Is Israel an Ethno-state?
Progressives accuse Israel of being an ‘ethno-state’ in order to delegitimize it. They don’t object to the 22 Arab states, to Arab nationalism or Pan-Arabism. They reserve their derision for the only Jewish state. As to whether Israel is in fact an ethnostate is another matter. It can be challenging to categorize Judaism because it is a religion and a culture and there are genetic connections shared by Jews that further complicate matters. However, being Jewish is not a racial category because there are black Jews from Africa and white-passing Jews from Europe.
Ethnicity is a somewhat vague concept. Let us assume, then, that being Jewish is an ethnicity and Israel is an ethnostate. Would Israel be unique in this regard? Israel is not the only country that provides preferential routes to citizenship for particular ethnicities. In 2019 India passed a law that grants citizenship to persecuted Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians who fled Muslim-majority Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan prior to 2015. Jordanian immigration law distinguishes between Jews and Arabs and gives preferential status to the latter. Lebanon requires that its Prime Minister be a Sunni Muslim.
But all of this is besides the point. It is hard to imagine countries with a distinct ethnic identity allowing it to become a minority through immigration. Poland, Germany and France are examples of countries in which the overwhelming majority of citizens belong to a particular ethnic group. Saudi Arabia would not tolerate anything other than Sunni Arab majority within its territory. Would Japan allow its ethnicity to become a minority as a result of immigration? Of course not.
Nor would that be desirable. What makes travel so enriching is being immersed in a different culture. We would not want Japan to have the same culture as China, and we wouldn’t want to hear more English in Mexico than Spanish. What should matter to liberals is not that a country attempts to preserve its cultural and ethnic identity, but that it grants equal rights to all of its citizens. Israel is the only democracy in the Middle-East, and though it uses legal mechanisms in order to maintain its Jewish identity, it grants equal rights to all its citizens. That is what should matter to liberals.
Nevertheless, Judaism is a religion, not an ethnicity. This can be easily proven. You can’t convert to another ethnicity, but you can convert to another religion. You can convert to Judaism, therefore it is not an ethnicity. So Israel is not an “ethnostate” because Judaism is not an ethnicity, and even if it were an ethnostate, that would not be the outlier and moral abomination that many progressives suggest it is.
