Is Israel an Ethnostate? Jonah Platt Breaks Down Demonization, Delegitimization, & Double Standards

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Let's cut the bullshit, shall we?

We've spent the last couple weeks deconstructing the major buzzwords and liables most frequently tossed around in anti-Israel discourse.

If you haven't checked out those monologues yet, I strongly recommend it for your personal sanity, if nothing else, but there's one word we've yet to unpack.

An academic and esoteric term that literally no regular person uses in any context except to denigrate Israel.

Many of you will be familiar with the great Jewish activist Natan, Sharansky three Ds of antisemitism, demonization, delegitimization, and double standards.

The way anti-Zionists use the term Ethnostate checks all three boxes in the most obvious and honestly embarrassing of ways.

Anyone attempting to weaponize this term is essentially wearing a sign on their forehead that says, I have not done any critical thinking about this.

I'm just repeating something somebody else told me that seems to support my chosen desire to dump on Israel.

Now, look, I sound pretty confident, right?

That's because this is an easy one.

Most countries on earth lies somewhere on the ethnostate spectrum, and Israel, like many other countries, falls somewhere towards the middle.

You'd never know it from the way it's singled out, but it's true.

And verifiably so.

So let's break it down.

An ethnostate is a state whose citizenship national identity and political rights are explicitly organized around a single ethnic group with that group maintaining political dominance and often demographic majority through state policy.

In other words, it's a country organized for the benefit of one ethnic group with others excluded or subordinated.

Right off the bat, I bet you can think of a few places that might fit that definition.

Hence the spectrum.

Three key questions determine where a country falls on said spectrum.

Number one, can anybody become a citizen regardless of ethnicity?

If the answer is yes alto, you're a civic state like Singapore, whose laws actively prevent any sort of ethnic nationalism.

If the answer is no, mwo, you're a tier one ethnostate like Myanmar, who not only flat out denies citizenship to ethnic minorities like the Roya, but has actively sought to genocide them into oblivion.

And yes, I'm talking the real, legitimate, fully documented genocide.

Question two, does the state define itself as belonging to a particular ethnic group?

If the answer is yes, as it is for, say, Armenia, which is 98% ethnically Armenian, with a clear sense of nationhood, predating the formation of its modern state, you're high up on the ethnostate ladder.

If the answer is no, as it is in a purely multinational state like Canada, than you are a civic state.

And question three, are non-ethnic citizens treated as full equals.

If the answer is no, as it is for Japan, where even multi-generational ethnic Koreans are treated more as residents than citizens, you got ethnostate in you.

If the answer is yes, you're lying because true ethnic equality doesn't exist anywhere but a country like say, New Zealand, is decently close.

This is how we set our Ethnostate calculus at the top.

In addition to Myanmar, Japan and Armenia, you got countries like South Korea, which is 96%.

Ethnically Korean has very low naturalization rates and is one of the strongest ethnic nationalism ideologies in the world.

You've got Gulf States like Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Qatar, where the rulers are.

Arab citizenship is basically impossible for non Arabs and foreign workers are treated as permanent outsiders with no pathway to integration.

In fact, these countries operate very closely to apartheid states, just divided along civic lines rather than purely racial ones.

The populations of UAE and Qatar, for instance, are around 10% Arab citizens with full rights, while the other 90% are migrant workers with limited or no rights, often spatially segregated into labor camps and legally enshrined as permanent subordinates.

Ask yourself, have you heard even one conversation designating any of these countries as either apartheid or ethnostate me?

Thinks not.

At the other far end of the spectrum, you've got the most civic countries like Canada, Singapore, the United States, and Switzerland.

But I don't need to tell you, even these states face massive ethnic tensions, or in the case of Switzerland, no birthright, citizenship, and an extremely restrictive path to naturalization, which is all to say nobody's perfect.

You know, above them you've got moderate ethnostate like our EU pals, Finland, Ireland, Iceland, and Portugal.

These countries all have strong national ethnic identity.

Citizenship historically determined by blood and significant ethnic homogeneity with Iceland.

Bjork in it up at 95% ethnic Icelandic tops in all Europe.

But these countries are also fully democratic with anti-discrimination laws, EU integration, and are moving towards being more open societies.

And finally, the moment you've all been waiting for, we've got our moderate to strong ethnostate where we find alongside such illustrious nations as Greece, Egypt, Hungary, and Poland.

These are nation states that check two-ish of the ethnostate boxes.

Greece, for instance, is based around the principle of ethnic religious citizenship.

To be Greek is not about certain values or merit like America, but about being ethnically Greek as almost 95% of the population is and practicing Greek Orthodox Christianity is around 90% of the population.

Does minorities face widespread discrimination?

Citizenship is primarily through descent, and the Greek diaspora can claim citizenship much more easily than even long-term residents.

Egypt, very much the same with a 90% Muslim majority, systematically privileged over the 10% Christian minority, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So now let's go back to those three questions and run Israel through the gauntlet.

One, can anybody become a citizen regardless of ethnicity?

The answer is technically yes, which is one of the main reasons why Israel is further down on this list than many other countries.

However, while it's not impossible, like in Qatar or Japan, it is still pretty hard for most non-Jews to become citizens.

Less than 5% of new Israeli citizens annually are non-Jews, and for Palestinians, it's essentially impossible.

