The implicit assumption is that any place with a majority of "Arabs" would ethnically cleanse all the Jews or become an Islamic theocracy, so we must view everything through the lens of competing ethno-states. It's important to challenge this assumption. Ethno-states are inherently violent because every population is a mixture of different ethnicities, and an ethno-state needs to maintain a majority of a certain population. If the "wrong" group's population grows in an ethno-state, it becomes a "demographic problem" that the government needs to "solve". This is why carving up the world into such states is never a lasting solution for peace.
Aside: "Arab" and "Jew" are not mutually exclusive. You can be an Arab Jew in the same way you can be a Hispanic Jew - Arab is a distinction based on one's mother language not one's religion. This is why the Arab League includes countries in north Africa where most people aren't descended from ancestral Arabians. The history of and literature of Judeo-Arabic is an interesting rabbit hole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Jews
I'm sure Hamas feels the same way! I'm not going to say whether one or two-state solution is best, that's for Palestinians and Israelis to decide, but something's gotta give.
This is simply not true. Almost none of the world is ethnostates.
The biggest cosmopolitan countries are the United States and Brazil if I remember correctly. Maybe Canada too. Europe is moving in that direction. Countries that have a diverse citizenry are more of an exception though. Not that I disagree with your probable view that we should all live in diverse secular democracies, I just think your claim that almost none of the world is ethnostates is somewhat suspect.
I agree with the idea that Israel would ideally be a single secular state, but navigating that transition while preserving it as the safest place the Jews of the world can go would be an enormous challenge. The situation sucks and resists simple answers.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/israel-adopts-divisive-la...
Or this? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaization_of_the_Galilee
These are simply not normal things for a country to do in the 21st century. That doesn't mean I don't have massive problems with what these other countries are doing, or what the US is doing, but to say they're ethno-states like Israel in my view is a false equivalency.
> but navigating that transition while preserving it as the safest place the Jews of the world can go
Is it though? I know Jewish folks in the US with family in Israel, and it doesn't seem like they'd feel safer in Israel. These policies don't seem to be making Jews safer.
> Saudi Arabia is named after the Arabs.
nit: It's named after Arabia which is a geographic region that's been named after the Arabs for centuries. The disturbing part of the name Saudi Arabia is that it's named after a specific family of despots, not that it refers to Arabia. But even being named after an ethnic group doesn't make your country an ethno-state.
The UN doesn't have the firepower to force Israel to do anything it doesn't want to do, and doesn't have the desire to force Palestine to do anything it doesn't want to do.
I agree.
And I'm not saying that any countries are better or worse at being an ethnostate than Israel, just that there are many countries where racial identity is prominent. China as an ethnostate is complicated (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Dream for some examples), but 91% of people in China are Han Chinese. That culture is predominant and the Chinese state has an official language associated with that identity. Likewise, foreigners make up just about 2% of the population in Japan (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Japan). Japan is known to be an insular country that has a reputation for xenophobia. That's what I meant by de facto. Both countries have a dominant culture in a more pronounced way than the United States, for example. China also practices ethnic clensing with things like the Uyghur cultural genocide, which could be compared to some of the policies you linked.
If we waived a magic wand and made Palestine and Israel one country we wouldn't have peace. We'd have a a bloody civil war that makes the current conflict look like childs play.
As an outsider to this feud, perhaps the best thing for me to do is not to judge either of them. I think it’s human to want to pick a side, but they’re not making it easy either way, by now. War is ugly, and I feel sad about and disappointed in that region for reminding me how bad people can be…
I wish they would stop fighting and dying but i got no power to change that. If that’s what they wanna do, it’s up to them.
I was really looking forward to a trip to Israel this year but now i guess that’s on hold…too dangerous
Most European countries historically functioned like ethnostates. They’re trying to change that, but not successfully.
I don’t believe diverse countries are sustainable in the long run. Look at what happened to Jews in Europe. They were living in peace with their neighbors for hundreds of years, and then their neighbors turned on them and massacred them.
Ethnostates are still highly relevant today, especially for Jews.
Calling France an ethnic state is saying the Normans are the same group as the Provençal. It's like doing the same in Spain; a sure way to lose new friends. France and Spain are also old empires.
Japan is something else. The description makes sense there. Maybe also for the Nordic countries of Europe.
Freeing the slaves (a task which required us to fight the deadliest war in our history) was still the right and necessary thing to do. "You broke it, you bought it."
Yes, I don't think Palestinian Christians would love the idea of a caliphate in any case…
> Territorial gains from their conquest of the Levant
Again, for the daily life of the average resident of Gaza or the West Bank, this matters not a whit.
Progroms were not exactly a new thing in europe, but frequently happened over the centuries. The 19. and beginning of the 20. century was rather a quite peaceful episode, with jews getting equal citizen rights etc. but the hate did not go away, as can be seen, once the Nazis took over.
France officially rejects the idea of French ethnic nationalism. France’s nationalism is civic and linguistic - the French nation is defined in terms of citizenship and language, not in terms of ethnic ancestry - in fact, the French government does not even know the ethnic/racial composition of their country, since they refuse to collect statistics on it. So I disagree with the suggestion that France is an “ethnostate”
> Saudi Arabia is named after the Arabs
Both the Saudi royal family and the Saudi religious establishment have always opposed Arab nationalism; the only significant Arab nationalist force in Saudi politics was the outlawed Arab Socialist Action Party opposition, which was mostly crushed by the Saudi regime in the 1980s, and by 1991 or so was extinct.
At the level of spoken language, Han natively speak several mutually unintelligible languages; even at the written level, most of the mutually intelligibility only exists in the more formal registers. Are Han really one ethnic group then? Or more like a family of closely related ethnic groups?
> Japan is something else. The description makes sense there
Are Ryukyuans the same ethnic group as Yamato Japanese?
That's not what I'm asking for. In the US, Native Americans and descendants of slaves have full legal and political rights (in fact, Native Americans have extra political rights not granted to other citizens). Israel also can give Palestinians full legal and political rights, either in a separate state or as part of a one-state solution, without compromising its continued existence.