I have studied Israel’s history extensively, have been there a dozen times, speak some Hebrew, and have studied a range of perspectives on it too. It was definitely, absolutely not founded as a reaction to ethnostates. That’s fake history. Theodor Herzl and Ben Gurion and Golda Meir were not all thinking, “Oh it would be so great to end ethnostates so let’s create a state for Jews in the biblical homeland of the Jewish people and get all the Jews in the world to come there.” No… they were all dreaming of a JEWISH homeland, they didn’t care much about what was going on between the goyim (“nations”, non-Jews), and they certainly did not create a country that was open to Arabs. If they had been opposed to ethnostates why would they have violently expelled Arabs from Israel? Would make no sense, they should have welcomed Palestinians and made them full and equal citizens. Why not? Nothing wrong with being a Jewish minority if it’s a non-ethnostate, everyone is just people, no nations, right?
In fact they did whatever they could to expel Palestinians, they did whatever they could to promote Jewish (but not Arab) birth rates, and so on, and this has been true since even before 1948. Yes now Israel is finally in a position where they don’t need to conceal their vision of Israel anymore, whereas before they had to be… somewhat unclear about it, and so they did token actions like taking in some African Jews, and taking in a tiny number of Vietnamese refugees, but… my feeling is those things were always done more as PR moves than as sincere goals, and now they no longer do them.
And ethnostates don’t always become anti-Semitic. Not at all. A sizable number of Jews fled from Europe to Japan during WWII and were treated very well there, even though Japan was the worst kind of absolute fascist nationalist monarchy imaginable at the time. There’s even a book about this. Even under Mussolini, things were ok for the Jews, at least until he capitulated and the Nazis took over, and there were Jewish Fascists in Italy. Jews were perfectly ok under Apartheid in SA, in fact were better off and safer under Apartheid than they are now, and they are now having to flee the country. SA was so good for Jews that Israel and SA had a very warm relationship and conducted nuclear development together. I could list a lot of examples… I’m not saying that any of those terrible systems (Apartheid, Japanese nationalism, etc) were not terrible, just saying that … strangely, such systems are not necessarily anti-Semitic. That’s just historical facts.
If you want a country that has become explicitly and strongly opposed to ethnostates, Sweden is your example. Not Israel. Israel is no Sweden.
