Hacker News Reader

Comment by dunekid | Hacker News Reader

Please do not throw the accusations of malintent when the truth presents otherwise, by not just a 10 minute walk.

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.

View on HN

What has that to do with anything? I stay with that accusation as long as there are accusation of Israel being an ethnostate at least. With so many languages an ethnostate is seems even more unlikely, but that is another matter.

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.

Even if that is true—which I doubt[*]—it is completely irrelevant to the question of ethnostate. The question of ethnostate is if the country has practices and policies to control the demographics that favors the dominating ethnic group. A country could be very friendly to minorities but still control the demographics in favor of the dominant ethnicity. The immigration policy of Israel, the carving out of the West Bank, the policy of settlements in the West Bank, all work together in demonstrating that Israel does indeed have practices and policies to control the demographics to favor the dominant ethnic group.

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?

---

*: 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.

Since this is HN and threads are supposed to be more interesting as they get longer, I might mention the neither subtle nor important different between Apartheid and Ethnocracy. It is not an important difference because either is demonstrably bad and shouldn’t happen, neither is it subtle because one portrays to civil rights (as in denying civil rights to a minority) and the other is about demographics (as in controling the demography to favor a certain ethnic group).

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com