Israel, a White European Ethnostate in the Middle East?

One of the canards tossed at Israel is that it’s a foreign interloper in the Middle East, a European ethnostate established so that “white” Jews can oppress the “brown” Palestinians. Of course that ignores DNA evidence showing that Ashkenazi Jews, those Jews whose families lived in Europe, are most closely related to Sephardi Jews, whose family lived primarily in the Arab world. Not only are Ashkenazi Jews primarily of Middle Eastern origin, today a majority of Israeli Jews are descended from Sephardim, with little or no connection to Europe. It also ignores about 3,500 years of recorded Jewish history in the land of Israel.

That Jews are Middle Eastern in origin one of the little known facts of the Middle East conflict. Another one is related to the popular image of Israel as being founded as a refuge after the Holocaust. That’s despite the historical fact that a small minority of Jews in 1948 Palestine were Holocaust survivors - the Zionist enterprise had thrived by the 1930s and there were hundreds of thousands of Jews there before any refugees from the Shoah arrive.

Getting back to little known facts, you likely know about Palestinian refugees, but if you’re not that interested in the Arab/Israel conflict, you probably don’t know approximately 800,000 Sephardi Jews were expelled from Arab countries and their property expropriated after the state of Israel was established in 1948. Most of them ended up in Israel where they experienced some level of prejudice from the Ashkenazi establishment but for the most part were successfully assimilated into Israeli culture. That’s almost a mirror image to what happened to the similar number of Arab refugees from the 1948 war who were kept as a festering sore by the Arab states to use as a weapon against the Jewish state, never to be absorbed by their host countries.

The influx of Sephardim to Israel was such that by the 1960s, they and their descendants made up a majority of the Israeli population, though it wasn’t until the 1970s that they began to flex their political power and put Menachem Begin and the Likud party in power, after three decades of Labor party rule since the establishment of the state.

Since the start of the war with Hamas, I’ve been watching live television from Israel, typically Channel 14, which is mostly discussion panels from the right side of the Israeli political system. My Hebrew isn’t great but I can get the gist of the discussions and news reports.

On this particular panel were five Israelis, all native born. The screenshot at the head of this post is from that show. If there was no Hebrew in the image, you might think it was American television with two white guys, an Arab, a Hispanic, and an African American, or some other properly “diverse” gathering of talking heads. In fact they were all Jews, two Ashkenazim, two Sephardim, and an Ethiopian. So much for Israel being a white European ethnostate. Oh, and that doesn’t include the 20% of Israeli citizens who are Arabs, Beduin, or Druze. Percentagewise, there are more Israeli Arabs than blacks in America, kind of peculiar for a white European ethnostate.

Two of the highest ranking Israeli casualties in this war were Druze, Lt. Col. Alim Abdallah, and Lt. Col. Salman Habaka, may their memories be blessed and may God avenge their blood. A Beduin family has offered a one million dollar bounty on the heads of the Hamas terrorists who humiliated, tortured, and killed their son and brother who was trying to save people being massacred at the rave in the Oct. 7th attack. They even said that they hope the IDF doesn’t get to the murderers first. Beduin take blood feuds very, very seriously.

Oh, and before anyone says that Jews are an ethnicity, no, Jews are a nation. The Torah describes the Jews as an “Ahm”, nation in Hebrew. While Judaism is a religion, the Jews are a nation, a people, defined by the rules of that religion. When someone converts to Judaism, they become part of that nation, just as when someone becomes a naturalized citizen of a country.

Like any other nation, they have the right to self-determination in their homeland, a right that nobody denies to the Chinese, French, or Saudi people.

Channel 14 in Israel is a right wing station and the Ethiopian guy was probably the farthest to the right. Most of the hard left and peace camp in Israel, btw, is Ashkenazi and relatively affluent. The Sephardi families know what it's like to live under Islam and they have no desire to experience that again. The Ethiopian families in Israel escaped both religious persecution and famine. They’re not going anyplace either.