Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics recorded 2.130 million Arab citizens and residents in September 2025, 21.5% of the 9.888 million in the Bureau’s two population groups, so citizenship under Israeli law is not confined to one group. The displacement behind the question is documented at scale: the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine registered about 711,000 Arab refugees in 1949, and Benny Morris (2004), working from Israeli state and military archives, puts the number at roughly 700,000. The word at the center of the question carries no definition in any Israeli statute, in the treaties that define apartheid, or in the political-science literature that has argued about Israel’s regime type for nearly three decades.
Key Findings
- Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics counted 10.148 million residents in September 2025: about 7.758 million Jews and others and 2.130 million Arabs, 78.5% and 21.5% of the 9.888 million in those two groups, a category the Bureau defines as Moslems, Arab Christians and Druze.
- The United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine reported approximately 711,000 Arab refugees in 1949; Morris (2004) reaches a figure in the same range from the Israeli archives and attributes the exodus to causes that varied by locality and phase, while Pappé (2006) argues the displacement was a planned expulsion.
- Two enacted texts carry the terms the question turns on: the Law of Return (Knesset, 1950), which grants Jews the right to immigrate and acquire citizenship, and the Citizenship Law (Knesset, 1952), which provides for citizenship by residence, birth, naturalization and grant.
- Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People (Knesset, 2018) states that the exercise of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people; the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel (1948) pledges complete equality of social and political rights irrespective of religion, race or sex.
- The peer-reviewed literature on Israel’s regime type is organized around two defined terms, Sammy Smooha’s ethnic democracy (1997) and Oren Yiftachel’s ethnocracy (1999, 2006). Neither author, and no statute or treaty, defines ethnostate as a category with criteria.
Does Israel limit citizenship to one ethnic group?
Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics recorded 2.130 million Arabs among 10.148 million residents in September 2025, alongside 7.758 million Jews and others. The Bureau’s own definitions place Moslems, Arab Christians and Druze in that category, and each group holds Israeli citizenship on the same statutory footing as Jewish citizens.
The two named groups total 9.888 million, of which those counts are 21.5% and 78.5%; the remaining residents are foreign nationals the Bureau counts in the total but in neither group.
It is often said that Israel is an ethnostate, meaning a state whose membership is reserved to a single ethnic group. On the citizenship record, the state’s own count does not support the strict form of that claim. The Bureau’s Independence Day release for 2024 gave a resident population of 9.900 million with 2.089 million Arabs (21.1%), and the 2026 release gave 10.244 million with 2.157 million Arabs (21.1%), so the share has held near a fifth across the recent series. These are Israel’s own official statistics, compiled by its national statistics bureau, and are labelled here as such.
The word itself has no legal existence. Apartheid is defined in two binding instruments: the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (1973), which describes inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group over any other racial group and systematically oppressing them, and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (1998), which lists the crime of apartheid at Article 7(1)(j). Ethnic cleansing is a descriptive term applied to documented patterns of forced displacement. Ethnostate appears in neither instrument, in no Israeli statute, and in no court judgment on the subject.
That leaves the question with two separable parts. The first is what the record documents about the founding and about the present legal architecture, which is answerable from primary texts and official counts. The second is which label those documented facts warrant, which is an interpretive question that different named authors and organizations answer differently and in their own defined vocabularies. The sections below take the documented parts one at a time.
Was Israel founded through mass displacement of Palestinians?
The United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine reported approximately 711,000 Arab refugees in 1949, the earliest official registration-based figure for the displacement during the 1948 war. Benny Morris (2004), in the second edition of The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, reaches roughly 700,000 from Israeli military and state archives, and the scale itself is not a matter of serious dispute among the historians who have worked those archives.
What is disputed is the mechanism and the label. Morris (2004) attributes the exodus to multiple causes that varied by locality and by phase of the war, including military attack and the fear of attack, expulsions ordered in particular sectors, and flight; he rejects both a single master plan of expulsion and the account that departures were voluntary. Ilan Pappé (2006), in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, argues from the same period that the displacement was a planned expulsion and states the ethnic-cleansing characterization in his title. The two positions are a named scholarly disagreement between archival historians, dated and in print, not a settled reading with one dissenter. B’Tselem, an Israeli monitoring organization with an advocacy mission, states that about 750,000 Palestinians were displaced, and Amnesty International, in its February 2022 report, describes 1948 as ethnic cleansing; both are those organizations’ own characterizations on their own definitions.
