When in a political discussion I heard someone say they do not support Israel because they do not support ethno-states, I thought “aren’t plenty of countries ethno-states”? I thought of countries including Japan, Armenia, South and especially North Korea, the DR, Haiti, Rwanda, and the Comoros.
Is it true that Israel is more of an ethno-state than other nations?
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I mean Japan was pretty famously a supremacist ethnostate in its past. I don’t believe they are currently engaging in widespread ethnic cleansing against a subordinate ethnic/racial/religious population that lives within their State’s sovereign military authority by intentionally starving them to death after destroying or damaging 92 percent of their housing units ^(66), 70 percent of agricultural land^(67), 18 of 36 their hospitals^(68), and 53 percent of their power/water/fuel facilities^(69). I’m not an expert on those other countries, but if they were doing that, I think that is a pretty strong indicator of a rather severe ethnostate.
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Sooo many deleted/removed comments lol. Wonder what they said??
Israel is an ethnostate in the same way that Ireland, Italy, and Hungary are ethnostates. All of those countries offer citizenship by ancestry (jus sanguinis). They also all have citizens who are not ethnically Irish, Italian, or Hungarian who have equal citizenship, just as Israel has many non-Jews with equal rights and citizenship (2 million Arabs, for example). The difference is that since Judaism is an ethnoreligion, people get confused. But it’s the same idea— that of the ‘nation-state’.
People from countries that are the result of recent colonization such as the US, Australia, or Canada often have a hard time grasping this idea because their nationality is not also an ethnicity. But that type of nationality is more of a New World concept.
Sources:
2.Israeli Law of Return
3.Israeli demographics
5.Definition of an ethnostate
Irish citizenship by descent
Italian citizenship
8.Hungarian citizenship
/1. Israel calls itself a state for Jews only. The Prime Minister has said that it is not a country for all its citizens, but for Jews only.
The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), Israel Country Report, March 2012 states: “the Committee is concerned that no general provision for equality and the prohibition of racial discrimination has been included in the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty (1992), which serves as Israel’s bill of rights; neither does Israeli legislation contain a definition of racial discrimination in accordance with Article 1 of the Convention.” Here is the Basic Law in English. The very first article states that the purpose of the Basic Law is to create a Jewish and democratic state.
/2. Israel’s Law of Political Parties makes it illegal for any political party to deny that Israel is a state for the Jewish people. The Nakba Law bans anyone from commemmorating the Nakba.
/3. The right to national self-determination is a human right according to Article 1 in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and in the UN Charter. Israel has specifically made Palestinian self-determination illegal.
In 2018, the Israeli parliament passed the Nation State Law that states that “the actualization of the right of national self-determination in the state of Israel is unique to the Jewish people”
/4. Israel’s national ID distinguishes between Jews and non-jews, and Israel has colour-coded ID cards for Palestinians that represent which occupied area they come from.
Until 2005 there was an explicit category for race in the Israeli national ID. This was removed due to disagreement about whether to categorize converts as Jews or not. Nevertheless, Jews still have the Hebrew calendar dates on their IDs while non-Jews do not, effectively identifying to the police who is ethnically Jewish and who isn’t. And here is the Population Registry Law that explicitly collects data on citizen’s ethnicity. And here you can compare it directly to apartheid South Africa’s Population Registration Act of 1950. The Israeli Population Registration distinguishes between “nationality” and “citizenship”, placing Arabs into their own “nationality” which is then given a numeric code.
There was a court case in 2013 to change the ‘nationality’ section in the Population Registry to ‘Israeli’ instead of Jew or Arab. The Supreme Court rejected ‘Israeli nationality. It stated explicitly:
Allowing citizens to relinquish ethnic or religious identity in the population registry would undermine Israel’s Jewishness, ruling says
Residents cannot identify themselves as Israelis in the national registry because the move could have far-reaching consequences for the country’s Jewish character, the Israeli Supreme Court wrote…
While many states (Germany, France, Sweden, Norway, etc) do not collect ethnicity/race data on its citizens, many states do, such as the UK and US and Canada. However – the key difference is that in these other examples they are self-reported categories that you can change easily, or select ‘other’. In Israel it is a state-assigned category that cannot be changed without legal approval, and the categories are tied to legal rights in the state – ie: jews have special privileges that other citizens do not.
/5. Israel’s largest private land owner, the Jewish National Fund, refuses to sell or lease land to non-Jews. But it receives land from the state and this was and remains a key method of Judaizing Palestinian-owned land. First the state takes the land from Palestinians who fled during the wars or who have had their entry permits revoked, with the Absentee Property Law. Then it is given to the JNF with the Transfer of Property Law, which specifically mentions the Jewish National Fund as a beneficiary of land controlled by the state. So the state takes land and then gives it to an organization that will only sell land to Jews. The Israeli Land Administration, a government body, has offered to give an equal amount of land to the JNF for every plot that it sells to Arabs.
