Ethnostate Is Just Another Word for State

It Takes a People to Raise a Flag

Map of Europe in 1923, after the defeat of the Central Powers. Newly formed ethnostates, created per Woodrow Wilson’s principle of self-determination, are in red. The conglomerate-ethnostates of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were later divided into smaller ethnostates. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Is Israel an “ethnostate”? And what exactly does that term mean, anyway? On the left, the ethnostate accusation is usually meant to cast Israel as a barbaric outlier compared to the world’s progressive, post-ethnic nations.

Noah Smith

summarizes this view in all its received wisdom:

The downsides of ethnonationalism have been exhaustively laid out in the decades since World War 2, and I’m not going to reiterate them all now. Suffice it to say that most nations of the world have moved away from ethnonationalism — there is an informal sense in which some people still think of France as the land of the Franks and so on, but almost all nations define citizenship and belonging through institutions rather than race. Israel, one of the few exceptions to this rule, receives a large amount of international criticism for defining itself as an ethnostate.

By eliding the distinction between ethnicity and race, Smith makes it seem as if “ethnonationalism” is automatically akin to Nazism. But “most nations of the world” don’t define citizenship and belonging through institutions alone. Nor do they define citizenship and belonging by race. Israel certainly doesn’t, since 21% of its citizens are Arabs. Rather, most nations conceive of themselves as the homelands of peoples. By referring to “the land of the Franks,” Smith tries to depict this notion as painfully archaic. But most French would agree that France is the land of the French people. They would point to a shared culture, language, values, history, and, perhaps, certain je ne sais quoi, as elements of what it means to be French. France’s backlash to mass migration concerns precisely the integration (or lack thereof) of newcomers into the French people.¹ Smith is American, of course, and America is exceptional in the degree to which its identity is defined civically. But even then, most Americans believe that they are a culturally distinct people, not merely a collection of individuals who happen to share the same institutions.

Per Smith, “If Britain is defined as the land of the Britons, then a Han person whose great-great-great-grandparents moved there from China will exist as a contingent citizen — a perpetual foreigner whose continued life in the land of their birth exists only upon the sufferance of a different race.” Well, no, a person whose great-great-great-grandparents moved to Britain from China would, in all likelihood, now be fully British with some distant Han roots. If, over five generations, his British-Chinese clan only married other British-Chinese people, then sure, our lad would be ethnically Chinese as far as ancestry goes. But that would obviously be the result of a concerted effort to maintain a Chinese identity away from China. And certainly, by this point, Oliver Zhang (to give him a name) would be culturally closer to other Brits than to Chinese people in China. As long as he has equal rights and freedoms, what does it matter to him if Britain is defined as “the land of the Britons”? Can’t he take pride in Shakespeare and Churchill (in addition to Confucius and Taizong) without sharing their precise ancestry? If he does sometimes get perceived as a foreigner, can’t he show the trademark British stiff upper lip, keep calm, and carry on?

The Zhang example demonstrates what I’d call “inclusive ethnonationalism,” which is how national belonging generally works in the West. (China itself, and many other Asian countries, tend not to be so inclusive.) A country can be defined as the homeland of a people, while also providing legal equality and civil rights to members of other peoples (who may, in turn, join that country’s people). This point is made explicitly in the foundational documents of a number of nations. For example, Armenia’s Constitution declares both that “The Armenian language and cultural heritage shall be under the care and protection of the State” (ethnocentric!) and that “Everyone shall be equal before the law” (inclusive!). Per Ireland’s Constitution, “the Irish nation cherishes its special affinity with people of Irish ancestry living abroad who share its cultural identity and heritage” (ethnocentric!), but also “It is the firm will of the Irish nation . . . to unite all the people who share the territory of the island of Ireland, in all the diversity of their identities and traditions” (inclusive!). And then there’s Israel’s Declaration of Independence, which affirms “the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate in their own sovereign State, like all other nations” (ethnocentric, but not entirely, since it implicitly affirms the rights of other nations to their own states, too) while also promising to “ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race, or sex” (egalitarian!).