Three distinctions are worth holding separate, because the question collapses them. The 1949 refugee count is a registration figure produced by an intergovernmental commission at the time. The causal account of how those people came to leave is an archival question on which Morris and Pappé disagree in print. The legal or moral characterization of the pattern is a third question again, argued in the vocabulary of instruments drafted decades later. A report on the 1948 displacement record sets out the archives, the founding text and the votes in more detail.
None of the three questions is answered by the citizenship figures in the previous section, and none of them answers those figures either. A founding history and a present legal architecture are separate objects of measurement.
Do the apartheid findings call Israel an ethnostate?
Three organizations published determinations using the legal term apartheid within fourteen months: B’Tselem in January 2021, Human Rights Watch in April 2021, and Amnesty International in February 2022. Each rests its usage on the 1973 Apartheid Convention and the Rome Statute definitions of institutionalized domination by one racial group over another. None of the three determinations adopts ethnostate as a category.
Those are the three bodies whose published positions circulate behind the question, named and dated, each stating a conclusion on its own definitions and its own reading of the treaty language. Their determinations are contested by the Israeli government and by other organizations, and this report does not carry any of them as a measurement.
The point that bears on the wording of the question is a structural one about the terms themselves. Apartheid, as used in those documents, is a term with a written definition in a treaty the reader can consult: the 1973 Convention specifies the conduct at issue, and Article 7(1)(j) of the Rome Statute lists the crime with a defined element of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over another, committed with the intention of maintaining that regime. Whether a given body of law and practice meets that definition is arguable, but the definition exists on paper and both sides of the argument work from it.
Ethnostate has no comparable text. It is not defined in the 1973 Convention, in the Rome Statute, in the Genocide Convention, or in Israeli statute, and it does not appear as a determination in the three organizational reports most often cited for the underlying claims. It functions as an interpretive summary that a reader or writer applies to a set of facts, not as a category with stated criteria that a finding can meet or fail. A separate report examines the Amnesty findings and the record around them in detail.
So the inference in the question, that apartheid findings and a displacement history together establish that Israel is an ethnostate, moves from terms that carry written definitions to a term that carries none. That is an absence in the record, recorded here plainly.
What does the Law of Return actually grant?
The Law of Return (Knesset, 1950) states that every Jew has the right to come to Israel as an oleh, an immigrant, and the Citizenship Law (Knesset, 1952) converts that right into citizenship on arrival. The 1970 amendment extends the same rights to the child and grandchild of a Jew, to the spouse of a Jew, and to the spouses of that child and grandchild.
These are the enacted texts in which the ethnonational preference in Israeli law actually sits, and they are immigration statutes rather than citizenship-restriction statutes. The Citizenship Law of 1952 sets out the parallel routes by which citizenship is acquired without reference to the Law of Return: by residence, by birth, by naturalization and by grant. The two operate together, one governing who may immigrate as of right and the other governing the general acquisition of citizenship, and a report on the question is inaccurate if it cites only the first.
The 1970 amendment also fixes the definitional boundary. It defines a Jew, for the purposes of the statute, as a person born of a Jewish mother or who has converted to Judaism and is not a member of another religion, and it extends the immigration right two generations out and to spouses, which admits many people who are not themselves Jews under that definition.
The volumes are in Israel’s own statistical record. The Central Bureau of Statistics reported in its 2025 Independence Day release that more than 3.5 million immigrants had arrived since the establishment of the state in 1948, about 1.66 million of them (47.6%) since 1990, alongside about 154,000 immigrating citizens, defined by the Bureau as people born abroad to an Israeli citizen who entered intending to settle. The Bureau’s 2023 release on the population of Ethiopian origin recorded 168,800 residents at the end of 2022, of whom about 92,100 were born in Ethiopia, with 1,680 arriving in 2022 alone.
What do Israel’s founding and basic texts say about equality?
The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel (Provisional Government of Israel, 14 May 1948) states that the state will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its citizens irrespective of religion, race or sex. Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People (Knesset, 2018) states that the exercise of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.
Both sentences are in force in the sense that both are published texts of the state, but they are not the same kind of instrument. The Declaration is the founding proclamation, read on 14 May 1948 and signed by the 37 members of the People’s Council; it is not a Basic Law and does not function as a bill of rights. It also appeals directly to the Arab inhabitants of the state to participate on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions. The Knesset’s own English text renders the equality clause as all its citizens, while other widely used translations render the word as inhabitants; the distinction matters and is stated here so a reader knows which text is being quoted.
