well as liberal ones. We say ‘at best’, because revisionist immigration historians have convincingly refuted the Tocqueville-Myrdalian ‘anomaly’ view of the racist citizenship and immigration laws in force until  and , respectively, showing instead the (most often invisible) racial boundedness of the melting-pot ideal and of American republicanism (Jacobson ; Ngai ; King ). () We admit that the ethnic-civic distinction has mostly been made at the nation-, not the state-level, that is, at the level of culture, not of political institutions. In this vein, Hans    &   argued, this dichotomy does not hold at the empirical level (see also the excellent recent critiques by Yack  and Brubaker , the latter cautiously retracting from his own earlier work of ). Certainly, there are ethnic components to the German and Israeli states’ self-conceptions, and their respective Laws of Return are primary expressions of them. These laws indicate that state and nation do not overlap, as is typically the case in civic states, but that the nation is prior to and wider than the state. However, these ethnic components are strongly counteracted by civic components. The latter maximally derive from competing, more inclusive models of nationhood; minimally they are inherent in the logic of liberal stateness, which revolves around the precepts of equality, public neutrality and the universalistic rule of law. This minimal sense of civic stateness, which both Israel and Germany have to subscribe to qua (desiring to be a) liberal state, is invoked in the Israeli notion that Israel should not only be the state of Jews, but a ‘state of all its citizens’. We shall see that in the Israeli case this points to a multi-national alternative conception of the state, which leaves the ethnic definition of its Jewish constituency intact and only seeks to include the Arab constituency on equal terms; there has been no attempt to forge a more inclusive Israeli ‘nation’. By contrast, in Germany there has been a struggle over the very definition of German nationhood, ethnic or civic, with a strengthening of a civic definition over time. Minimal or maximal, civic-liberal precepts can be found in Israel and Germany alike, providing resources that can be—and have been—mobilized against an ethnic self-conception, and related policies, of the state. What is called the ‘liberal’ challenge to ethnic immigration articulates the tension between ethnic and civic stateness, which is observable even in an extreme case of ethnic stateness such as Israel. This challenge brings out that the state’s preferencing of one ethnic group (even if it coincides with the majority nation) entails discrimination for the nonpreferenced group(s). The liberal challenge is thus carried by or on behalf of other immigrant or minority groups that are disadvantaged by (or appear disadvantaged vis-à-vis) policies supporting such immigration, such as Palestinians in Israel or asylum-seekers and the descendants of Turkish guestworkers in Germany. However, there is also an additional source of conflict surrounding ethnic immigration, which we call the ‘restrictive’ challenge. Instead of deriving from a tension Kohn defined nationalism, with Zangwill and Weber, as ‘a state of mind’. However, he continues to say that this is a state of mind ‘striving to correspond to a political fact’ (Kohn : ), that is, to find embodiment in  a state. Looking at this process from the result, one may apply the ethnic-civic distinction to the state, as we wish to do in the following. We also use the notions of civic and liberal stateness interchangeably. :    between ethnic and civic stateness, the restrictive challenge takes ethnic stateness for granted, and attacks an overly extensive implementation, or even a misguided direction of the immigration policy, which allows the entry of ‘false’ or ‘diluted’ co-ethnics. While the possibility of ‘liberal’ and ‘restrictive’ contention surrounding ethnic immigration is—in principle—available in Germany and Israel alike, the political space for their articulation and mobilization differs according to geopolitical context and different historical connotations of ethnic immigration. In the case of Germany, changes in the geopolitical context (i.e. the end of the Cold War), along with this country’s privileged location in uniting Europe, contributed to a decline in the legitimacy of ethnic immigration, and broadened the political space for its (liberal and restrictive) opponents. In the case of Israel, the persistence of its specific, less privileged geopolitical context (i.e. the conflict with the Palestinians) and of the concomitant material state interest in peopling the land with loyal Jews, helped shore up ethnic immigration against the political forces opposing it in principle or in actual operation. The mapping out of the differently developed political spaces for contestation surrounding ethnic immigration defies any grand macrohistorical or sociological scheme (à la ethnic versus civic nationhood). One even has to consider the mutual implicatedness of both cases under investigation. From a historical point of view, we are dealing not just with two parallels but with two highly interactive cases. If, in addition to the demographic-geopolitical imperative, Israel is an ‘ethnic’ state in a much more unambiguous and stronger sense than Germany ever was, this is of course also due to its grounding in a powerful and enduring historical founding myth, which was provided by (Nazi) Germany’s very attempt to destroy world Jewry. By contrast, the same Nazi quest for racial purity had rendered ethnic stateness in postwar (West) Germany rather oblique and qualified from the start, and a sense of civic nationhood emerged as a strong contender to the compromised ethnic tradition. The ironic result of the tragic German-Jewish encounter under Nazism has been to push the Germans firmly toward civic nationhood, and to lock-in the Jews (and the Israeli state) in an ethnic self-definition. Origins and justifications of ethnic immigration in Israel and Germany A frequent fallacy in cross-national comparisons is to blend out the different physical size of the compared objects and the different scope of    &   their compared characteristics. In our cases, the meaning and impact of numerically and typologically similar (ethnic) immigration is radically different in two countries of vastly different territory and population sizes, and these differences are bound to be even more extreme if one such immigration is entirely constitutive of state and society (as in Israel), whereas the other immigration remains rather peripheral to the latter (as in Germany). Accordingly, interpreting Jewish and ethnic German immigration exclusively in the light of ethnic state and nationhood in Israel and Germany obscures more than it reveals. In the German case, this linkage is at best an indirect one, and by far more relevant has been the political and only temporary imperative of mastering the consequences of World War II, in the context of the Cold War confrontation with the Communist East. In Israel, there is a more direct and openly promulgated link between Jewish immigration and ethnic state and nationhood; however, the full significance of Jewish immigration derives from a conflictive geopolitical environment in which demography is seen as destiny. Demography as destiny in Israel The principle of unrestricted Jewish immigration was legally enshrined in the Law of Return of , whose first article declares that ‘Every Jew has the right to come to this country as an oleh’ (). The Law of Return—one of the few Israeli laws in which there is an explicit reference to Jewishness as the basis for a special privilege—is perhaps the major legal expression of the definition of Israel as a Jewish state (see Klein ; Shachar ). By framing Jewish immigration as ‘return’, the law provides a statutory enunciation of the link between the state and the Jewish Diaspora. Tellingly, the right of return was framed not as an entitlement granted by the state, but as a ‘natural’ right of every Jew in the world that precedes and constitutes the state. Accordingly, the state only recognizes and endorses, but does not create, this right. As Prime Minister Ben-Gurion put it, the Law of Return is not an ‘immigration’ law in which the state establishes which kind of immigrants it is willing to accept; rather, it is ‘the law of the persistence of Jewish history’, on the basis of which the State of Israel has been established (). () Law of Return (-). The English text of the law can be found in the website of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (www.Israel-mfa.gov.il). The term oleh refers to a Jewish immigrant to the Land of Israel. The law was passed by the Knesset unanimously, with not even the non-Zionist Israeli  Communist party dissenting (Hacohen ), and the notion of an absolute and ‘natural’ right of every Jew to settle in Israel was taken for granted by all members of parliament. () Knesset Records,  July , Vol. , p. . The perception of Jewish immigration not as ‘immigration’ but as ‘return’ is reflected :    Part of the legitimation of Israel as a Jewish state is that it should provide a shelter for Jews threatened by persecution. This motif was mentioned in the presentation of the Law of Return in the Knesset (). Yet, the principle of unrestricted Jewish immigration did not only apply to those Jews suffering from discrimination or persecution; instead, the right of return was conceived of as belonging also to Jews willing to settle in Israel because of their ‘love to the ancient tradition, to Hebrew culture and to Israel’s glorious independence’ (). Hence, in a sharp contrast to Germany, the right to freely immigrate to Israel was ideologically framed as based on membership in the ethnonational community per se, and not merely as a remedy to persecution or discrimination. Accordingly, there is no reference at all in the law itself to persecution as a condition for entitlement to the right to immigrate to Israel. However, Jewish immigration is grounded not only in the ethnocultural idiom that defines the Israeli polity, but also in material statebuilding imperatives. The Zionist colonial project was from the start founded on immigration flows, and the existence of a pre-state Zionist community in Palestine was entirely the result of successive waves of Jewish immigration. After the establishment of the state, Jewish immigration continued to play a fundamental role in the demographic make-up of Israeli society. According to the first census carried out in November ,  percent of the Jewish population was foreign-born. As a consequence of massive immigration this proportion significantly increased over the first years of statehood, reaching  percent in . Since then and until the nineties the percentage of the foreign-born among the Jewish population decreased, but still remained at very high levels ( percent in ). The large wave of immigration from the former Soviet Union during the last decade caused a temporary halt in the downward trend (see Central Bureau of Statistics, different years). Between  and  the net migration balance constituted nearly  percent of Jewish population growth (DellaPergola : ). Jewish immigration has played an instrumental role in the internal conflict between the Zionist settlers and the Arab population of Palestine, and in the external confrontation with Arab countries since . Since the beginning of Zionist settlement in Palestine and over the entire pre-state period, the demographic ratio between the Zionist settlers and the Arab population was one of the central dimensions of the also in the Hebrew word chosen for it: not hagirah, the Hebrew word for immigration, but aliah, a religiously charged expression that literally means ‘ascension’. () Knesset Records,  July , Vol. , p. -. () David Ben-Gurion, in Knesset Records,  July , Vol. , p. .    &   conflict between the two national movements. Both sides recognized that demography would be a central factor in the determination of the political future of Palestine and its two national communities. Accordingly, Palestinian attempts to halt, or at least to limit, Jewish immigration and Zionist efforts to enlarge it as much as possible, were key components in their respective political strategies. The dependence on immigration for the consolidation of the Zionist project vis-à-vis the Arab population continued after the establishment of the state, especially during its first decade of existence. Following the - War, the national composition of the population residing on Israeli territory changed dramatically. First, due to flight and expulsion, only about , of an estimated ,-, Palestinians who had lived in the territory before the founding of Israel remained (Peretz : ). In addition, as a consequence of the enormous wave of immigration following the establishment of the state, the Jewish population doubled within three years. Despite this sweeping demographic transformation, the Israeli state continued defining the ratio between the Jewish and Arab populations as a matter of national security and survival, and Jewish immigration remained the main tool for maintaining what is called in official discourse the ‘demographic balance’. This is a euphemism that refers to the basic interest of the Israeli state in keeping the demographic superiority of the Jewish population over the Palestinian minority, and which gained further impetus from significantly higher fertility rates among the Palestinian population (Goldscheider : ) (). This demographic superiority is seen by the state and most political forces as a precondition for holding down the Palestinian minority in a subordinate status, especially given the fact that as citizens they enjoy full formal political rights (i.e. voting rights). The instrumental link between Jewish immigration and statemaking, which goes well beyond symbolic notions of ethnonational belonging, is illustrated by the state-initiated and operated massive immigration of Jews from Moslem countries during the s and early s. Despite the ambivalent and often overtly negative attitudes of European Zionist state-builders towards these ‘Oriental’ Jews, and disregarding some voices that demanded a more selective immigration policy, state agencies actively encouraged their massive immigration to () The goal of increasing fertility among the Jewish population has occupied a prominent place in the discourse about social policy in Israel, and some policy initiatives, such as the increase of child allowances during the s and s, have been linked to that goal,  though mainly at the declaratory level. Nevertheless, due to a rising standard of living, fertility rates among the Jewish population, except in the ultra-orthodox community, have steadily decreased. :    Israel. These immigrants were considered mainly as an instrument for pursuing material state-building tasks, especially in increasing the Jewish population ratio, for planting Jews in the peripheral areas of the country with a high concentration of Palestinians, and for strengthening Israeli state and society in economic and military terms. As stated in  by the Minister of Finance, Eliezer Kaplan: ‘We need workers and fighters’ (quoted in Segev : ). The demographic motif in the management of the national conflict became more acute after the  War, when the occupation of Arab territories significantly enlarged the Palestinian population under Israeli control, providing new fuel to the ‘demographic threat’ to the Jewish character of the Israeli state (see Lustick ). By then, the reservoir of potential Jewish immigrants from Moslem countries was practically exhausted, and Jewish communities in the Soviet block were banned from emigration by their respective governments, except for a brief period during the early s. Under these aggravated conditions, the framing of Jewish immigration as imperative for assuring Israel’s survival remained salient and broadly consensual among Zionist political forces. As we will elaborate later, when the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early s opened up a huge new reservoir of Jewish immigrants for Israel, the iron link between Jewish immigration, demography and the protracted national conflict helped shore up the principle of ethnic immigration against its liberal and restrictive challengers. While the Law of Return stands for the ethnic self-definition of Israel as a Jewish state, there are also civic principles in the legitimation and functioning of the Israeli state. For example, the Nationality Law incorporates significant civic elements, as it sanctions the acquisition of citizenship by birth on territory and by residence (Gouldman : Chapter ). Civic principles in the operation of state agencies, and in the political arena in general, have become more prominent over the last two decades, although they are still subordinated to ethnonational notions (Shafir and Peled ). The simultaneous operation of both ethnic and civic principles, and the tensions between them, are manifest especially in the relations between the state and its Arab-Palestinian citizens. As Peled () notes, although excluded from the ethnically defined national community, Palestinian citizens enjoy formal civil and political rights, which allow them to participate, albeit in a restricted form, in the political process. Moreover, the relative strengthening of state-level civic principles has enlarged the opportunity structure of Palestinian citizens to challenge the ethnonational character of the Israeli state and to exert some influence upon state policies (see Rosenhek and Shalev ).    &   These civic notions would be mobilized during the s by the Palestinian leadership and ‘post-Zionist’ Jews to advance their liberal challenge to the principle of ethnic immigration. Mastering the consequences of World War II in Germany In contrast to Israel, Germany’s ethnic immigration has remained a peripheral and temporary, rather than state and society-constituting device. This is not to belittle the magnitude of the German expellee problematique. Expellees from the lost eastern territories and beyond constituted some  percent of the West German population in . Their swift and generous integration was the single greatest challenge to the fledgling West German democracy, because expellees represented a considerable source of revanchism and right-wing radicalism (). Public-order perhaps more than ‘identity’ considerations conditioned the setup of the legal framework for Germany’s ethnic immigration in the s. Accordingly, the link between ethnic immigration and the ethnocultural tradition of German nationhood is less straightforward and direct than conventional wisdom would have it (e.g., Brubaker ). Consider, for example, that the Weimar Republic denied any responsibilities toward some , forcibly collectivized German-origin peasants during the Stalin era, who had asked for their repatriation to Germany. The German ambassador in Moscow at the time sardonically declared that ‘these peasants cannot be helped, their German nationality is doubtful, and their desire to enter Germany is pure illusion’ (in Otto : ) (). This suggests the centrality of the consequences of World War II in (re)activating the ethnocultural tradition, which was not automatically available for indiscriminate co-ethnics. It is still important to point out, in line with the argument of ethnocultural tradition, that postwar Germany, like Israel, has always denied that its ethnic immigration is ‘immigration’ at all, but the ‘return’ of co-ethnics to their homeland. This points, in both cases, to an ethnocultural relationship between people and ‘their’ states: not states building citizenries in their image, and thus the former preceding the latter, but pre-constituted people forming states for their self-representation () Most notably in terms of the Bund für Heimatvertriebene und Entrechtete (BHE), which entered the federal parliament in  with . percent of the national vote. Successful expellee reception and integration contributed to its demise by . () In the year of the world economic crisis  (), the Weimar government was simply short of money to accommodate the would-be resettlers. After protests by right-wing parties, among them Hitler’s NSDAP, some , German-Russian peasants still had to be admitted (see Otto : ). :    and protection. Is then Germany a ‘state of Germans’, as Israel is a ‘Jewish state’? A crucial difference between the two is that, as a very result of the confrontation between Germans and Jews under Nazism, the German ethnocultural idiom of nationhood has in principle been delegitimized, whereas the idea of Israel as a Jewish state has been powerfully reaffirmed, as a safe haven from persecution. In addition, the ethnic homogeneity of the resident population in Germany prevented the rise of an Israeli-style demographic imperative in its policy toward ethnic Germans—there was no rebellious minority to hold down by peopling the country with loyal ‘Germans’ (). In contrast to Israel, whose ethnic texture is internally visible in the rift between Jews and Arabs, the ethnic dimension of the (West) German state became internally invisible, as it was transferred into the future (as the mandate of national reunification) and extraterritorialized (as the—in the Cold War period mostly virtual—commitment to admit