After 2000 years of Roman, Christian and Muslim persecution, pogroms, ghettos and genocide, holding Israeli Jews to the more punctilious standards of more genteel geopolitical neighborhoods is unrealistic. It betrays both the soft bigotry of low expectations about Israel's Arab neighbors and the covertly anti-semitic expectation that Jews be better. Neither is valid.
Also, Israel is far from unique in combining ethnocracy with liberal democracy. The EU is full of defacto but non-dejure ethnostates: the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Norway (ask a Lap or a Turkish immigrant), Finland (ask an ethnic Swede in Finland who the state is for), Germany, Poland, the Latvia I live in, Estonia, Lithuania, Romania (ask an ethnic Hungarian in Transylvania), Czech o Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Bulgaria (ask a local Turk or gypsy)....I'll stop here. So accepting at face value holier than thou EU claims to uphold liberal democratic values that supersede their states' ethno-national character is very, very naive. This charade is, of course, legally, politically and constitutionally imperative, but a charade nevertheless. Just because Estonia's constitution does not explicitly tell the ethnic Russians who make up 98% of the population of Narva that the state is for Estonians does not mean it isn't. They know it and happily accept it given the alternative right over the border.
And don't compare the fate of Israel's Arabs to any absolute standard, but to the constitutional protections their Arab brethren in the neighboring authoritarian kleptocracies enjoy. We see none voting with their by leaving Israel for Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Lebanon, the Saudi, Moroccan monarchy, Jordanian Hashemite and Assad family businesses with flags.
My paternal grandfather survived the 1903 Kishinev (Chisinau) pogrom and my paternal grandmother lived through Polish and Ukrainian nationalist Petliura's predations of Jews during the Russian Civil War before her then Jewish Brigade veteran fiance went back to Vinnitsya to get her out in 1921. Even in the comparative Jewtopia of postwar Long Island I saw enough anti-semitism to understand the absolute necessity of Jewish state sovereignty. And there is no sovereignty without power. It may be constitutionally limited, but it is there nevertheless, along with the danger of Jewish fascists like Gevir and Kahane, both of whom are proof we're not the chosen people. Reality is always messier than and will never fully conform to any political or constitutional theory. You'll see this just by scratching any liberal democratic EU state and finding the ethnostate reality under its official constitutional surface. In branding Israeli democracy as less legitimate than its covertly ethno-democratic European counterparts you are handing a covertly anti-semitic weapon to Israel's enemies that is by nature fraudulent.
A Jewish state in a much rougher neighborhood has no obligation to be better. The correct standard is to compare Israel's treatment of its Arab citizens to its neighbors' treatment of its once thriving and now virtually extinct Jewish communities that in 1948 numbered more than 800000, the same number of Arabs who fled newly independent Israel after being told by their muftis and other leaders that they could return after Arab armies had driven the Jews into the sea.