The 2018 Basic Law is constitutional-level legislation. Its opening articles state that the State of Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people, in which it realizes its natural, cultural, religious and historical right to self-determination, and that Hebrew is the state language, with Arabic given a special status and existing arrangements preserved. The self-determination clause is written in the vocabulary of national collective rights, not in the vocabulary of citizenship or individual rights, and it neither grants nor withdraws citizenship from anyone.
That distinction is the load-bearing one for the question. A text reserving national self-determination to one people and a text restricting citizenship to one people are different legal objects, and the 2018 law is the first. Which of the two the term ethnostate is meant to describe is left unfixed by the term itself. A separate report reads the Israeli laws described as Jewish supremacist statute by statute.
How many Israeli citizens are not Jewish?
Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics counted 1.707 million Moslem residents at the end of 2021, 18.1% of all residents and the largest non-Jewish population group in its own statistical series. The Bureau publishes each group separately, on its own release schedule, so the components below carry different reference dates and cannot be summed into a single current total.
The Bureau’s Nabi Shu’ayb release put the Druze population at approximately 152,000 in February 2024, against 14,500 at the founding of the state, and its Christmas 2025 release put the Christian population at approximately 184,200 in December 2025, about 1.9% of the population, of whom 78.7% were Arab Christians at the end of 2024. Each of these is a preliminary or dated estimate from the issuing bureau, and the Christian figure excludes people absent from the Population Register, so it undercounts foreign nationals by the Bureau’s own footnote.
The same bureau records these populations across the ordinary machinery of the state rather than as a separate category. Its 2022 release reported 395,348 Moslem students in primary and secondary education in the 2020/21 school year and 747,492 Moslems licensed to drive in 2021, 15.7% of all drivers. Its 2025 Christmas release reported that 87.7% of Christian twelfth-grade students were eligible for a matriculation certificate in the 2024/25 school year, and that 61.1% of Christian students in higher education were women.
For comparison on the other side of the ledger, Sergio DellaPergola (2025), in the American Jewish Year Book, estimated Israel’s core Jewish population at 7,153,000 on 1 January 2024, within a world total of 15,736,800. That estimate is the author’s own, not an Israeli government count.
Do scholars use ethnostate, ethnocracy, or ethnic democracy?
Sammy Smooha (1997), in Israel Studies, proposed ethnic democracy and named Israel its archetype: a regime combining competitive democratic procedure and individual citizenship rights with an institutionalized structural preference for one ethnic nation. That is the earliest of the two defined terms around which the peer-reviewed argument on Israel’s regime type has been conducted.
Oren Yiftachel (1999, in Constellations, and 2006, in Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine, University of Pennsylvania Press) argued the opposite classification with a term of his own. His ethnocracy describes a regime in which a dominant ethnic group appropriates the state apparatus to expand control over contested territory, and he holds that such a regime is neither a democracy nor an authoritarian state but a third type, with the settlement and land regime, rather than the franchise, as the analytic center of gravity.
The disagreement between the two is specific and dated: they are arguing about whether the democratic component of the Israeli regime is sufficient to make ethnic preference a qualifier of a democracy, as Smooha holds, or insufficient, as Yiftachel holds. Each author states criteria, and each applies them to a comparative set of cases beyond Israel.
Ethnostate is not the term either of them defined, and it does not carry an equivalent operational definition in that literature: no criteria, no comparative case set, no threshold a case can be tested against. It circulates as a compression of the arguments above rather than as one of them. That is an absence in the scholarly record, recorded as an absence.
This matters for how the question can be answered at all. Asked whether Israel meets Smooha’s definition or Yiftachel’s, a reader can consult the stated criteria and follow each author’s reasoning to a conclusion, and can see exactly where the two part company. Asked whether Israel is an ethnostate, the reader has a word whose content varies with the person using it, attached to two documented factual claims, the 1948 displacement and the constitutional-level self-determination clause, that each have a record of their own.
How does the ethnostate framing appear in measured discourse?
Becker, Ascone and Troschke (2022), coding 4,500 comments on the Facebook pages of leading British, French and German media outlets against an IHRA-based scheme, found that 26.9% of the 1,504 UK comments were antisemitic, and that within those UK antisemitic comments, denial of Jewish self-determination accounted for 7.7% and the apartheid analogy for 5.2%. The measurement is of how a framing circulates in one comment corpus, not of the underlying political claim.
