Ethno-states

One of the ideas that floats around in the empty heads of the use-X (add your suffix of choice) idiots, is that Israel = an ethno-state. 

There is of course an element of "well, duh" about this. 

Israel is a post-colonial nation and one of the defining characteristics of such, at least those which achieved independent statehood in the last century, is usually an ethnic or ethno-religious patina to the political structures. 

This is true not only in the Middle East, where the phenomenon is close to ubiquitous, but also in parts of Asia — like the Indian sub-continent — even when a form of democratic rule with broad enfranchisement has long been established. Parts of Africa too. 

Where post-colonial nationhood tends to look starkly different is actually in the Americas. 

Here, independence was achieved earlier under the auspices of landed or bourgeois elites, many of whom kept slaves (and their womenfolk out of politics). Ethnic tensions were generally resolved with blatant genocides — then not understood as such — which were far less exposed to the critical outside gaze. 

Where this process dragged on late into the twentieth century, in places like Guatemala for example, things got seriously ugly for they became cross-contaminated with the ideological fancies of the era. 

So if Israel has been constructed around the idea that there should be at least one country in the world where Jews are in charge of their own destinies (and specifically, security) there is indeed a very clear ethno-religious component to the state that has been built there. 

That said, whichever structural inequalities remain — and may now be experiencing reinforcement — every Israeli citizen has the right to vote and to participate up to the highest levels of their society, as well as that of equality under law. (In the UAE if an Emirati crashes into the back of your car, it's YOUR fault. In theory at least, these kind of shenanigans are less prevalent in Israel.) 

This is another reason why 'Apartheid State' is another slur, and a pretty far-fetched one at that. If you think you can draw useful, non-absurd comparisons between that other tortured post-colonial state, South Africa, up to the very end of the last century, then you might as well try to crowbar the same analogy into place across a range of contemporary and historical societies — many perhaps more deserving, yet it would still not be especially illuminating. 

Take Roman Britain for example. Fearing for the security of the society they were attempting to build on our island, they constructed a wall across the top of it, the general idea being that some (not all) of the people living to the north of these bricks manifested as obstinately hostile marauders. Sometimes the wall itself was not enough and they had to venture north on campaigns designed to (often brutally) restore the basic stability…incidentally rather notoriously once losing an entire legion this way.

Would the Picts have had a trans-historical case for describing this state of affairs as as "Apartheid"?

Well, unlike their non-Roman southern counterparts, they showed almost zero inclination to participate, to collaborate with civilised life on any sort of level. And the Romans erected their stone barrier, not because they were following the dictates of racist creed, but because they knew what would happen if they operated an open border policy. 

The Britons who were meanwhile mingling a little more usefully in the south enjoyed a mixture of rights plus potential for wealth and status. There was clearly a lot of the sort of formal inequality that the ancient world was famous for. But there was also that fundamental tension between tribal forms of organisation and larger-scale state building which has been a feature of our world and its gruesome conflicts during my lifetime. 

When I first came to Central America in the 80s I associated with an individual who harboured certain fantasies which, if not 'Leftist' as is now generally understood, were deeply revolutionary and presumably dependent on fairly extremist action for their realisation — he wished to foster the formation of a Mayan ethno-state, mainly out of northern Guatemala and other parts of the Yucatán, with its capital on Lake Petén-Itzá, at Flores, no less.  

If there seemed to be one native American people for whom this might make some sort of crazy sense — if only in a (bloody) wet dream — it would have been the Maya, with their strong association, going back around three millennia, with a specific geographical expanse — the 'Mayab' — and who, unlike say the Mexica or the Inca, had no significant history thetein of enforced hegemony over subject races. 

The point is that before it became fashionable for some sections of Arab opinion and at least some of their transnational eedjits to — hypocritically — decry the Jewish state as grounded in ethno-religious prejudice, it was quite common for radicals to imagine post-colonial orders based rather firmly on shared ethnic identity, especially when these identities pertained to so-called indigenous or 'original' populations, such as the Israelites...with their strong association going back around three millennia with a very specific geographical expanse.