on ethnostates and tumblr discourse

so yall really need to have another word taken away from you, because you are conflating two very different meanings all the time

ethnostate(1): a state that considers itself to belong to one specific ethnicity (or more, but a limited and strictly separated number), and seeks to actively assimilate, discriminate against and/or push out all others, frequently coupled with religious discrimination / privileging of one specific religion

ethnostate(2): a state that covers the territory where one or more specific ethnic groups live, that identifies itself with that ethnic group (those ethnic groups), whose citizenship identifier is either literally the same word as or generally associated with the name of that ethnicity (those ethnicities), has its formal language(s) be the language(s) of that ethnic group (those ethic groups), and bases its state holidays and other government-led traditions on the traditions of that ethnic group (those ethnic groups)

Ethnostate(2) always has at least a small group of citizens that want it to be ethnostate(1) and depending on the specific government can act or not act as ethnostate(1) at any given time. They are however not synonymous concepts.

Here's the thing: for people of any given ethnicity, the alternative to having an ethnostate(2) to call their own is to be forced to live in either: - ethnostate(2) that belongs to another ethnicity; - an empire that's basically an ethnostate(2) but a lot of its population does not actually belong to its "lead" ethnic group (and it will frequently be ethnostate(1) towards large chunks of its own native population).

Like, there isn't really a form of statehood out there that's not either ethnostate(2) or an empire. At minimum each state has specific official languages that its citizens fill out formal documents in - and it can be a regional mess like in India, but there's still a distinction between Indian and non-Indian ethnicities in India, isn't there? (Indians feel free to come in and correct me if I'm wrong on this one, I'd be very delightfully surprised to be wrong here)

This particularly applies to Jewish people. There are a lot of native slavic language speakers in Israel, because there was a huge ass exodus of Jews from the Soviet Union after Israel became a thing, ongoing until the end of USSR's existence and still ongoing in post-soviet countries. Three guesses why, and the first two don't count.

(It's because of antisemitism. Not because those people were nasty colonizers who hated native Palestinians, but because it wasn't even on their radar as they fled the country where they and their children faced discrimination and violence, preferring one where they knew no-one and didn't even speak the language, but would at least be SAFE.)

Of course, even besides the ability to flee hostile territory (VERY IMPORTANT), there's the fact that people face discrimination, receive opportunities, respect and socioeconomic status based on their native ethnostate(2) and whether they have one. I - I don't need to explain this one and give examples, right? We all live in the same world, right?

Like, the concept of ethnostates(2) is a historical successor to the shattering of empires, where structurally it didn't matter which ethnicities lived where, the group in charge was the group in charge and everyone else was out of luck depending on how different they were from them. Ethnostates(2) are a means of self-protection.

Like, right now Russia is attacking Ukraine, right? And it's aiming to commit genocide - it wants to eliminate the Ukrainian identity, culture and language. It's taking children away from families to "re-educate them" in "Russian values". It's instituting the use of Russian language exclusively on conquered territories. And that's just Ukrainians, basically cousins - you don't want to know how bad a time Crimean tatars are having... there's a reason why nobody believed the Crimean "referendum" on joining Russia - a lot of its population are people whose families were forcibly relocated in soviet times and who could only return upon USSR's dissolution because Ukraine didn't give a fuck. And it's still the same people at the head of Russian government, the same thought patterns, the same system, that had caused that genocide back then, yeah?

Ethnostates(2) are a means of protection against genocide. Pure and simple, that's what they are for - the ones that aren't simply successors to cut down empires that never really faced that danger.

(I'm assuming most of people railing against ethnostates on here are from one of those when they aren't simply American and currently living in an empire that's trying really hard to pretend it isn't one and is really a new unique thing)

So, like, yeah, ethnostates(1) are bad and Israel's ethnostate(1) policies are bad and it shouldn't be doing them.

But the existence of the state of Israel? Do not. Fucking. Conflate. This. Shit.

tl;dr