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  • I may be wrong but I think Israel is actually unique. If you’re Jewish you have an open invitation.

    You are wrong (although Israel may be unique in other ways). Ethnic Nationalism is a feature of several other countries e.g., Armenia, who offer privileged immigration status to members of an ethnic diaspora.

    As a white English British citizen and therefore a mongrel of various ethnic backgrounds (including Irish, Italian, Jewish and almost certainly northern European/Scandinavian) and a member of a deliberately ethnically-mixed country, the idea of an ethnostate is really troubling. If you asked me whether any country should be created for the express purpose of being a home specifically for one ethnic group, I'd say no, and given the intractable shitstorm that the creation of Israel has left us with it's pretty clear (in hindsight) that it wasn't the best idea.

    However, we have to deal with the situation as it is: Israel does exist and its ceasing to exist would create a further shitstorm and suffering for a lot of people. Israel also does a good job of being a much better progressive, liberal democracy (on many fronts) than many other middle-east countries. I therefore have the slightly weird viewpoint of objecting to the existence of Israel in principle (on the basis that it's a quasi- or budding ethnostate), but not in practice. All we can do is make the best of a bad situation. Trying to critique the actions of Israel from that standpoint is really tiresome though as you constantly have to dodge the accusation of being specifically anti-Israel and therefore (by implication) anti-semitic.

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