"Israel must exist as an ethnostate for the Jews"
--Jewish history is an argument that the Jewish people cannot afford the luxury of not having their own state.
"geographic location...are we actually what we believe ourselves to be"--Magically move Israel next to Denmark, and everything changes. But Israel lives where it is, not where you wish it could be geopolitically. It's a western (for now) more secular democratic island in an autocratic theocratic sea. Demanding that Israel behave as if it lived in geopolitical Beverly Hills, when it resides in geopolitical South Central LA is an unrealistic political purity test. Brand Israel as no longer worthy of being called a legitimate liberal democracy and you legitimize, however unintentionally, the old Zionism is racism canard.
That Israel has remained as liberal and democratic as it has through 75 years of endless war is already a miracle. Submit the French, Americans, Germans or Japanese to this kind of stress test and their democratic institutions would end up as political versions of Lehman Brothers in 2008.
"EU ethnostates"--I've lived in five EU countries and speak eight EU languages. Germany's nationality by blood law changed only 23 years ago.
Your assertion that Latvia isn't an ethno-state is contradicted by my experience of 18 years living in Latvia and visiting often while investing in real estate there from 1998-2005. My former Latvian lawyer, now married to an American ex-marine in South Carolina, would certainly not agree.
My Latvian wife is half Russian, half Polish and born in Latvia. Her extended family is a bolshoi kisch-misch of Latvian, Russian, Polish, Belarussian and, going back two centuries, Jewish. But the Latvian government and state language policy, which I'm familiar with from passing the state language exam, actively aims to reverse Tsarist and Soviet Russification. All the Latvians I know understand Latvia as a state that aims to protect Latvian language and culture, which makes it an ethno-state. My wife and kids are totally bilingual. Her grandkids speak Latvian and English, but not much Russian or the Polish of their great-grandmother.
The EU is full of ethnostates that have never been the targets of the equivalent of the Zionism is racism canard. Nobody targets DK, NO, SE, FI, NL, DE, F, PL, PT, IS, SLO, SK, BG, RO as racist or illiberal when they're no less ethnostatist than Israel. Until recently Arabic was an official language in Israel, a status which Russian didn't have in the post-independence Baltic States. But no global grievance mob targets Latvia the way Israel is targeted. My argument is that anti-semitism is at the root of Israel being uniquely targeted for doing exactly what dozens of other ethnostates do: privilege the language and culture of their majority group.
The essence of anti-semitism is singling out Jews for criticism when they behave just as others do.
"Israel has no obligation to be better..."--I should have added "than others". Your misunderstanding my meaning was due to omitting these two words.
Of course you should strive to defend Israeli democracy and push back against the current govt's legal and constitutional vandalism. What I meant was Israel has no obligation to be better than other ethno-states. The unspoken expectation that Jews be better than their misgoverned Arab neighbors is a core component of an insidious form of faux philo-semitic anti-semitism, the kind voiced by Israel's fascistic false friends Orban, Meloni, Salvini, LePen, Wilders and America's theocratic right.
Under pressures far less severe than Israel's, many other states have descended into the abyss of xenophobic authoritarianism. That Israel has seen 1m people protesting against its further descent into this abyss makes it a "light unto the world". The next step will hopefully get Netanyahu, Trump and Bolsonaro convicted and sharing the same jail cell.
