In the early years of the Palestine Mandate, the British developed an apolitical citizenship —without reference to or input from the figure of the political and civil national. This was legislated through the 1925 Palestine Citizenship Order-in-Council. The British meant for their legislated construction of nationality and citizenship to transcend ethnic nationality and offer rights in a socio-communal sense based on religious grouping. In stark contrast during the first decade of the mandate the Palestinian Arabs advocated a citizenship imbued with practices of political and civil rights in their demands to the government. Palestinian popular groups and leaders demanded the government give all nationals of Palestine an equal status and an equal combination of political, civil and social citizenship rights for both Palestinian-born Arabs and immigrant Jews under the mandate. This paper seeks to explore how the leadership of the Palestinian Arabs used a discourse of rights linked to the ever-present anti-colonial demand for an independent, democratically-elected government responsible to a parliament which would be charged with offering such rights to its nationals. The Palestinian national leadership used their arguments against the mandate to show the clear contradictions between citizenship in the liberal democracy of Britain and the mandate administration’s concepts of colonial citizenship. The paper will historicize the variety of processes in Palestine related to the development of the concepts of Palestinian citizenship and nationality. It is based on the Palestinian press, and records of social and political organizations and their leaders. The Palestinians conceptualized themselves as native nationals rather than legal citizens, according to the history of nationality prior to the end of the Ottoman Empire. The differences between the two statuses were clear in their interpretations of national political and civil rights that they repeatedly asked the British to give. By contrast, the Palestinians and indeed the Arabs of the former Ottoman provinces felt that nationality was a primordial status received by right of birth and language, and which came with the right to self-determination. These themes will be shown in the colonial era of the mandated Middle East, along with a brief summary of the impact of Palestinian citizenship on Arab emigrants and how their reactions contributed to the furthering of the counter-discourses and practices of civic identity from 1920 to 1930.