zlacker

Most of the world is competing ethnostates, including most if not all Arab states. (I’m certainly glad my parent’s generation secured our ethnostate, at great cost.) Whether there is a better way is an open question. But anybody would be an idiot to sacrifice their ethnostate for that experiment. It’s never ended well.

>>rayine+(OP)
> Anybody would be an idiot to sacrifice their ethnostate

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.

>>rayine+(OP)
> Most of the world is competing ethnostates, including most if not all Arab states.

This is simply not true. Almost none of the world is ethnostates.

>>tdeck+45
Countries like China and Japan are de facto ethnostates. There's also countries with religious majorities like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, and India, many of which are associated with an ethnicity. Saudi Arabia is named after the Arabs. You could make the argument that many European states have dominant ethnic groups like the French, though they are nominally secular nations.

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.

>>__loam+b9
Good analysis. Any ideas on solutions?

>>keepam+Jc
Not a fucking clue man. These people hate each other and they both have reason to. Maybe you need a solution administered by a third party like the UN but no solution is going to leave everyone happy, and the UN itself is pretty flawed. There's plenty of insane people on both sides including Hamas.

>>__loam+b9
De-facto seems to be doing a lot of work there. Which of these countries have things like this?

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.

>>__loam+qe
I don't really see what the UN can do. Even if you had a solution that no one likes how do you force it on both parties?

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.

>>tdeck+8j
> These policies don't seem to be making Jews safer.

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.

>>JamesB+ep
I suppose one approach is just sanction/isolate the entire region, until both sides reach their own solution. But… unlikely the entire world would unite in that, resulting in incomplete sanctions and messy alliance networks, with probably new enemies for each in the aftermath, and sadly perhaps new “scores to settle” against those who sanctioned them.

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

>>keepam+Qu
I would love to say I shouldn't have an opinion on this. Unfortunately my government is giving our tax dollars to one side so it can bomb the other. If they would prefer I didn't have an opinion, maybe they can stop taking our money to buy bombs.

>>__loam+7C
Yeah, I like your thinking. It's tricky. Inextricable government-citizen stuff. I'm more of a global citizen right now, I don't really feel that. But I get it. Must be tough. Democracy...whaddayagonnado?

>>__loam+b9
Right. Asian countries that aren’t technically ethnostates are effectively such, by way of something that functions like an ethnic identity. E.g. nearly everyone assimilating into Han ethnic identity in China. Similarly, Arab identity.

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.

>>George+l2
The only workable solution is two states, and Arabs giving up the idea of retaking Jerusalem and rebuilding the caliphate. They got to keep nearly all their territorial gains from their conquest of the Levant, that should be good enough.

>>__loam+b9
Wait what? China as an ethnic state? That would require a pretty large stretch. Europe is populated by Europeans, but saying it's an ethnic state is not very useful. China is a huge country with many ethnic groups with their own identities. The Han may dominate but the country functions more like a colonial empire.

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.

>>rayine+ya1
> The only workable solution is two states, and Arabs giving up the idea of retaking Jerusalem and rebuilding the caliphate.

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.

>>__loam+7C
One issue with that is we only provide a small portion of their military budget and use a lot of that influence to persuade them to treat the Palestinians better.

>>rayine+ca1
"They were living in peace with their neighbors for hundreds of years, and then their neighbors turned on them and massacred them."

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.

>>__loam+b9
> You could make the argument that many European states have dominant ethnic groups like the French, though they are nominally secular nations.

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.

>>xorcis+8f1
> The Han may dominate but the country functions more like a colonial empire.

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?

>>__loam+7C
I'm assuming you're American and on this basis, it's safe to point out this expenditure is primarily defensive, funding the iron dome. You don't hear about the iron dome in the news much as it would get boring reading day in, day out of the same defences against "exploratory" missiles fired into Israel. These defensive missiles are really expensive.