Neither citizens nor migrants, Palestinian residents of Jerusalem are required to regularly prove that their “center of life” is within municipal limits or risk residency revocation and expulsion even if their families have lived in the city for generations. Despite their precarious status, a key practice Palestinian residents of Jerusalem draw on to engage the constraints on daily life is, paradoxically, refusing citizenship. Generations of Palestinian Jerusalemites have debated this predicament, largely arguing against applying for citizenship by articulating a politics of refusal. However, many also consider citizenship a mode, not of simple concession, but of securing future access to their homeland and are expressing this position more openly than in previous eras. This paper draws on my dissertation chapter titled: “Citizenship Refusal and the Social Contract at the Center of Life”, and examines the tensions around boycotting or applying for Israeli citizenship in Jerusalem to ask how citizenship refusal is refracted from the viewpoint of Palestinian Jerusalem and everyday practices and political ethics. The context of Palestinian Jerusalem troubles the presumption of a shared, if unequal, social contract and raises limits to the political concept of refusal given the categorical exclusion of permanent residents from the state. Two different methodologies for interpreting refusal inform this paper’s initial motivations: Tina Campt’s Listening to Images (2017) and Audra Simpson’s Mohawk Interruptus (2014) and “The ruse of consent” (2017). This paper documents repertoires that catalog the tension with the residency regime since 1994 when large waves of residency revocations began. They include protests, periodicals, and debate, and the chapter draws on sources ranging from interviews to memoirs, newspapers, and digital forums on fatawa. The chapter also includes a brief discussion historicizing Palestinian citizenship and residency refusal in moments of rebellion like the Great Revolt (1936-1939) and the first Intifada (1987-1992). Overall, the chapter engages discussions and debates around this phenomenon with a comparison to different eras to demonstrate how refusal is reshaped around political moments but maintains coherence across varying imperial and colonial forms of rule.