The Ethnostate Canard
Critics of Israel often lambast it for being an ‘ethnostate’, but this argument is entirely bogus.
Criticisms of Israel abound. Some are defensible and rational, some are antisemitic blatherskite, and some fall in the expansive middle ground between those poles. Most are wrong, but are still promoted by the media, espoused by serious political figures, and taken at face value by significant percentages of the public. One such critical argument against Israel deserves greater scrutiny, as it has gained purchase among an influential part of the progressive left and their backers in the press. This is the idea that Israel is an ‘ethnostate’ and, as such, it does not deserve American support and is rightfully lambasted by the ‘international community’.
The problems with this argument are extensive, ranging from those of basic facts and global realities to those of hypocrisy and anti-Israel bias. It is useful to deal with each in kind.
First off, we need to define terms. What is an ‘ethnostate’, both as a theoretical concept and in practical reality? Dictionaries define the word in varied specific manners, but they generally agree that an ‘ethnostate’ is a nation that restricts citizenship to members of a particular ethnic group or is dominated by the interests of that group, to the exclusion of others. Some ethnostates are deliberately set up as such, with legal discrimination against ethnic outsiders, while others are simply ethnostates by practical reality: they are almost entirely populated by members of one ethnicity and are deeply homogenous in population. Some ethnostates restrict all immigration so as to preserve racial heritage, while others welcome immigration from their specific ethnos who live abroad.
Pretty wide-ranging possibilities here, right? But Israel fails all of them. It is not an ethnostate by any reasonable definition of the word. One can understand this by looking at the actual facts of Israel’s population, policy, and politics.
Most foreign observers, when they conceptualize Israel, see it as a nation with an almost exclusively Jewish population. This is entirely untrue. Over 21% of the Israeli population is Arab, either Christian, Druze, or Muslim by faith. These people hold Israeli citizenship, vote in Israeli elections, can freely exercise their religion, and are part of normal Israeli society. They have political parties dedicated to advancing their interests and, in the last coalition government before the current coalition took over, participated in the government of the country. Israel has a significant Bedouin population as well, allowing their traditional semi-nomadic way of life to flourish.
Still, 74% of Israelis are indeed Jewish, so would that not count as an ethnostate? The problem here is that the Jewish population of Israel is by no means at all homogenous. Americans often think of Ashkenazi Jews, largely because that population, generally associated with Eastern Europe, is the predominant Jewish population in the United States, having immigrated in significant quantities beginning in the late 19th century. This population is also more familiar in the popular imagination, as it was the main target and victim of the Holocaust.
Israel, on the other hand, is home to a wide variety of Jewish subgroups, crossing racial, ethnic, and national lines – despite their shared Levantine ancestry. Ashkenazi Jews migrated to Israel after the devastation of World War II, and made up much of the early political class of the nascent state – something that made a great deal of sense given that modern political Zionism was primarily theorized by Ashkenazi Jews in Europe, including Theodor Herzl and Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Ashkenazim, however, aren’t even the majority Jewish population in Israel. That honor goes to the Mizrahi Jews, who came from ancient communities in the Middle East, including the land of Israel itself. Most of these Jews, having lived across the region for centuries, were forcibly evicted from their homes by Arab governments in the aftermath of the 1948 War for Independence. Israel welcomed and integrated these refugees, providing a stark contrast with Arab treatment of Palestinian evacuees at the same time.
Several smaller ethnic groups of Jewish ancestry also populate Israel. Sephardic Jews, once at home in the Iberian Peninsula, spread across Southern Europe and North Africa after their expulsion by the Spanish crown in 1492. North African Jews, creating their own offshoot culture, are ethnically distinct and known as Maghrebi Jews. There are Jewish Israelis who emigrated from India, Uzbekistan, Italy, the Caucasus, and Ethiopia. None of these people are the stereotype of Israeli Jews that the critics of the Jewish State promote. And their existence, alongside the non-Jewish citizens of Israel, fatally undermines the ethnostate claim on its own merits.
