Are you a Zionist?

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What happens when a country that is historically “primarily ____” stops being so, due to immigration or differing birth rates? If a country is entitled to be “primarily” of a certain ethnicity, what measures should it be able to take in order to preserve that nature?

The interesting thing is that while this certainly has happened frequently at the sub-national level, it's really hard to think of modern examples at the national level. The only one that comes to mind is Lebanon, and that's in my understanding primarily because of emigration, not any of the factors you cite. The answer to what happens next is widespread inter-ethnic violence. (Also happens at the sub-national level; cf Kosovo, Northern Ireland).

I can think of one example: Israel itself; Ashkenazis eventually being outnumbered by arriving mizrahi and Sephardic jews.

I suppose the issue is that the israeli and Palestinian identities are so discrete it's hard to see them merging into one broader group, short of having one of those 19th century Latin American dictators who mandated inter-group marriages.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

What happens when a country that is historically “primarily ____” stops being so, due to immigration or differing birth rates? If a country is entitled to be “primarily” of a certain ethnicity, what measures should it be able to take in order to preserve that nature?

The interesting thing is that while this certainly has happened frequently at the sub-national level, it's really hard to think of modern examples at the national level. The only one that comes to mind is Lebanon, and that's in my understanding primarily because of emigration, not any of the factors you cite. The answer to what happens next is widespread inter-ethnic violence. (Also happens at the sub-national level; cf Kosovo, Northern Ireland).

I can think of one example: Israel itself; Ashkenazis eventually being outnumbered by arriving mizrahi and Sephardic jews.

I suppose the issue is that the israeli and Palestinian identities are so discrete it's hard to see them merging into one broader group, short of having one of those 19th century Latin American dictators who mandated inter-group marriages.

That's sort of an example, but the Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews did not disrupt the state's conception of who it was for. In that case you could say various white Americans of non-English descent eventually came to outnumber the descendants of the original English colonizers; I think that misses the spirit of the question, which refers to people losing a territory to a clearly defined 'other' through immigration or birthrate differentials, not to some group friendly to the initial culture which tries to assimilate even if it isn't necessarily very successful. At smaller levels this is clearly a thing which happens (like, to neighborhoods or cities), but I think it's very unusual for countries or country-sized territories, where if it does happen it is caused very substantially by emigration.

I think the issue we face is that normally cultural identity is more fluid than you might think: the arabization of Egypt and turkification of Anatolia did not happen because the newcomers outbred the population, but because for various reasons it became more socially advantageous to gradually adopt the culture/language/religion of the new guys. This also has the affect of absorbing newcomers for the most part - although kurds tend to have more children than Turks, it's unlikely that Turkey will have a serious identity crisis as a result (far right agitation aside) because kurds often in practice integrate into the broader Turkish society. Australia also had a non-anglo majority would also be damaging to its identity, but in practice the "other" was absorbed without too much chaos.

Question is, could Zionism have become that expansive? Could it have essentially israelified the population and brought them into the broader project? Or could they have essentially created a new Zealand, the most "benevolent" of the british vassal states?

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

What happens when a country that is historically “primarily ____” stops being so, due to immigration or differing birth rates? If a country is entitled to be “primarily” of a certain ethnicity, what measures should it be able to take in order to preserve that nature?

The interesting thing is that while this certainly has happened frequently at the sub-national level, it's really hard to think of modern examples at the national level. The only one that comes to mind is Lebanon, and that's in my understanding primarily because of emigration, not any of the factors you cite. The answer to what happens next is widespread inter-ethnic violence. (Also happens at the sub-national level; cf Kosovo, Northern Ireland).

I can think of one example: Israel itself; Ashkenazis eventually being outnumbered by arriving mizrahi and Sephardic jews.

I suppose the issue is that the israeli and Palestinian identities are so discrete it's hard to see them merging into one broader group, short of having one of those 19th century Latin American dictators who mandated inter-group marriages.

That's sort of an example, but the Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews did not disrupt the state's conception of who it was for. In that case you could say various white Americans of non-English descent eventually came to outnumber the descendants of the original English colonizers; I think that misses the spirit of the question, which refers to people losing a territory to a clearly defined 'other' through immigration or birthrate differentials, not to some group friendly to the initial culture which tries to assimilate even if it isn't necessarily very successful. At smaller levels this is clearly a thing which happens (like, to neighborhoods or cities), but I think it's very unusual for countries or country-sized territories, where if it does happen it is caused very substantially by emigration.

I think the issue we face is that normally cultural identity is more fluid than you might think: the arabization of Egypt and turkification of Anatolia did not happen because the newcomers outbred the population, but because for various reasons it became more socially advantageous to gradually adopt the culture/language/religion of the new guys. This also has the affect of absorbing newcomers for the most part - although kurds tend to have more children than Turks, it's unlikely that Turkey will have a serious identity crisis as a result (far right agitation aside) because kurds often in practice integrate into the broader Turkish society. Australia also had a non-anglo majority would also be damaging to its identity, but in practice the "other" was absorbed without too much chaos.

Question is, could Zionism have become that expansive? Could it have essentially israelified the population and brought them into the broader project? Or could they have essentially created a new Zealand, the most "benevolent" of the british vassal states?

I think it tried to some extent, and it did for the Druze or some particular groups of Bedouin, but this mostly did not happen. (If anything, something very different happened, where over time the identity of Jews in other parts of the world -- sometimes including "Jews" by marriage or by only a very small fraction of their ancestry -- became Israelified). This sort of thing is also about the sum of many individual decisions taken, and the ideology that ended up emerging among Palestinians was very opposed to Israelification.

Cultural identity is pretty fluid, and it is not necessarily obvious a priori whether two groups will see themselves as opposed or one will assimilate into the other (...and usually it is the case that through this process one group or the other distinctly "wins"), but once they see themselves as opposed to each other identity in some sense comes to be defined against the other group, and this kind of thing does not at all go away easily.

Very dark example of a country "losing its purpose" would be Liberia. Intended as a homeland for freedmen who made a caste system with the collaboration of the indigenous elite; ruled via a Masonic lodge; ended in an exceedingly violent coup wherein the entire cabinet were executed on live TV.