/6. Israel continues to build Jewish-only settlements and Jewish-only roads in the occupied West Bank, in violation of the Geneva Conventions. The government subsidizes the Jewish settlements in the occupied territories and offers subsidized loans and grants to settlers if they move into the illegally occupied territories. Settlers receive tax breaks simply for having their permanent address in a settlement. The World Zionist Organization (WZO) is one of the primary funders of agricultural projects in the settlements, and its primary funding comes from the Israeli state. The Israeli government invests more in schools in the settlements than in average schools in Israel. It gives incentives to teachers, transportation for children, and settlement schools have fewer pupils per classroom. As with education, the settlements also get over-investment in healthcare compared to Israel proper. Isolated settlements have a clinic for every 50-100 residents, far beyond the ratio of clinics inside Israel. Medical staff receive benefits for operating in the settlements. Here’s a map from HRW showing the sheer scale of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
/7. According to the 1998 Rome Statute, “the transfer, directly or indirectly, by the Occupying Power of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies” is defined as a war crime. Israel has transferred its Jewish population to all the territories it occupies.
/8. Then there’s the army, only Israeli Jews and tiny amounts of bedouins and Druze actually serve in the military. The vast majority of Israeli Arabs don’t. This means that the country’s military in effect, represents only 1 ethnic group in the country. Imagine if the American military was only made up of whites.
/9. It is well known that Israeli law distinguishes Jews from non Jews. But there are many examples of this day to day discrimination. For ex. the Jerusalem city hall announcing that minorities aren’t allowed into kindergartens. Israeli hospitals admit that they segregate Arab and Jewish women in maternity wards A council leader stating that Arabs should not be allowed into the same swimming pools as Jews, or the creation of a Jews-only parking lot in Jerusalem.
/10. Palestinians are banned from converting to Judaism. See:
Palestinian requests to convert to Judaism rejected automatically’
“Rabbi Yitzhak Peretz, director of the Israeli government’s Conversion Authority, made the statement earlier this week, according to NRG.”
/11. Any Jewish person anywhere in the world is allowed to emigrate to Israel. That right is exclusive to Jews. However- Israel seems to be the only country that has adopted DNA testing as part of this process and which has rejected candidates on that basis. See this 2015 paper from Harvard: Genetic Citizenship: DNA testing and the Israeli law of return
There are many many other examples of why Israel is an ethnostate modelled on a truly 19th century European ethnostate model
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Well, ask yourself – why do many Israelis get married in Cyprus?
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Well Israel has a clause in its constitution that says its a Jewish state….if that helps clarify things
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it’s more about the way ethnicity is directly relevant to laws, not just a demographic concern. if Japan has laws that only applied to those of non-japanese ethnicities, it would also be an aparthied ethnostate.
https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Read-the-full-Jewish-Nation-State-Law-562923
> It states that “the right to exercise national self-determination” in Israel is “unique to the Jewish people.”
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Do people who aren’t Jewish by heritage or religion have equal rights?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_Middle_East
Israel is one of the most ethnically and religiously diverse nations in the Middle East. The very ideal of the question is weird.
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If you use this definition (see below) then no. The Israeli constitution protects all people regardless of ethnic background, religion etc. ~30% of Israel is Muslim and they have full rights.
ethnostate[ˈɛθnəʊsteɪt]
noun ethno-state (noun)
If you use the definition that belonging to a certain group grants you automatic citizenship, then yes (sort of). All Jews has the unrestricted right to immigrate to Israel and become an Israeli citizen. But they are not alone in this as many other countries also practice a form of automatic citizenship. For example all people of Greek heritage (back to great grandparents) can automatically obtain Greek citizenship.
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whats with all these israel posts on reddit lately?
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Last time I asked Google, there were 56 ethno Muslim states. Is that what you mean?
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First many of your examples are not ethno-states at all so immediately we need to make some corrections.
Rwanda 85% Hutu and 14% Tutsi is not an ethnostate they practice Rwanda for all meaning no ethnic identifiers on ID cards. I mean their national anthem says
“They made us believe we were different”
“The white man split us”
“Before they came, we were one”
Granted of course there is a lot of systemic issues in Rwanda where Tutsi basically dominante the country in today’s world.
How is the DR an ethno-state? It’s a multi racial country where there is no “Law of return” for anybody or bloodline citizenship. I don’t even know what you’re in about for this one to be honest.
Haiti? Again what are you talking about? Just because you have one group of people dominating that country doesn’t make it an ethno-state. There is no official hierarchy in the law based on ethnicity there. Same thing with the Comoros
The ones that are actually ethno-states
Japan, Armenia, and South Korea are the best examples of ethno-states now how does Israel differ?
Israel is the only one based on the diaspora coming back to their homeland of Judea while the rest are not. There was no mass expulsion of Koreans or Japanese by the Roman Empire or mongol empire or whatever empire. What this means practically is they didn’t have to expel other native groups to make their ethnic state.
Israel is actually more open to allowing non Jews having citizenship than Japan or South Korea. The tension comes from Palestinians feeling like second class citizens though and not receiving the same rights as a Jewish person.
So is Israel more of an ethno-state than other nations? Well most nations are not ethno states so yes
If we just compare them to other ethno states in some ways yes and other ways no
The whole diaspora thing and law of return. In other ways no because it’s actually easier to get citizenship there than say Japan
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