co-ethnics) (). Daniel Levy (: ) has succinctly argued that the ethnic German expellees allowed the ‘rehabilitation’ of Germany’s otherwise delegitimated ethnocultural self-understanding after World War II: through reference to the ‘victimhood’ of expellees, ethnocultural nationhood could be ‘dissociated from Nazism’ (p.). Was (West) Germany, at least in this indirect way, a state of Germans, as Israel is a state of Jews? Turning to West Germany’s founding document, the Basic Law, one can observe a tension between ethnic and liberal elements. The ethnic elements are tellingly tied to the temporariness and incompleteness of the West German state. Accordingly, the preamble of the Basic Law states that it was to apply only for a ‘transition period’ (Übergangszeit), until the ‘unity and liberty of Germany was completed’. Moreover, the ‘German people’, in crafting this constitution, had ‘acted also for those Germans who were denied participation’—the German division obviously reactivated the traditional non-congruence between state and nation. On the liberal side, the Basic Law’s preamble commits the new state to a ‘united Europe’ and ‘to serve peace in the world’, and the constitution’s first seven articles protect universal human rights inde() A weak equivalent to demographic considerations in Israel is the pointing out by some conservative voices in Germany’s immigration debate that the size of its immigrant population had to be kept small, because the Federal Republic was ‘a state created by the German people for the German people with the purpose of national reunification’ (Uhlitz : ). () This does not mean that there were no internal costs to (West) Germany’s ethnic orientation as an ‘incomplete’ nation-state geared towards ‘reunification’: they were shouldered, for instance, by second—or third—generation Turkish ‘guestworkers’ who, until the early s, remained excluded from the citizenry by an ethnic citizenship law (see Koopmans ).    &   pendently of citizenship—all commitments that, in contrast to the ethnic ones, were conceived of as not only temporarily valid (). A cornerstone of postwar Germany’s ethnic orientation, and the constitutional foundation of its ethnic immigration, is Article (), which defines who is a German. It contains a liberal element in simply stating that a ‘German’ is one who ‘owns German citizenship’, leaving the determination of citizenship to the political process. Accordingly, the German Basic Law never prescribed an ethnic citizenship law, like the one that was in force until . However, Article () contains an ethnic element in adding that a ‘German’ is one also who ‘as refugee or expellee of German origins (Volkszugehörigkeit) or as his spouse or descendant has found reception in the territory of the German Reich according to its borders of  December ’. This meant that (West) Germany was not only the state of its citizens, but also of certain noncitizens, if they qualified as co-ethnics. However, as in the unity mandate in the preamble, this ethnic commitment was to be temporary only—this is expressed in the fact that Article  was placed under a statutory proviso, and that it appears only in the last section of the Basic Law, which deals with ‘Transitory and Concluding Regulations’ (). Article  points to the fundamental difference between Jewish and ethnic German immigration: while the former was an invitation to every Jew in the world, the latter applied only to those ethnic Germans who were ‘refuges or expellees’. From Article  alone one might conclude that the pool of potential claimants was both wider and more narrowly conceived than the actual ethnic immigration engendered by it: ‘wider’, because there was no geographical specification attached, so that, say, ethnic German refugees from Pinochet’s Chile would qualify as well; ‘narrower’, because in common understanding ‘refugee or expellee’ is someone who is actually forced to leave one’s homeland by a persecuting power. The Federal Expellee and Refugee Law (FERL) of , which spells out the statutory framework for Germany’s ethnic immigration, reversed this constellation. Its Article  () () stipulates: ‘An expellee is also one who as a German citizen or as a German Volkszugehöriger... after the end of the general expulsion measures has left or leaves the former eastern territories, Danzig, (the Baltic States), the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Jugoslavia, Albania, or China’ (emphasis supplied). This peculiar expellee, who was not () Article  () of the Basic Law explicitly invests the human rights catalogue in Article  to  with a Ewigkeitsgarantie, that is, immunity from future revision or amendment. () Ethnic interpretations of the Basic  Law, which draw their ammunition from the unity mandate in the Preamble and the ethnic refugee clause in Article  (e.g., Uhlitz ), ignore the temporariness of these provisions. :    actually expelled, but who had to originate from a Communist country, was labelled ‘resettler’ (Aussiedler). Interestingly, this geographic restriction of expellee/resettler status, which denied the latter to German minorities in Denmark, France or Italy, occurred ‘with respect to the western Allied powers’, that is, was mandated by the winners of World War II (Münz and Ohliger, : ). In addition, it is curious that among the listed territories for resettlers are China and Albania—not known for harboring any German minority groups. This reveals, as the administrative Expulsion Pressure Guidelines of  put it, the ‘regime and ideology-reference’ of the notion of resettler (). In other words, only ethnic Germans under communism qualified for resettler status. By the same token, one could forfeit one’s claim by ‘special tie(s) to the political regime of the state of origin’ (). Communists could not become resettlers. This was obviously not only an ethnic, but also a political status betraying the pivotal role of the Cold War in shaping German ethnic immigration. Resettlers, most of whose ancestors had left the ‘German’ lands before there even was anything akin to a German national consciousness, let alone a German nation-state have formed the bulk of ethnic German immigration after World War II. Accordingly, what had started as a temporary measure to integrate the millions of ethnic Germans who were actually forced to leave their homeland by the advancing Red Army and retaliatory expulsion, was turned around by the Federal Expellee Law and its—rather generous—subsequent administrative implementation into an open-door policy for anyone from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union who could claim, however remotely, German origins (Brubaker a: ). It is therefore not far-fetched to assume that, much like the Israeli Law of Return, German policy quite literally produced the ‘co-ethnics’ whose existence it notionally presupposed, who were lured by the prospect of moving into a country with vastly better living conditions. Liberal and restrictive challenges in the s In the s, both Jewish and ethnic German immigration came to face serious social and political challenges. The external causes for this () The  Expulsion Pressure Guidelines are reprinted in Liesner (: -). () Ibid., p. .    &   are similar, the removal of exit restrictions in the declining communist states of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. This greatly increased the number of ethnic claimants, many of whom were of questionnable truthfulness. In response, there has been a dual ‘liberal’ and ‘restrictive’ challenge to ethnic immigration in Israel and Germany alike. The existence of a liberal challenge sets ethnic immigration apart from ‘normal’ (labour, family, or refugee) immigration, opposition to which has been restriction-minded only. The liberal challenge to ethnic immigration articulates the point of view of other migrant or minority groups disadvantaged by, or in respect to, the ethnic-preference policy. The liberal challenge is usually not against the entry of putative co-ethnics as such, but against their exclusive or preferential entry, opting instead for an ethnically neutral immigration policy. By contrast, the restrictive challenge articulates the point of view of (certain groups among) the majority population, which sees itself threatened by the cultural and economic consequences of immigration. Ethnic immigration, after all, is still ‘immigration’. In the specific case of ethnic immigration, the restrictive challenge is either premised on (as in Germany) or directly addresses (as in Israel) a questionable truthfulness of claims for co-ethnicity. This questioning entails the cognitive and evaluative transformation of ‘returning’ co-ethnics into ordinary ‘immigrants’. The restrictive position is usually not concerned with keeping out ‘true’ co-ethnics, but with keeping in check ‘creative’ re-identifyers, and with a reluctance to give them entitlements that exceed those of the domestic population. While the duality of liberal and restrictive challenges has been the same, the nature of the restrictive challenge has been rather different in both cases considered here: religious in Israel, populist in Germany. In addition, the liberal-cum-restrictive challenges have yielded sharply different outcomes: the resilience of Jewish immigration in Israel, and the closing-down in-principle of ethnic German immigration in Germany. Resilience in Israel While still supported by a large majority of the Jewish population in Israel ( percent according to a recent survey) (), the Law of Return came under significant pressures during the s. The challenges emanated from two opposite ideological sources. The first objects to the notion of Israel as a Jewish state, proposing instead a non-ethnic definition of the polity. The second challenges the (de facto) expansive () The Jerusalem Post,  April .  :    secular definition of the Jewishness of the state, offering instead a more restrictive, ethno-religious conception of membership. The liberal challenge. The thrust of the liberal challenge is to bring out the fundamental contradiction in the self-definition of Israel as both a Jewish and a liberal-democratic state (see Rouhana ), targeting the Law of Return as a major expression of the ethnic character of the state. In Israel, the liberal challenge builds on a minimal sense of civic stateness, with a religious-culturally neutral, plurinational state as the goal. In contrast to Germany, there are no significant political actors pursuing the building of a more inclusive, ethnically neutral Israeli nation. Tellingly, the Israeli liberal challenge is mainly, though not exclusively, articulated by the political and cultural elites of the Palestinian population in Israel. For example, the celebrated Palestinian writer in the Hebrew language, Anton Shammas, denounced the Law of Return as a ‘racist law’ (: ). According to Shammas, the Law of Return may have been justified in the immediate wake of the Holocaust and if applied to persecuted Jews, but the indiscriminate granting of immigration rights to every Jew in the world is surely indefensible today (Shammas , ). In addition, Palestinian members of the Knesset have recently picked up the notion of ‘a state of all its citizens’, questioning and challenging the ethnic character of the Israeli state and its exclusion of the Palestinian minority. In this context, Arab political parties openly raised the demand to abolish the Law of Return. Their basic claim is that as long as the definition of Israel as a Jewish state stands, with the Law of Return as its key symbolic and institutional component, this state cannot be regarded as a genuine democracy. For example, Knesset member Azmi Bishara, chairperson of the (Arab) National Democratic Alliance party, characterized the Law of Return as a discriminatory law that should be revoked (), seeing this as a necessary step towards the de-Zionization of Israel and its transformation into a liberal-democratic state which is founded on non-ethnic, civic principles of membership (in Shavit ). In order to highlight the discriminatory character of the law, Palestinian leaders often contrast the right of return granted to Jews with the dismal situation of Palestinian refugees. In sharp contrast to the unrestricted immigration of Jews, the Palestinian population displaced and expelled during the - War was never allowed to return to its homeland by the Israeli state. This comparison is drawn by Knesset member Talab El-Sana from the United Arab List: ‘If the Jewish peo() Knesset Records,  November  (www.knesset.gov.il/tql/knesset/knesset/).    &   ple have the right, according to the Law of Return, to come to the State of Israel, and this on the basis of a historical claim from , years ago, why is this right denied to those Palestinians who were forced to leave their towns and villages, not , years ago, not , years ago and not  years ago, but only  years ago?’ () The liberal critique of the Law of Return has recently been adopted by ‘post-Zionist’ Jews. Post-Zionism, while originally an intellectual and academic preoccupation, has gained considerable public attention, particularly through its popularization in the media. It claims that the Israeli state should cease to be defined according to ethnic principles, and be transformed into a ‘normal’ liberal democracy based on the notion of ethnically neutral citizenship (see Ram ). Post-Zionism does not necessarily reject Zionism in toto. Rather, it reduces the latter to a historical stage in the dynamics of the Israeli state and society that now should be surpassed. Like other Zionist notions, the principle of unrestricted and exclusive Jewish immigration is also viewed by many post-Zionists as an anachronism that impedes the transformation of Israel into a democratic state of all its citizens. Hence they urge the abolition of the law (Silberstein : , ). Post-Zionist ideas are slowly sinking into the liberal wing of Zionist parties. For instance, Knesset member Zahava Gal-On from Meretz, a ‘left-wing’ Zionist party (), stated: ‘It is possible to sincerely recognize that in the Law of Return there are also racist elements, because it is based on origin and membership in a group... It is a law that discriminates between those that want to immigrate to Israel and also between Jewish and non-Jewish citizens’ (). Interestingly, she proposed a German-style restriction of the right of return as applying only to Jews suffering persecution, and the establishment a ‘normal law of immigration such as those existing in Western countries’ for non-persecuted Jews. There is no doubt that the liberal critique of the Law of Return is at the moment very weak politically, and the likelihood that it will affect a basic change in Israel’s ethnic immigration regime in the foreseeable future is extremely low. Yet, the very appearance of this challenge and its growing legitimacy reveals the emergence of cracks in the ideological foundations of the ethnic character of the Israeli state. () Knesset Records,  July . () The right-left political spectrum in Israel is mainly defined according to the parties’ positions concerning the conflict with the Palestinians and Arab countries, and other political issues such as the state-religion relationship. The left wing endorses more mod-  erate positions concerning the national conflict, and the right wing a more militant stand. With respect to state-religion matters, the left wing tends to endorse more secular postures. It is in these terms that Meretz is considered the most ‘leftist’ Zionist party. () Knesset Records,  December . :    The restrictive challenge. The restrictionist attack on the Law of Return also emerged during the s, as a response to the ethnic composition of the large immigration wave from the Soviet Union and its successor states (). Due to a  amendment in the Law of Return that made non-Jews with family ties to Jews eligible for immigration and automatic citizenship (), nearly  percent of the immigrants arriving between  and  were halachic non-Jews (that is, non-Jews according to religious law) (Tolts : ). The proportion of non-Jews even increased considerably in the following years (DellaPergola : ). The Minister of Diaspora Affairs, Michael Melchior, reported that among the  immigrants,  percent were non-Jews; among  immigrants the share of non-Jews further increased to  percent (). Based on figures published by Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics in , roughly , of all immigrants arriving in the country during the last decade were registered as non-Jews (). An unknown, but probably large number of them are non-Jews not only according to the halachic definition, but also according to their religious and ethnic selfidentification. Especially (but not exclusively) ultra-orthodox religious circles viewed the growing numbers of non-Jewish immigrants as a severe threat to the Jewish character of Israel. This concern was first raised in , just one year after the beginning of the new immigration wave. The Ministers of Interior, Arye Deri, and of Immigration and Absorption, Yitzhak Peretz, both from the ultra-orthodox Shas party, proposed to change the law to reduce the number of non-Jewish immi() There has also been controversy over the immigration of Christian Ethiopians of Jewish descent or with Jewish family connections (known as Falas Mura). Despite the demands of Jewish-Ethiopian activists in Israel, the state refuses to recognize them as entitled to immigrate under the Law of Return. Some of them are being allowed to immigrate under special schemes of family reunification (see Kaplan and Salamon ). () The  amendment, which was a compromise between religious and secular factions in Israeli government and parliament, introduced two important changes to the Law of Return. One restricted the definition of membership in the Jewish people for the purposes of immigration, while the other expanded the right of immigration also to family members of Jews who were not deemed Jewish according to religious law. A Jew was defined, largely according to religious law, as ‘...a person who was born of a Jewish mother or has become converted to Judaism and who is not a member of another religion’. But this restrictive test was accompanied by an expansive rule extending the rights of a Jew under this and other laws (e.g. Nationality Law) to ‘...a child and a grandchild of a Jew, the spouse of a Jew, the spouse of a child of a Jew and the spouse of a grandchild of a Jew...’ (Law of Return—Amendment , -). Epitomizing their expansive thrust, these rights were extended to family members of a Jew whether he or she was still alive or not, and whether he or she had immigrated to Israel or not. () The Jerusalem Post,  October ;  November . () Central Bureau of Statistics, Press release /,  May .    &   grants (). Other ministers and Knesset members from the ultraorthodox parties explicitly depicted the non-Jewish immigrants as a threat to Israel’s existence (). Even some members of Zionist secular parties expressed concern about the future of the Jewish definition of Israel (). The print media also became involved in the mounting campaign for a more restrictive immigration policy. For example, an opinion article in the Jerusalem Post stated: ‘Has the Law of Return, Zionism’s ultimate instrument for the ingathering of the exiles, inadvertently become a mechanism for the creeping de-Judaization of Israel? The answer is yes, and therefore it is time, alas, to amend the law [...] Ironic, isn’t it? A Zionist cornerstone, out of control, is contributing to the diminishment of Israel’s Jewish character’ (). Up to now, however, all attempts to limit the immigration of halachic non-Jews have failed. In order to understand why, one must consider the reasoning and forces behind the defence of the law, which—in the order presented here—make reference to the Holocaust, demographic fears, and the risk of a cataclysmic (restrictive-cum-liberal) challenge to the Law of Return as such. The first line of defence was to frame the eligibility criteria in the Law of Return as a response to anti-Semitic ideology in general, and to Nazism in particular. In order to legitimize the granting of immigration rights and automatic citizenship to the non-Jewish grandchildren of Jews, many of the supporters of the Law of Return in its present form link it to the definition of Jewishness practiced by the Nazi regime during the Holocaust. For instance, an editorial opposing any change in the law claims: ‘Providing a safe haven was our raison d’être. But now we are considering changing the message. And the dangers inherent in doing so are vast. Legislators beware... (N)othing could be more immoral for the Jewish state than to deny a home to the same category of Jew that Hitler had wanted to exterminate’ (). Similarly, the Minister of Immigration and Absorption, Yael Tamir (better known in academic circles for her work on ‘liberal nationalism’), declared in the Knesset: ‘There are reasons for the definition of Jewishness and the definition of who is entitled to immigrate under the () The Jerusalem Post,  July ;  November . () See Meetings of the Knesset Committee on Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora Affairs,  November ;  January ; and Knesset Records,  November . () For example, the Chairperson of the Knesset Committee on Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora Affairs, Naomi Blumenthal, and