This article examines how Arab Christian citizens of Israel navigate sectarian boundaries with their Arab Muslim co-ethnics through symbolic boundary work under a nationalizing state. Drawing on 61 interviews, it asks how individuals adopt or resist sectarian categories, which socio-mental grammars shape their consolidation or attenuation, and how these processes unfold under competing institutional logics. The analysis identifies three modes of boundary work. Social sectarianism reproduces distinctions by associating Christian identity with modernity, civility, and education in contrast to constructed Muslim traditionalism. National post-categorical unification rejects sectarian divisions by affirming a unified Palestinian identity and exposing sectarian categories as contingent ideological constructs. Segmented interreligious unification promotes Christian–Muslim solidarity within an Arab civic framework while preserving Christian distinctiveness, producing cohesion within an Israeli-Arab imagined community while distancing itself from broader Palestinian national identification. Theoretically, the article introduces liminal sectarianism as a durable condition in which sectarian frameworks remain culturally available yet politically non-deterministic. This concept offers a new analytical lens for understanding how sectarian boundaries remain culturally consequential without determining political belonging, thereby illuminating multiple trajectories of national identification under conditions of national domination.
Ameer Fakhoury (Thu,) studied this question.