Another factor militating against the ethnostate claim are the very policies and actions of the Israeli government over the nation’s near-80-year history. Israel has taken in refugees of every color and nationality. It allows all citizens, regardless of background, to participate in the political process in all respects: from voting, to running for office, to serving the state either politically or bureaucratically. Civic service is not only nondiscriminatory; it is mandatory across nearly all groups. Military service is not cabined to specific ethnicities and the only exempt group are those ultra-Orthodox Jews who spend their days in religious study.
The most profound counterexample for the ethnostate critics is the Israeli government’s approach to the holiest place in Judaism: the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. It is the site of the First Jewish Temple, legendarily erected by King Solomon in Biblical times and destroyed by the Babylonians. After the Persians defeated the Babylonians and returned the Jews from their exile to Jerusalem, the Temple was rebuilt on the ruins of its predecessor. This Second Temple lasted until the Roman period, when it was razed by the armies of Titus in 70 AD, scattering the Jews into diasporic exile for nearly the next two millennia. The lone remaining retaining wall for the temple complex, the Western Wall, is a pilgrimage site for millions of Jews across the world.
Currently sitting atop the Temple Mount is not a reconstructed Jewish Temple, but several mosques. The Dome of the Rock and Al Aqsa Mosque are two important Islamic holy sites, but pale in comparison to Mecca and Medina, by far the holiest sites in Islam. This is a site that Israel entirely controls from a security standpoint, but that it has allowed a foreign power, Jordan, to administer religiously. Muslims are free to enter the Temple Mount – once again, the holiest site in Jewish history – and worship in a place the Prophet Muhammad never visited during his life, but Jews are forbidden from entering the complex to pray, even silently. Some ethnostate!
The ethnostate smear against Israel is also proved to be a farce by geopolitical reality itself. In the modern world, the vast majority of nations could be considered ethnostates. China is dominated by the Han majority, with policies explicitly favoring that sole ethnic group and genocidal destruction of the culture and society of ethnic subgroups like the Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. Vietnam is composed mostly of Vietnamese, Iran of Persians, Japan of Japanese, Denmark of Danes, Morocco of Moroccans, and on and on. The ethnostate norm is particularly strong in Israel’s very backyard, with each Arab state being comprised almost exclusively of Muslim Arabs. There are small minorities in some of these lands, but they are often heavily persecuted – see the Copts in Egypt, the Kurds in Turkey/Syria/Iraq, and Christians pretty much everywhere else. There used to be flourishing Jewish communities across the Middle East, but they were ethnically cleansed in 1948, in a much bigger version of the infamous ‘Nakba’ of the Palestinians. And this is where the hypocrisy comes in.
The anti-Israel zealots who criticize it – falsely, as we have seen – as an ethnostate have no such problems with the nations mentioned above. Jordan and Egypt aren’t lambasted for being ethnostates. Neither is Iran. Or Cambodia. Or Libya. China isn’t even criticized by these people for its abhorrent, genocidal treatment of its Muslim minority. The progressive left doesn’t care because China is anti-American and isn’t primarily run by Jews. It’s literally that simple. They aren’t against ethnostates; they’re against Israel and the pro-Western civilization it represents.
The clearest example of this comes with respect to the Palestinian cause they promote. The Palestinian-run state they so dearly pine for would itself be an ethnostate. There are no Jews whatsoever living in any territories controlled or governed by Palestinians, either in the West Bank or Gaza. Jews in those areas are in mortal danger, as would be Jews in any future nation of Palestine. There are laws under the Palestinian Authority forbidding land sales to Jews in any portion of the West Bank, people who seek comity between Muslims and Jews are subjected to torture or worse, and the families of murderous antisemitic terrorists are financially taken care of for the rest of their lives. Sure sounds like an ethnostate to me, and a particularly pernicious one at that.
Perhaps the progressive left should remove the log in its own eye before it criticizes the mote in Israel’s. Because that log is pretty damn enormous.