Key Takeaways:
- Influencers, podcasters, and journalists have increasingly labeled Israel an “ethnostate,” using the term as a moral and political accusation rather than a precise description of Israeli law or governance.
- An ethnostate typically restricts rights or citizenship to a single ethnic or cultural group. Applying this definition to Israel falsely suggests that the state privileges Jews at the expense of minorities, despite Israel granting equal civil and political rights to its non-Jewish citizens.
- The ethnostate label is weaponized across ideological lines to delegitimize Jewish self-determination by portraying Israel either as an expression of Jewish racial power on the right or as a symbol of collective colonial guilt on the left.
Israel is, by its own description, an ethnostate, and saying otherwise would be a “ludicrous lie.” At least, that’s according to Tucker Carlson in a recent conversation with white nationalist Peter Brimelow.
Because Jewish identity is matrilineal, meaning a person is considered Jewish if their mother is Jewish, Brimelow and Carlson argue that the Jewish religion is racially based and therefore a “racial component” is inherent in the State of Israel. Being that the state was founded by atheists who “identified as Jewish racially,” Carlson suggests that Israel can only be described as such.
However, Israel, by its own description, is not an ethnostate in the way that Carlson and his guest describe. It is not a ludicrous lie to say this, but rather a simple understanding of the state’s laws and what an ethnostate actually is. This term, nevertheless, has become increasingly popular amongst anti-Israel influencers and journalists to negatively single out the only Jewish state for being just that – a Jewish state.
An ethnostate, at its basic understanding, is a state dominated by a certain ethnic group. But anti-Israel influencers have taken this term to mean something drastically different when applied to Israel, because, being a Jewish-majority state, would naturally make Israel an ethnostate in the same way that other ethnic or cultural majority states, such as Japan or Greece, would also fall under this category.
But when applied to Israel specifically, the entire understanding of the term changes to be one of racial discrimination based on fundamental misinterpretations of Israeli and Jewish laws.
Israel’s establishment as a Jewish state grants every Jew in the world the right to live in Israel, under the Law of Return. Under this law, anyone with one Jewish grandparent is eligible to become a citizen of the state. This is not a racial hierarchy as Carlson and Brimelow allude to, but rather a policy rooted in peoplehood, history, and refuge. The Law of Return exists because Jews are a nation with a shared identity that predates modern racial categories and has survived thousands of years, despite much of that time being in exile from the land of Israel.
Related Reading: What Is Israel’s Law of Return?
Crucially, Israeli citizenship is not limited to the Jewish people. Arab Israelis account for 21% of the total population and hold the same rights as Jewish Israelis, including holding positions of government and law.
Yet this has not stopped journalists such as Briahna Joy Gray from incorrectly and continuously repeating that as an ethnostate, Israel denies Arabs equal rights.
What people want to end is a Jewish supremacist ethnostate that has spent the last 75 years oppressing the indigenous population of Palestine, and to go back to Jews and Arabs having equal rights under the law. https://t.co/8zoF0r5sAc
— Briahna Joy Gray (@briebriejoy) May 4, 2024
A critical understanding of Israeli rights is entirely missing from anti-Israel influencers and journalists, enabling them to use the term ethnostate with ease and ill intent. In doing so, self-determination in the Jewish ancestral homeland is reframed as a racist endeavor, which is considered to be antisemitic under the widely-recognized IHRA working definition of antisemitism.
It is through this framing of the term ethnostate that right-wing podcasters such as Nick Fuentes feel comfortable applying the term to Israel. In using any term that can be leveled against Israel, Fuentes suggests that being an ethnostate is embedded in the character of not only Israel, but rather is an inherent aspect of the Jewish people as a collective. It is the suggested “privilege” of the Jewish people that upholds the ethnostate and enables it to commit a “genocide” while bypassing criticism. The Jewish people are portrayed as a racial group capable of controlling global affairs and thus a danger to the rest of society.
I’m so sick of hearing about antisemitism
You can start complaining about bigotry again when you aren’t committing a genocide with your ethnostate while being the most privileged group in the world
— Nicholas J. Fuentes (@NickJFuentes) November 20, 2024
It is ironic, then, that British journalist Owen Jones has written that the “western far-right see Israel as a model: an ethno-state waging what they see as a righteous war against Islam,” when in reality, far-right figures demonstrate the exact opposite. The far-right movement has perceived the Jewish people as abusing any power they supposedly hold in America, Israel, or elsewhere. A Jewish state with Jewish characteristics is thus treated as a suspect of a broader Jewish conspiracy theme.
Pro-Palestinian influencer Guy Christensen has applied the term ethnostate to Israel, using language remarkably similar to that of both Fuentes and Carlson. In claiming that Israel is a state built on oppression by the Zionist movement, Christensen reframes the national liberation movement of the Jewish people as one of racial domination.
The reason Israel should not exist is simply because Israel cannot function as “the Zionist project for a Jewish ethnostate” without its systems of oppression.
Zionists built them inside the foundations of Israel.
Never advocate to continue systems of oppression.
— YourFavoriteGuy (@guychristensen_) August 23, 2025
The universalization of the term ethnostate as applied to Israel thus reveals that the meaning the word holds when not used to Israel is something else entirely. Whereas the right frames Israel as holding racial power, the left frames Israel as collective colonial guilt and justifies its actions and rhetoric accordingly. In both cases, the ethnostate label serves the function of transforming Jewish nationhood into an inherently immoral project.
Labeling Israel an ethnostate is less about precision and more about delegitimization. In reframing Jewish self-determination as a uniquely illegitimate cause, those who use this term as a gross accusation ignore the many other states built upon similar ethnic, national, or cultural foundations. Its repurposing to wrongly accuse Israel of supremacy strips the term of analytical value, turning it into yet another weapon to be used against the world’s only Jewish state.
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