Knesset member Tzipi Livni, both from  the Likud party, in Meeting of the Knesset Committee on Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora Affairs,  December ; Minister of Justice, Yossi Beilin, from the Labor party, in Meeting of the Knesset Committee on Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora Affairs,  January . () The Jerusalem Post,  December . () The Jerusalem Post,  December . :    Law of Return. They derive from Jewish history. They are not disconnected from the Jewish past, from the persecutions of Jews. The state of Israel was established as a shelter... for the Jewish people as they were defined, to our regret, by their persecutors in the Diaspora, and not as they were defined by the halacha’ (). A second defence of the Law of Return in its presently expansive version relates to the demographic functions of immigration within the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As Ian Lustick () pointed out, to maintain the demographic advantage over the Palestinian minority—whether in the whole ‘Land of Israel’ (including the occupied territories) or only within the State of Israel’s recognized borders—has been the main reason for the unwillingness of most political forces to amend the law in a restrictionist direction. In this vein, Knesset member Moshe Arens, a former Minister of Defence and of Foreign Affairs from the Likud party, explains his opposition to limiting the number of non-Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union: ‘I’m afraid that if we accept the proposal of Knesset member Halpert [to restrict the eligibility of non-Jews], ...we might put at risk the Jewishness of the state, because today we have  percent of Arabs in the country. The natural increase of the Arab population is higher than the natural increase of the Jewish population... (I)f we don’t succeed in increasing the percentage of Jews in the population, in not too many years we will face a huge (demographic) problem’ (). Expressing a mainly secular notion of membership in the Jewish people, the defenders of halachic non-Jewish immigration for demographic purposes hold that the newcomers would eventually be integrated into the Jewish majority through their participation in central Jewish-Israeli institutions, such as the educational system and the army (). The third line of reasoning by the opponents of restricting the Law of Return interestingly reconnects to the liberal challenge to the Law of Return. The late Prime Minister Barak was not only unwilling to change the Law of Return, but also unwilling to allow any discussion of it in the cabinet (). This was driven by the fear that an amendment in the law limiting the eligibility of non-Jews, or even a discussion of such an option, might open the ‘Pandora’s box’ of a thorough public debate on () Knesset Records,  November . () Meeting of the Knesset Committee on Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora Affairs,  November . () For example, Knesset members Moshe Arens and Michael Nudelman, both from the Russian immigrants’ party Yisrael Beiteinu, in Meeting of the Knesset Committee on Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora Affairs,  November ; Knesset Speaker Abraham Burg, Knesset Records,  December . () The Jerusalem Post,  November .    &   the principle of ethnic immigration as such, enlarging the political opportunities also for the liberal challengers to the Law of Return. This is intimated by the Minister of Immigration and Absorption, Yael Tamir: ‘(W)e would throw ourselves into a very painful and unneccessary debate, in which the claim will be raised—that I do not want to see raised—that the Law of Return should be abolished completely’ (). The challenge to the Zionist principle of Jewish immigration, whether from a liberal or from a religious-restrictionist perspective, has failed so far. Yet, the public debate on the Law of Return is in motion. The emergence of this debate, triggered by the ethnic composition of the immigration wave from the former Soviet Union, shows more generally the gradual erosion of Zionist hegemony in Israel and the increasingly confrontational politics conducted by the Palestinian minority. Should the national conflict with the Palestinians and the Arab countries come to an end (admittedly a most unlikely outcome at the present time), the controversy over the ethnic character of the Israeli state and the tensions between ethnic and civic components in its definition of membership would certainly be exacerbated. Then, with the weakening of the ‘demographic imperative’, the political space for the questioning of Jewish immigration, from both liberal and restrictive perspectives, would widen significantly. Demise in Germany Between  and , about . million resettlers were admitted to the Federal Republic, which amounts to an annual trickle of just ,. Low numbers kept German ethnic immigration outside the public view. This abruptly changed in  when, due to the liberalization of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, the number of admitted resettlers skyrocketed, to about , in that year alone. Between  and , a total of . million resettlers were admitted—which is almost double the figure in the preceding four decades (Münz and Ohliger ). As in the Israeli case, escalating numbers of ethnic migrants created pressures on the underlying policy. In a second parallel to the Israeli case, these pressures originated from both liberal and restrictive positions. As in Israel, the liberal challenge spoke on behalf of those migrants and minorities who were disadvantaged vis-à-vis ethnic migrants, in this case asylum-seekers and the (Turkish) guestworker immigrants. However, () Meeting of the Knesset Committee on Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora  Affairs,  January . :    the restrictive challenge was different in kind. There could not be an ideological challenge and concomitant plea to return to the original spirit of Germany’s ‘Law of Return’, because the rationale of this policy—mastery of the consequences of World War II—was simply no longer valid. There was no original spirit to recapture. Witness that, in contrast to Israel, an equally doubtful truthfulness of claims for co-ethnicity was generally presumed (), and did not trigger calls to admit only ‘true’ ethnic Germans. Instead of an ideological challenge, Germany’s restrictive challenge was a populist challenge, in which the economic and social privileges attached to expellee status lost their public support. The liberal challenge. Just about the time when the center-right government celebrated the reception of ethnic German resettlers as an ‘act of national solidarity’ (Chancellor Kohl, quoted in Levy : ), the same government responded to a swelling number of asylum-seekers by trying to renege on the constitutional asylum right, as guaranteed by Article  of the Basic Law. This inequity was doubly scandalous, because both asylum-seekers and the ethnic resettlers (who were officially assumed to suffer from ‘expulsion pressure’) were notionally ‘refugees’. However, how could ethnic resettlers from post-communist Poland, Hungary or Romania still be subject to ‘expulsion pressure’, when according to the new ‘safe country of origin’ rule in asylum policy the same states were officially labelled ‘free of persecution’ (verfolgungsfrei), so that asylum requests by people originating from these states were generally denied? The contradictory treatment of both types of ‘refugees’ was first attacked by a leading SPD politician, Oscar Lafontaine. Calling the center-right government’s preference for ethnic German over non-German refugees ‘Deutschtümelei’ (an intranslatable term denoting ethnic nationalism), Lafontaine declared: ‘I have certain problems in admitting German-origin people in the fourth and fifth generation, while coloured people whose lives are at risk are rejected’ (). Chancelor Kohl, known externally for his commitment to unifyingEurope but on the domestic scene a long-standing proponent of a strengthened ethnic sense of national community, derided this state() At first, regarding Poles who claimed to be ethnic Germans because of their (ethnically Polish) parents or grandparents’ forced inclusion into the Nazi Volkslisten (Der Spiegel, no., , -). Later, the suspicion of lacking ethnic credentials focused mostly on non-German speaking Russians. In a  survey of the Allensbach Institute, less than one-third of respondents considered the newly arriving resettlers as ‘Germans’; the rest was either undecided ( percent) or did not consider the newcomers as ‘Germans’ ( percent) (quoted in Levy : f). () Quoted in Frankfurter Rundschau,  November , p..    &   ment as ‘disgusting’, and he found that Germans would be a ‘morally deprived people’ if they did not stand by their ‘compatriots’ (). As in Israel, this was a struggle between liberal and ethnic interpretations of the German state, the liberals rallying around the defense of the constitutional asylum right (Article ), the ethnics pointing to the commitments enshrined in the Basic Law’s ethnic German expellee clause (Article ). A first difference, however, was that the commitment to asylum-seekers was an abstract human rights commitment, directed at people outside Germany’s territorial and national boundaries, whereas the Israeli liberals’ reference to disadvantaged Palestinians was directed at a group that was not only within the state’s borders but considered its territory their ancient homeland, much like Jews did. In this regard, the structural equivalent to Palestinians in Israel are the descendants of non-European guestworkers (especially Turks). They were kept out of the citizenry by archaic citizenship laws that favoured the ethnic resettlers, even though the latter had no concrete ties to German society. This was a much more powerful comparison, because it pointed to a discriminated group in, rather than outside, German society. Calling those Polish, Russian and Romanian newcomers ‘Germans who want to live among Germans’ (Liesner : ), while calling those who were born and raised in Germany ‘foreigners’, showed in extremis the obsoleteness of the ethnic idiom of nationhood. Liberal challengers of ethnic immigration, in fact, were drawing references both to disadvantaged asylum-seekers and guestworker immigrants. If the asylum-seeker reference was somewhat more prominent, this was simply because this was the largest migrant group in the early s, singled out by the resettler-friendly center-right government for restrictive measures. The notion of Deutschtümelei and the inclination of the German liberal challenge to associate the conservative government’s ethnicreturn policy with the