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I’m not an expert in Israeli law, but I’m sure quite a few laws in Israel meat the definition of ethno-state, which is practices and policies that favors shifting the demography in favor of a particular ethnic group. Wikipedia actually has a few examples of laws which meet the criteria[1], including the nation state law. If we look at the practices it becomes very clear that Israel meats the criteria of being an ethnostate. The immigration policy prohibits a single ethnic group (Palestinian Arabs) from immigrating, while creating the conditions for that same ethnic group (as well as others, such as Bedouin) to emigrate. The conditions for emigration includes confiscating land, limiting mobility, etc. In the occupied territories these practices become abundantly clear, and we even have an ICJ case backing this narrative[2]. Ethno-states are actually quite rare in history, you need a pretty strong military or police to enforce demographic policies, and before industrialization most states didn’t have that. Ironically one can argue that Roman Judea would meat that critearia when they expelled all the Jews. Notably they didn’t have the same ethno-demographic policies in neighboring Galilee, hinting that this was an expensive policy which the Roman state deemed not worth the costs. After industrialization ethno-states become a much more viable option, but we still mostly see them as a single ethnic regions of empires, most commonly via settler colonialism, where the settler are the ethnic rulers. And even then the policies were usually short lived as local population pushed back. Syria does not have practices and policies to shift the demography in favor of one ethnic group at the cost of another, and neither does Egypt. One can argue that Turkey does (against the Kurdish people) but this does not come anywhere close to the ethnic policies enacted by Israel today. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnocracy#Israel 2: https://www.icj-cij.org/case/186 |