This article examines Israel as a state that emerged out of a settler colonial project, demonstrating that this emergence is not only a historical question, but is also constitutive to the state’s structure and the nature of citizenship in it. The article argues that Israel differs from other settler colonial states in that it failed to normalize or nativize itself, for three main reasons. First, Palestinians had been nationally crystalized before it was established and therefore they were not transformed, like in other settler colonial states, into an "indigenous people" demanding cultural rights. Second, the 1967 occupation is not a classic occupation practiced by a "normal state," but a continuation of the settler colonial project itself. And third, while Israel had established an ethnocracy after expelling the majority of the Palestinian population from its 1948 borders and granted the minority that remained Israeli citizenship, it turned into an apartheid state after the 1967 occupation. In these territories, Palestinians – most of whom were neither expelled, nor granted citizenship – were subjected to direct occupation, which has gradually transformed, due to the settlement project, into an apartheid system.