Nazi’s ‘Heim-ins-Reich-Politik’, which had a basis in some questionable administrative practices (), indicates a second difference from the Israeli case—the obvious delegitimation and decline of an ethnic understanding of nationhood. Positively phrased, the German liberal challenge to ethnic immigration could rely not only on a minimal sense of civic stateness, based on the procedural logic of () Ibid. () Before the issue became politicized in the late s, for instance, expellee authorities granted ethnic-German status to ethnic Poles whose (grand)parents had been forcibly incorporated in the Nazi Volksliste . This rendered  ad absurdum that part of the recognition procedure that asked for a subjective ‘confession to German peoplehood’. In addition, dubious Nazi credentials, such as ‘service’ in the murderous Waffen SS, could help a person to attain ethnic-German status. :    representative democracy and legal universalism, but also on a thicker sense of civic nationhood, according to which it has become anachronistic to define Germanness on the basis of ethnic genealogy (for details see Levy ). This made the German liberal challenge potentially much stronger than its Israeli counterpart, which remained limited to a few (Arab and ‘post-Zionist’) fringe voices, outside the political and societal mainstream. At the discursive level, the German liberal challenge came in two variants. One was to consider ethnic resettlers as just one of several immigrant groups, and to call for a comprehensive and self-declared ‘immigration policy’ to take care of all of them. As a Green MP put it, ‘resettlers are immigrants and refugees, independently of their ethnic origins’ (). Another variant was to take sides, particularly with asylum-seekers against resettlers, as in the Lafontaine response. Behind these responses were different images of resettlers: as to what they were, a sociological minority, like asylum-seekers eager to escape poverty and state-breakdown; or as to what they were made to be in official discourse, co-ethnics, and thus unloved relics of ethnic nationhood. The restrictive challenge. In the context of a center-right party coalition in power during most of the s, the restrictive challenge had to be more immediately effective than the liberal challenge to ethnic-German immigration. Its focus became the economic and social benefits bestowed on ethnic newcomers by the state. The Expellee Law of , the legal basis of ethnic immigration, was in the first place a social integration law, which provided for a long list of positive discrimination measures. Elderly resettlers, for instance, received fictionally wage and employment-based pensions that equalled, and sometimes even exceeded, those of comparable native Germans, even though they had never worked in Germany and thus had not contributed to the public pension funds (). ‘Who has lost his home and property because of his Germanness may well expect that the great insurance community of West Germany will compensate him for this’, said the responsible minister during the drafting of the  Expellee Law (). This reasoning may have been appropriate in , when the number of resettlers was down to a trickle of , per year. It was anachronistic when more than  times as many arrived in , with a rather lower sense of obligation on the part of West Germany’s ‘great insurance community’. In addition, () Erika Trenz, ‘Einwanderung gestalten,’ Das Parlament,  August . () In , the average pension for male resettlers was , DM—which was  DM higher than the average pension of male natives (Otto : ). () BT-Drs., Stenographische Berichte, . Sitzung vom .., S..    &   there was preferential access to public housing, immediate unemployment benefits (based on qualifications and the type of work performed before resettlement), compensation for lost property according to the Equalization of Burdens Act (Lastenausgleichsgesetz), subsidized loans for furnishing appartments or opening businesses, preferential hiring (employers who hired resettlers were reimbursed  percent of employment costs), and even lower car insurance rates (see the entire catalogue in Otto : -). Against the backdrop of increasing mass unemployment and slimming welfare benefits for natives, the generous benefits bestowed on the ethnic resettlers had to stir massive resentment and social envy. By , over  percent of the public was in favour of restricting ethnic immigration, which was deemed by most to be economically rather than ethnically motivated (Levy : ). Pushed by the recent successes of the far-right Republikaner party, which was the first to scandalize the privileges for ethnic resettlers, even the Bavarian sister party of the ruling CDU, the CSU, started campaigning against overly generous pension schemes for resettlers (Puskeppeleit : ). In response to the dramatic collapse of public support for ethnic German immigration, the center-right government quickly retreated from its initial approach to make the newcomers’ swift integration a s-style ‘national task’. Just one year after passing an ambitious Special Programme for Integrating Resettlers in , the focus shifted toward keeping resettlers in their places of origins, by means of development aids and securing in situ minority and self-government rights (Puskeppeleit : ). For those still bent on immigrating, a series of laws has been passed since  making this both less lucrative and more difficult. The Integration Adjustment Act of January , among other things, replaced wage-based unemployment benefits with a standardized and more modest ‘integration money’, limited to one year. The Interior Minister saw this as a response to populist pressure: ‘(P)ossible irritations among the native population about the... favouritism of Aussiedler... are counteracted’ (quoted in Levy : ). Six months later, the Resettler Reception Law, in a copy of the British ‘entry clearance’ system, shifted the application procedure to the countries of origin. This amounted to an unofficial quota system (and approximation of ethnic-return to ‘normal’ immigration), almost halving the number of admitted resettlers, from , in  to , in . The restrictive trend culminated in the Law on Settling the Consequences of the War (Kriegsfolgenbereinigungsgesetz) of , which phased out all special laws dealing with WWII consequences, thus  :    signalling the official end of the postwar period. This law was a compromise between the ruling CDU and the opposition SPD. The SPD wanted to put an end to ethnic German immigration as such by means of a ‘fixed day’ (Stichtag), after which no further applications were to be accepted, arguing that after the liberalization of Eastern Europe there was no longer any ‘expulsion pressure’. On the other side, the CDU rejected such a ‘fixed day’ rule, but interestingly with the defensive argument that the resulting ‘exit panic’ would further increase rather than decrease ethnic immigration (Alexy )—the wish to decrease ethnic German immigration had evidently become consensual by then. There was a particular bite to the SPD demand, because the parliamentary opposition’s consent was needed for the center-right government’s plan to curtail the constitutional asylum right. In the so-called Asylum Compromise of December , the SPD gave in to restrict asylum, but only at the price of restricting ethnic-German immigration (). Accordingly, the Kriegsfolgenbereinigungsgesetz, which (among other things) implements the Aussiedler component of the Asylum Compromise, bears the mark not only of the restrictive, but also of the liberal, challenge to ethnic immigration. The crucial novelty of the new law is its denial of the status of ethnic resettler to all persons born after  January . This means that ethnic-German immigration has in principle come to an end. For those still eligible to apply, the procedure has been fundamentally reshuffled. First, there is now a formal quota restriction of , admissions per year (reduced to , in the late s). Secondly, except for applicants from the former Soviet Union, the existence of expulsion pressure (which is one of two prerequisites for being granted the status of Aussiedler) is no longer presumed, but has to be proved by the applicant. Thirdly, the criteria for ethnic membership (Volkszugehörigkeit, which is the second prerequisite for Aussiedler status) have been tightened for applicants born after  December . Most importantly, the active mastery of the German language is now key in proving one’s Volkszugehörigkeit. This change, innocent as it seems, marks a fundamental departure from previous recognition practice, in which the very absence of German language skills was taken as sign of oppression and forced assimilation, and thus held in favor of the ethnic claimant. The new centrality of language competence is less the result of a new vision of ethnic Germanness than of the mundane need to better ‘integrate’ ethnic migrants. The stress on ‘integration’ as such is difficult to () ‘Ergebnisse der Verhandlungen zu Asyl und Zuwanderung’, Süddeutsche Zeitung,  December , p..    &   reconcile with the official logic of ‘returning’ co-ethnics—how could true ‘co-ethnics’ create an ‘integration’ problem? Regarding its statusrecognition function, harsh new guidelines stipulate that the language test, obligatory since , cannot be repeated, because—as the government says—its purpose is the ‘determination of a status’. In /, over one third of Russian applicants failed the individual language test and thus once and for all forfeited their chances to be admitted as resettlers. At the same time, the German government generously finances German language classes in Russia, which are currently attended by over , potential resettlers. This shows the ‘integration’ concern behind the mandatory language test—the German government simply wants to make sure that resettlers are not subject to ‘integration’ problems in Germany. Making language competence the key to admission amounts to conceding the obsolescence of ‘ethnic return’ migration. The new language policy is contradictory also in a second respect: if its official purpose is ‘determination of a status’, why does the government help to create this status by means of subsidized language classes? As Müinz and Ohliger () indicate, the language classes could have the ‘unintended effect’ of increasing rather than decreasing the number of potential claimants. However, this unintended increase is bound to be short-term only, because there cannot be ethnic Germans born after . Discussion A common feature of co-ethnic immigration is to force the state into the difficult business of checking individual identity claims— interestingly, not unlike asylum policy, in which individual biographic