Israel’s Declaration of Independence, like the constitutions of Armenia and Ireland, is a particular example of a general principle upheld by the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights: “All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.” The term “ethnonationalism” is meant to imply a harsher, more racialist tone than “a people’s right to self-determination.” But ethnicity refers to more than just ancestry: it encompasses the full gamut of, well, peoplehood. White nationalists who dream of a “white ethnostate” are confused precisely on this point. Yugoslavia was composed of racially identical South Slavic people. Nevertheless, it broke apart along ethnic lines. You couldn’t tell a Serb from a Croat, but their identities, forged through history and religion, are still distinct. By contrast, white is not an ethnicity, but a cluster of separate ethnicities that, going far back enough in time, are distantly related. Of course, shared ancestry is often a component of ethnicity, but it is the cultural legacy of one’s ancestors—not the physical traits that they passed down—that forms the primary basis of ethnic ties. Blood is thicker than water, but shared ethnicity goes deeper than blood.

One irony of accusing Israel of defining nationality by race is that unlike, say, Koreans, the Jewish people can be joined by individuals of any ancestry. The classic example is Ruth the Moabite, who says to her Israelite mother-in-law, “where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.” Ruth’s descendants include King David, Israel’s greatest ruler: an example of inclusive ethnonationalism at its best. Most Jews do share a common ancestry, but that has not been the prime determinant of Jewish peoplehood. (For example, the notion of “half-Jewish” is foreign to the traditional Jewish self-definition: If you have a Jewish mother, you’re Jewish. If you don’t, you’re not.²) Another irony is that Israel is not unique in the Middle East in defining itself as a people’s homeland. The Palestinian National Charter calls Palestine “the homeland of the Arab Palestinian people.”³ Neighboring countries are members of the Arab League and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, despite their non-Arab and non-Muslim minorities. Rather, Israel is unique in the degree to which it accords rights to all its citizens. For example, it is the only Middle Eastern country where the Christian population is increasing. Elsewhere, according to a UK-commissioned report, Christians experience “forms of persecution ranging from routine discrimination in education, employment and social life up to genocidal attacks,” which have contributed to their decline from 20% of the region’s population a century ago to less than 4% today.

Israel’s treatment of non-citizen Arabs in the West Bank, as compared with Jewish settlers, may be rightly criticized. (I’m leaving aside Gaza, since Israel withdrew from the territory in 2005, only reentering after Hamas’s invasion in October 2023.) Nevertheless, it’s worth noting that Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, who oversees civilian policy in the West Bank, is not a Jew at all, but a member of the Druze minority. If you want to describe Israel as an ethnostate then, you’d have to include the modifier “inclusive.” Or you could simply say that Israel is the nation-state of a people, as is common throughout the world, which is involved in a conflict with another people—as is also common throughout the world. My point is not that Israel is uniquely innocent of the sins of nationalism, but that it is not uniquely guilty. And more generally, nationalism—which, in most cases, to varying degrees, is also “ethnonationalism”—is not just the cause of a litany of sins. Israel, like other successful nation-states, has flourished politically and economically in large measure due to its national cohesion. By contrast, in neighboring Lebanon, the absence of a strong shared identity has led to sectarian conflict and societal collapse. Call it “ethnonationalism” if you will, but better to have peoplehood and a state than tribalism and chaos.

1. Of course, this backlash extends to other European countries.

2. At least 400,000 Israelis have Jewish ancestry but are not considered Jewish according to halakha (religious law). Whether the conversion process should be made easier for this population (as well as for interested Palestinians, who themselves often have distant Jewish ancestry) is a separate question.

3. To his credit, Smith acknowledges that the Palestinian movement is also ethnonationalist: “Personally, I tend to agree with the criticism of Israel’s ethnocentrism, but I don’t think replacing this with Palestinian ethnocentrism would make things better.” However, critics of Israel as an “ethnostate” are rarely so consistent.