It is neither a narrative nor ahistorical in contrast to your claims. A 10 minute walk through Israel would significantly deny your suggestion about it being an ethnostate.
That isn't some misinformation on your part, it is just a malicious lie.
That isn't some misinformation on your part, it is just a malicious lie.
Here is an excerpt from the Judicial examination of the nature of Israeli state by it's own judges.
>At their center stands the right of every Jew to immigrate to the State of Israel, where the Jews will constitute a majority; Hebrew is the official and principal language of the State.
The state forces the nature of State, and it's principal language, on what was predominantly an Arab place, with settlers Speaking Yiddish, German, Polish and Russian. Moreover it gives a right to unchecked immigration to one ethnicity.
And it moves it's own population to occupied areas in West Bank, with freedom to carry and use assault weapons, and to Golan heights, etc in violation of humanitarian and legal aspects.
Fact is Israel is the country most friendly to any minority in the wider region and the adaptation or ignorance of facts here is quite telling.
Just a case in point, if we look at historic ethno-states, Apartheid South Africa had dozens of languages. But they still had a policy of carving out bantustans and deporting people into those bantustans, with the hope that the demographics in the remaining South Africa would favor the dominant racial group. Apartheid South Africa was an ethno-state.
That said, Israel obviously is not the most friendly to any minority in the wider region. Israel is currently engaging in an ongoing genocide against a particular minority, they are illegally occupying their territories, and—as the ICJ has just ruled—they are engaging in apartheid against this minority. When all this is evident, how can you say they are “friendly” towards that minority?
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*: There are millions of metrics to measure this, and you could surely point to the few which conveniently “proofs” your point. You’re not even doing that, so I highly doubt.
The Jim Crow south in the pre civil rights era USA was an apartheid, as the legal framework denied civil rights to Black Americans. It was not however an ethno-state as there was no policy of controlling the demographics of Black Americans. The eugenics movement tried to change that, and if the Eugenics movement had been more successful it is highly likely that some of the states in the USA would have become ethno-states.
In Israel the practices and policies in the West Bank are apartheid, and policies of preventing immigration from occupied territories into Israel, and establishment of Jewish settlements inside the West Bank are behaviors of an ethno-state.
So just like Rhodesia and Apartheid South Africa, Israel maintains both an apartheid and an ethnocracy.
"But the dominant group in Israel has internal diversity; therefore it can't be the dominant group" -- is that the counterargument, here?
Perhaps I lazily assumed the parent would refer to ethnicity when throwing the accusation of an ethnostate around? Which ethnicity would that refer to in your opinion? It should be possible to answer that question if the accusation is in any way substantial.
Some ethnicities (and religions for that matter) might have serious problems in the wider region. Many do flee to Israel for safety in that case. That is the reality here and I would say that this fact is pretty hard to dispute without pointing fingers at less fortunate circumstances that maybe lead to less tolerance than there is in Israel.
Of course the fact of one group being dominant is not sufficient; there need to be deeply structural (legal) mechanisms in place for that group to maintain its dominance, which has certainly been the case with Israel since its very founding.
You may consult the definitions in Wikipedia as to "ethnostate" and "ethnic group" for further detail if you wish.
Which ethnicity would that refer to in your opinion?
The one referred to in Sections 1, 5, 6 and 7 (and whose language is given preferential treatment in Section 4) of the Nation State Bill.
https://www.adalah.org/en/law/index
Regarding the myth of a diverse legislator negating an ethnostate, this is easily disprooven by looking at the legislator of unambiguous ethnostates of history. Even Rhodesia had a way more diverse legislator than today’s Israel.
Again, minorities often try to flee to Israel for different reasons, not the other way around. This is easy to observe.
Then Syria is an ethnostate as it is called the Syrian Arab Republic. Egypt is an ethnostate, as it is called the Arab Republic of Egypt. I believe the pattern is obvious?
I cannot shake the feeling that some might utter this criticism because in case of Israel it would likely be a Jewish majority nation. But the existence and political participation of non-Jews makes it clear that you try to use ethnostate differently.
If we look at the practices it becomes very clear that Israel meats the criteria of being an ethnostate. The immigration policy prohibits a single ethnic group (Palestinian Arabs) from immigrating, while creating the conditions for that same ethnic group (as well as others, such as Bedouin) to emigrate. The conditions for emigration includes confiscating land, limiting mobility, etc. In the occupied territories these practices become abundantly clear, and we even have an ICJ case backing this narrative[2].
Ethno-states are actually quite rare in history, you need a pretty strong military or police to enforce demographic policies, and before industrialization most states didn’t have that. Ironically one can argue that Roman Judea would meat that critearia when they expelled all the Jews. Notably they didn’t have the same ethno-demographic policies in neighboring Galilee, hinting that this was an expensive policy which the Roman state deemed not worth the costs. After industrialization ethno-states become a much more viable option, but we still mostly see them as a single ethnic regions of empires, most commonly via settler colonialism, where the settler are the ethnic rulers. And even then the policies were usually short lived as local population pushed back.
Syria does not have practices and policies to shift the demography in favor of one ethnic group at the cost of another, and neither does Egypt. One can argue that Turkey does (against the Kurdish people) but this does not come anywhere close to the ethnic policies enacted by Israel today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnocracy
There may be other countries in the region which satisfy this definition also, or fall on the spectrum; I do not single out Israel for criticism in this regard. The topic only came up in regard to the events 1947-1948, specifically the UNPPP -- and why the indigenous populace were not exactly celebrating this proposal or its likely consequences (which are of course now their day-to-day reality).
In regard to those consequences, specifically: the creation of an ethnostate on a large portion of their ancestral homeland; dominated by foreigners, and intrinsically and permanently hostile to their well-being and their right of self-determination.
Which they naturally opposed, as any self-respecting people would.