claims are the subject of an excruciating recognition procedure. These classificatory practices by states are not determined by a fixed sense of ‘identity’, but instead are malleable, subject to conflict, and injected with a heavy dose of political exigency. In Israel, the question ‘Who is a Jew’ has been anything but clear, and the eligibility criteria of the Law of Return have been the stake of permanent conflict between secular and religious understandings of Jewishness (see Samet ). In Germany, the most recent emphasis on language in determining ethnic Germanness is entirely the result of state interests. It responds to the oddity of sociological non-Germans entering as official co-ethnics, which had raised the public against the policy and has found concrete manifestation  :    in obvious problems in socially integrating the latest wave of Spätaussiedler, particularly from ex-Soviet Eurasia (e.g. Dietz and Hilkes ). In radically changing the role of language in the recognition procedure, the German government has de facto admitted that the status of ethnic German is more the result of its own policy than of some underlying ethnic Germanness. This indicates a second feature of immigration policies based on co-ethnicity: the production of ethnicity by the very policies that are meant to presuppose and to passively register this ethnicity. Ethnic immigration policies are ‘performative’; they help create the (ethnic) reality that they nominally presuppose (). This paradox is known from affirmative action policies in the United States, in which preferential race quota in college admission or public employment provide an incentive on the part of individuals to identify along ‘minority’ lines (see Ford ). In our cases, the receiving states’ production of ethnicity is also favored by some objective demographic features of the sending regions. The pool of applicants for ethnic German or Jewish status in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union is anything but sharply bounded; instead, it is characterized by high degrees of intermarriage and cultural and linguistic assimilation with their local environments (see Münz and Ohliger ). It is therefore not far-fetched to assume that not the ‘real’ but the ‘official’ ethnicity of the state is driving this strangely ‘non-Euclidian’ immigration, in which ‘outmigrations may increase rather than decrease the reservoir of potential ethnomigrants’ (Brubaker a: ). There is a thin line between fabricating the requisite ethnicity and exhausting the wide status-recognition opportunities provided by the state—the German-government-financed language courses in Russia quite literally help produce the co-ethnics that are then subjected to a (paradoxically language-centered) status test. Unfortunately, there is a lack of reliable data on this creation of ethnicity by the status-granting state. A rare study of the situation in the Russian city of Brest showed that the size of the self-declared Jewish population doubled between  and , the precise moment of heavy outmigration of Jews to Israel and Germany (quoted in Münz and Ohliger : -, fn.). A third feature of ethnic immigration policies is their susceptibility to a ‘liberal’ challenge, even in proverbially ethnic states like Israel and Germany. This is because such policies conflict with constitutive principles of liberal stateness, such as public neutrality and equality (see () See Bourdieu’s () reflections on the performative character of ethnic representations and classifications.    &   Dworkin ). At the academic level, liberals have usually argued in favour of open borders (Carens ), and a policy that makes closed borders more permeable for some should not further outrage them—if those ‘some’ had not been singled out according to ascriptive group criteria, which entails discriminations for other immigrant and minority groups. Since ethnic immigration is, after all, ‘immigration’, it has also provoked a restrictive challenge, which addresses the economic and cultural costs of immigration; in particular, the restrictive challenge is premised on questioning the veracity of co-ethnicity claims, as a result of which returning co-ethnics are refashioned as ordinary immigrants. Interestingly, while obviously differently motivated, the liberal and restrictive challenges have ‘synergetic’ effects, one reinforcing the other. The liberal position is usually not against the entry of putative co-ethnics as such, but against their exclusive or preferential entry, opting instead for an ethnically neutral immigration policy. In turn, the restrictive position is usually not concerned with seeking to keep out ‘true’ co-ethnics, but with keeping in check ‘creative’ re-identifyers, and resenting to give them entitlements that exceed those of the domestic population, particularly in the contest of slimming welfare states. However, in their ‘synergetic’ confluence, the liberal and restrictive challenges can grow into a severe threat to ethnic immigration as such. This has been the German experience, in which the combination of the restrictive and liberal challenges in the Asylum Compromise of  led to the death-in-principle of ethnic-German immigration. Likewise, the unwillingness of the mainstream political forces in Israel to change the Law of Return in a restrictive direction (as sought by orthodox-religious circles) was encouraged by the fear that this might also promote a fullscale liberal attack on the Law of Return as such, and thus endanger the Jewish character of the state. In order to explain divergent outcomes in Israel and Germany, we have argued that for historical and geopolitical reasons the political space for raising the liberal and restrictive challenges was differently wide in both cases. Historically, the very encounter between Germans and Jews under Nazism had compromised ethnic statehood in Germany, permitting only a temporally and spatially qualified ethnic immigration policy. By contrast, the Holocaust has provided a powerful founding myth for Israel as the place for the ‘Ingathering of the Exiles’, without any temporal or spatial limitations (). As we saw, the Holocaust motif was also effectively used to deflect the restrictive-religious challenge to the Law () The State of Israel’s declaration of independence proclaims that it ‘will be open  for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles’. :    of Return in its current, expansive form. Geopolitically, Israel’s interest in Jewish immigration is enduringly tied up with the protracted national conflict with the Palestinians, whereas the geopolitical interest of the German state in ethnic immigration was temporally limited to the Cold War context. One difference with Israel is that in Germany, ethnic immigration has never had to be at the service of a state whose territory is permanently contested by rival ethnonational groups. In addition, Germany’s privileged position in a Lockean zone of peace, uniting Europe, has deprived ethnic immigration of all secondary, strategic purposes, next to complying with an individual right of the ethnic claimant. And the legitimacy of claims for co-ethnicity became ever more doubtful as national self-understanding moved from an ethnic toward a civic mode. When the massive entry of notionally co-ethnic but sociologically Russian or East European immigrants in the s created adjustment and integration problems similar to those of ‘normal’ immigrants, an obvious opening was provided also for the restrictive challenge, which at that point was no longer kept in check by the Cold War division of the European continent. By contrast, the persistence of the conflict between Jews and Palestinians over the same territory gave rise to a demographic imperative of such magnitude that all liberal or restrictive challenges to ethnic immigration in Israel have (so far) failed. Given its historical roots in an ethnonational colonial project, Israel is determined to be, and this perhaps permanently, a strong ‘nationalizing state’ (Brubaker ) that seeks to strengthen the Jewish majority against the Palestinian minority by admitting more (and in principle only) Jewish immigrants. This demographic imperative has constricted the political space not only for the liberal, but also for the restrictive challenge to ethnic immigration—a doctrinary, narrow definition of Jewishness would simply be luxurious in the Hobbesian zone of war, into which Israel seems precariously and permanently locked. The full scale of Germany’s turn away from ethnic-German immigration, and Israel’s continued commitment to Jewish immigration, is evident in the following two contemporary constellations. Just about the time when the German government went about to restrict the admission of ethnic Germans, it opened the doors widely for Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Since the passing of the  Quota Refugee Law, some , Russian Jews have seized the opportunity of immigrating freely (without numerical restrictions and without individual screening) to Germany, quadrupling the size of the small Jewish community in the Land der Täter (Laurence ). In a delicate twist, the Israeli government has repeatedly urged the German govern   &   ment not to grant automatic refugee status to Russian Jews, claiming the latter for its own nation-building purposes. Already in , the same conservative government that would soon restrict the entry of ethnic Germans refused such pressure by Israel: ‘In view of her historical past, Germany does not want to close her borders for Jews from the Soviet Union’, said a government official (quoted in Harris : ). Admitting Jewish immigrants is the latest instance in the country’s politics of Wiedergutmachung (reparations), in which Jews obviously take a higher order of priority than co-ethnics. A partial structural equivalent on the Israeli side would be restrictions on Jewish immigration, and an open-door policy for Palestinians. The ‘right of return’ for the . million Palestinian refugees was actually a central stake in the aborted peace negotiations between the former Prime Minister Barak and the Palestinian leadership. It was overwhelmingly rejected even by liberal Israeli intellectuals and peace activists. An open letter ‘to the Palestinian leadership’ by Amos Oz and other leading Israeli intellectuals declared that ‘(w)e shall never be able to agree to the return of the refugees to within the borders of Israel. The meaning of such a return would be the elimination of the state of Israel’ (). Should Israel acknowledge the ‘right of return’ for Palestinians, worries another liberal intellectual, they might become ‘the biggest population group in a state whose essence and symbols they