When you've lived through thousands of terrorist attacks as Israelis have, I think you can understand the logic there, but it is by definition a bit discriminatory and obviously punishes those with sincere dreams of becoming Israeli, the same as those who might seek to do Israel harm.

Israel also has what's called the right of return, meaning any Jew who moves to Israel is granted automatic citizenship.

I think this is a beautiful and necessary thing that has protected millions of Jews all over the world from annihilation.

And why shouldn't Jews be able to rejoin the rest of our tribe in our homeland, from which we have so long been exiled?

If you have no problem with diasporic Armenians, Irish Greeks, and Germans being granted automatic or streamlined citizenship, but it bothers you when the Jews do it, guess what?

You're not anti ethnostate.

You're just a bigot.

Period.

Plenty of countries on earth prioritize their own ethnic citizenship.

Not every country in the world needs to be America just because America is.

But the trade off, for better or worse, is that it makes you ethnostate.

The question is whether or not that actually matters to you, and perhaps even more importantly, why that question itself even matters at all when nobody you know has ever thought to ask it about any other situation in any other country I've mentioned so far.

Question two was, does the state define itself as belonging to a particular ethnic group?

Clear, yes.

For Israel here, the 2018 nation state law unapologetically codified Israel is the land of the Jews.

Recognizing national self-determination is unique to the Jewish people making Hebrew the official language, the menorah, the official state symbol, the Jewish calendar, the official calendar, et cetera.

Clear ethnostate stuff there.

Check.

Which brings us finally to question three.

Are non-ethnic citizens treated as full equals?

This answer is a little more complicated.

Under civil law, the answer is definitely yes.

The nation state law in no way altered the formal civil rights enjoyed by the country's 20% Arab population.

As we've talked about before, Arabs vote live and work at every level of Israeli civil life.

But there are some caveats, the first of which is symbolic, but significant.

Israel is officially the homeland of the Jews.

Meaning if you are Arab or Jews or anything else, you can absolutely live there and love it and be deeply ingrained in the fabric of society.

But like a golf cart at a Boca Country Club, there's always gonna be a Jew at the wheel.

Some Westerners find this disparity abhorrent and rage of the supremacist oppressive Jews.

Of course, this implies they believe that 2 million Arab Israelis have no agency and are so infantile and naive.

They couldn't possibly be choosing to enjoy Israel's democratic freedoms, liberal society or economic opportunities over the more repressive, Islamist and authoritarian countries that surrounded.

It also implies that unless they're bald face card carrying hypocrites, they must be equally furious at Estonia, Latvia, Fiji, Malaysia, and Sri Lanka, all of which have varying degrees of constitutional ethnic nationalism while maintaining civil and voting rights for ethnic minorities.

There is, however, another caveat here, as there has long been systemic imbalance between the ways Jewish and Arab communities are treated by the government, and I'm only speaking about Israel proper here, not Gaza or Judean Samaria.

The 2018 Nation state law contains a key provision stating that the development of Jewish settlement is a national value.

This clause is essentially a constitutional justification for directing resources to Jewish communities, which is great, but also the systemic underfunding of Arab communities, which is not great.

Arab municipalities receive roughly 30% less per capita in government funding than Jewish ones with major infrastructure gaps in roads, sewage schools and hospitals where Arab citizens can live, build, and own land are all restricted compared to their Jewish counterparts.

When the basic law says that Jews are the priority, it leaves a lot of leeway for politicians to pursue discriminatory policies that are not security based and not in the best interest of a free and equal society.

Thus, yet again as it is with all these defamatory terms, because we're always stuck in the binary posture of it is, no, it isn't.

We don't get to discuss the actual issues.

We just debate the terminology, and certainly most of the people weaponizing these words against Jews do not have the depth of knowledge to even have a meaningful discussion if they wanted to, because to even become an anti-Zionist.

Requires that you maintain only a shallow grasp of the material and lack interest in developing any sort of comprehensive understanding.

So in conclusion, is Israel an ethnostate?

Yes, to a degree.

So are dozens of other countries to varying degrees as well, which raises the key question.

Who gives a shit why?

In the name of all things, holy.

Doesn't matter if we can or cannot label a country in this specific way.

You wanna debate policy?

Great.

Let's talk about it though.

Unless you're a person of great influence in the country, you're debating your opinion one way or the other means nothing.

It's dinner table conversation.

And let's be honest, there isn't a person on earth who's refusing to visit Japan or eat Japanese food or talk shit about the Japanese because their country's kind of ethnostate, right?

So anyone levying this charge at Israel as an excuse for being anti-Zionist is full of it.

And you know what the funniest part is?

If the Palestinian Territories today became an official Palestinian country, guess what?

It would be an ethnostate.

The country would be close to 99%.

Ethnically homogenous include a right to return for one ethnic national group only, and you've already got laws on the books like the current Palestinian Authority Penal code, which makes land sales to Jews punishable by death to say nothing of the Hamas charter that seeks to kill every Jew on earth.

So the next time someone tries to use the word ethnostate as any kind of legitimate argument against Israel's existence, call them on it.

Unless they're prepared to wrestle with all of the ideas I've just presented, it's gonna be a bad faith conversation from the get go.

If they're open to exploring and learning, great.

If not, don't waste your breath.

I mean, come on.

It's right there in the word.

Just say no to Ethnostate.

This is the 61st episode of being Jewish with me.

Jonah Platt.