had always rejected, and whose extinction had been their highest aim [...] ‘Therefore—no thank you. I do not want to be a Jewish minority in Israel’ (). The wholesale rejection of the Palestinian ‘right of return’ invokes the demographic imperative not to be outnumbered by Palestinians, which has been a central element in the resilience of Jewish-priority immigration in Israel. It also shows that the definition of Israel as a Jewish state prevails; no civic transformation of Israeli nationhood is in the making. By contrast, the decline of ethnic German immigration is closely linked to the rise of a new civic-territorial identity in postwar Germany (see Levy ). If there still is an ‘ethnocultural idiom of nationhood’ (Brubaker ) in Germany, it is not readily visible in the disparate treatment of ethnic Germans and Jews for immigration purposes, and at best it has taken on strangely inverted forms (). () The Hebrew original appeared in Haaretz,  January . Quoted in The Economist,  January , p.. () David Grossman, ‘No right of return’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,  January , p.. () Laurence’s () informative study of  the divergent treatment of the Jewish and Turkish immigrant communities in Berlin shows that the better treatment of Jews is partially justified in ethnonational terms, as facilitating the return of Jews to their presumed cultural Heimat. :    In this article we considered ethnic immigration policies as a dependent variable, which is shaped not only by ethnic national idioms but also by a geopolitical and historical context that either constains or facilitates (liberal and restrictive) contestation. However, the dynamics of ethnic immigration may also be looked at as an independent variable, which impacts on the boundaries and the constitution of the national community. Once a policy has been set, it in turn affects the boundary definitions that it partially reflects. After the demise of ethnic-German immigration, which will be complete only in a generation or so, a major institutional expression of ethnic stateness will have disappeared in Germany. The default result of this must be the further strengthening of civic nationhood. In the same vein, Daniel Levy (: abstract) argued that the scaling-down of ethnic-German immigration both ‘reflect(s) and reinforce(s)’ the rise of a civic identity in contemporary Germany. Conversely, the resilience of Jewish immigration is not just expressive of, but also reproduces, the ethnic self-definition of the Israeli state as a Jewish state. Note the superb irony that this is attained through admitting also halachic or even self-defined non-Jews, which might eventually lead to the rise of a minority identity of the Russian newcomers, and thus add to the already considerable challenges to the Jewish definition of Israel. Conditioning and conditioned at the same time, the boundaries of the national community are not fixed but fluid, among other things, as a result of a state’s ethnic immigration policies. BIBLIOGRAPHY A, Hans, , Zur Neuregelung des Aussiedlerzuzugs, Neue Zeitschrift für Verwaltungerecht (NVwZ), no., -. B, Ruth, , Patterns of Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin). B, Pierre, , Elements for a Critical Reflection on the Idea of Region, in P. B, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge (UK): Polity Press). B, Rogers, , Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press). —, , Nationalism Reframed (New York: Cambridge University Press). —, a, Migrations of Ethnic Unmixing in the New Europe, International Migration Review (), -. —, b, Myths and Misconceptions in the Study of Nationalism, in John H (ed.), The State of the Nation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). —, , The Manichean Myth: Rethinking the Distinction Between ‘Civic’ and ‘Ethnic’ Nationalism, in Hanspeter K et al., Nation and National Identity (Zürich: Rügger). C, Joseph, , Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders, Journal of Politics (), -. Central Bureau of Statistics, Different years, Statistical Abstract of Israel (Jerusalem: Central Bureau of Statistics). C, Jules and Sarah H, , Citizenship, the Demands of Justice, and the    &   Moral Relevance of Political Borders, in Warren S (ed.), Justice in Immigration (New York: Cambridge University Press). D P, Sergio, , The Global Context of Migration to Israel, in Elazar L and Judith S (eds), Immigration to Israel (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers). D, Barbara and Peter H, , Integriert oder Isoliert? (Munich: Olzog Verlag). D, Ronald, , Liberalism, in Stuart H (ed.), Public and Private Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). F, Christopher, , Administering Identity: The Determination of ‘Race’ in Race-Conscious Law, California Law Review , -. F, Gary, , Modes of Immigration Politics in Liberal Democratic States, International Migration Review (), -. F, Mary, , Germany for the Germans, in D. C and M. F (eds), Citizenship, Nationality and Migration in Europe (London: Routledge). G, Calvin, , Israel’s Changing Society—Population, Ethnicity, and Development (Boulder: Westview Press). G, M.D., , Israel Nationality Law (Jerusalem: Institute for Legislative Research and Comparative Law, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem). G, Liah, , Nationalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). G, Virginie and Gallya L, , A Reappraisal of the State Sovereignty Debate, Comparative Political Studies (), -. H, Dvora, , The Law of Return—Its Content and Disputes Around It, in Anita S (ed.), Independence—The First Fifty Years (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center) (in Hebrew). H, Randall and Patrick W (eds), , Towards a European Nationality (London: Palgrave). H, Paul A., , Jewish Migration to the New Germany, in Dietrich T̈ (ed.), Einwanderung und Einbürgerung in Deutschland (Münster: Lit Verlag). J, David, , Rights Across Borders (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press).  J, Matthew Frye, , Whiteness of a Different Colour (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). J, Christian, , Why Liberal States Accept Unwanted Immigration, World Politics (), -. K, Steven and Hagar S, , Ethiopian Immigrants in Israel: Experience and Prospects (London: Institute for Jewish Policy Research). K, Roger, , The Politics of Immigration Control in Britain and Germany, Comparative Politics (), -. K, Desmond, , Making Americans (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). K, Claude, , The Right of Return in Israeli Law, Tel Aviv University Studies in Law , -. K, Hans, , The Idea of Nationalism (New York: Macmillan). K, Ruud, , Germany and its Immigrants: An Ambivalent Relationship, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (), -. K, Will, , Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Clarendon Press). L, David, , Liberal Theory and the Nation, Political Theory (), -. L, Jonathan, , (Re)constructing Community in Berlin. Unpublished manuscript. L, Daniel, , Remembering the Nation. Dissertation filed at Columbia University, New York. L, Ernst, , Aussiedler (Herford: Maximilian-Verlag). L, Ian, , Israel as a Non-Arab State: The Political Implications of Mass Immigration of Non-Jews, Middle East Journal (), -. M, Jeannette, , Fences and Neighbours (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press). M̈, Rainer and Rainer O, , Deutsche Minderheiten in Ostmittel- und Osteuropa, Aussiedler in Deutschland (Berlin: Humboldt University, Chair for Demography, hectographed). N, Mae M., , The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law, The Journal of American History, June, -. O, Karl A. (ed.), , WestwärtsHeimwärts? (Bielefeld: AJZ Verlag). P, Yoav, , Ethnic Democracy and the Legal Construction of Citizenship: Arab Citizens of the Jewish State, American Political Science Review (), -. :    P, Don, , Israel and the Palestine Arabs (Washington, D.C.: Middle East Institute). P, Richard, , International Migration Law (nd edn.) (Dordrecht: Nijhoff). P, Juergen, , Der Paradigmenwechsel der Aussiedlerpolitik, in Inge G and Regina R̈ (eds), Forschungsfeld Aussiedler (Frankfurt on Main: Peter Lang). R, Uri, , The State of the Nation: Contemporary Challenges to Zionism in Israel, Constellations (), -. R, Zeev and Michael S, , The Contradictions of Palestinian Citizenship in Israel: Inclusion and Exclusion in the Israeli Welfare State, in Nill B, Uri D and Manuel H (eds), Citizenship and the State in the Middle East: Approaches and Applications (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press). R, Nadim, , Israel and its Arab Citizens: Predicaments in the Relationship Between Ethnic States and Ethnonational Minorities, Third World Quarterly (), . S, Moshe, , Who is a Jew? (), The Jerusalem Quarterly (), -. S, Dominique, , The Debate on Immigration and the Crisis of National Identity, West European Politics , -. S, Tom, , —The First Israelis (New York: The Free Press). S, Ayelet, , Citizenship and Membership in the Israeli Polity, in Alexander A and Douglas K (eds), From Migrants to Citizens—Membership in a Changing World (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace). S, Gershon and Yoav P, , Citizenship and Stratification in an Ethnic Democracy, Ethnic and Racial Studies (), -. S, Anton, , The Morning After, The New York Review of Books (), -. —, , The Morning After: ‘Palestinians’, ‘Israelis’ et cetera, in Ruth G and Dafna H (eds), The Jewish-Arab Rift in Israel: A Reader (Jerusalem: The Israel Democracy Institute) (in Hebrew). S, Ari, , The Citizen Azmi—An Interview with Azmi Bishara, Ha’aretz Magazine, May , . S, Laurence, , The Postzionism Debate—Knowledge and Power in Israeli Culture (New York: Routledge). S, Anthony, , The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell). S, Rogers, , Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America, American Political Science Review (), -. T, Abigail, , Whose Votes Count (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). T, Mark, , The Interrelationship Between Emigration and the SocioDemographic Profile of Russian Jewry, in Noah L-E, Yaacov R’, and Paul R (eds), Russian Jews in Three Continents (London: Frank Cass). U, Otto, , Deutsches Volk oder ‘Multikulturelle Gesellschaft’, Recht und Politik (), -. V, Vincent, , La France immigrée (Paris: Fayard). W, Michael, , Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books). W, Yfaat, , The Golem and its Creator, or How the Jewish Nation-State Became Multiethnic, in Daniel L and Yfaat W (eds), Challenging Ethnic Citizenship: German and Israeli Perspectives on Immigration (New York: Berghahn). Y, Bernard, , The Myth of the Civic Nation, Critical Review (), . 