Jikeli and colleagues (2022), working from an expert-annotated corpus of 4,016 English-language tweets collected between January 2019 and August 2020, reported that 11.2% of conversations containing the word Jews were antisemitic on the IHRA criteria, and that 15% of the antisemitic tweets in that keyword set fit the IHRA paragraph on denying the Jewish people the right to self-determination. Both studies measure keyword-drawn samples, not platform-wide prevalence.
Two survey studies measure associations rather than shares. Harber, Bulska, Malloy and Vila (2026), across three preregistered studies with samples of 373, 243 and 493 participants, report that their Conspiracies Mediated Model accounted for over 55% of the variance in anti-Israel attitudes, with conspiracy beliefs implicating Israel and Zionists mediating the association between antisemitism and anti-Israel attitudes, while conspiracy beliefs about Jews unrelated to Israel did not. Enstad (2026), in two nationally representative Norwegian surveys (N = 1,575 and a preregistered replication at N = 1,653), reports that endorsement of Holocaust inversion, the belief that Israel treats Palestinians as badly as Jews were treated during the Second World War, was associated with justification of harassment and violence against Jews. Both are abstract-sourced and correlational, and neither establishes a direction of cause.
Methodology and limitations
This report measures two things and not a third. It reads the primary legal texts and official statistical records that bear on the question, and it reports what named scholars and named studies have measured or argued. It does not assess whether the conduct described in any organizational determination meets the treaty definition of apartheid, and it makes no finding on the contested characterization of the 1948 displacement.
Source types are labelled where used. Primary and official records: the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel (1948), the Law of Return (1950) and its 1970 amendment, the Citizenship Law (1952), Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People (2018), the 1973 Apartheid Convention, the Rome Statute (1998), the 1949 report of the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine, and the media releases of Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics. Every Bureau figure is that bureau’s own compiled count, published by a party to the events it describes, and is not independently verified; several are marked preliminary in the releases themselves.
Peer-reviewed research: Smooha (1997), Yiftachel (1999), Becker and colleagues (2022), and Jikeli and colleagues (2022). Harber and colleagues (2026) and Enstad (2026) are peer-reviewed and sourced here from their abstracts, so no full-text detail is implied. Scholarly books, which are interpretive rather than measurement: Morris (2004) and Yiftachel (2006), and Pappé (2006), whose author states a moral position in the work.
Where the literature disagrees, both positions are named. On 1948, Morris (2004) and Pappé (2006) reach different accounts of the mechanism from overlapping archival material. On regime classification, Smooha (1997) and Yiftachel (2006) apply competing defined terms to the same case.
Three limits bind the figures. Central Bureau of Statistics population-group releases carry different reference dates and different collection bases, so components from separate releases are not summed. The 1949 refugee figure is a registration-based count produced during the events, not a modern demographic reconstruction. The discourse studies in the final section measure keyword-drawn samples and survey associations with the authors’ own stated bounds, so they describe how a framing circulates and what it correlates with, not what any political claim is worth.
Conclusion
Does the record establish that Israel is an ethnostate formed through apartheid and ethnic cleansing? The three parts of that sentence sit on very different footings. Israel’s own bureau counts 2.130 million Arab citizens and residents in 10.148 million, so citizenship is not held to one group. Roughly 711,000 Arabs were registered as refugees by the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine in 1949, a displacement Morris (2004) reaches from the archives and reads as multi-causal, and Pappé (2006) reads as planned expulsion. And the 2018 Basic Law reserves national self-determination to the Jewish people in constitutional-level text, while the 1948 Declaration pledges complete equality of social and political rights irrespective of religion, race or sex.
The final term is the one with the least behind it. Apartheid has a written definition in the 1973 Convention and Article 7(1)(j) of the Rome Statute. Smooha’s ethnic democracy (1997) and Yiftachel’s ethnocracy (2006) each come with criteria and a comparative case set, and their disagreement is legible because both stated what they meant. Ethnostate carries no definition in any statute, treaty, judgment or defining paper, which means the question’s most decisive word is the one a reader cannot check against anything.
That gap is where the measurement in the last section lands. Denial of Jewish self-determination appeared in 15% of the antisemitic tweets Jikeli and colleagues (2022) coded and in 7.7% of the antisemitic UK comments Becker and colleagues (2022) coded, and Enstad (2026) finds endorsement of Holocaust inversion associated with justification of harassment and violence against Jews in two Norwegian national samples. A word with no criteria travels easily, and it travels through corpora where those measured shares are what they are.
So the sharper question is not which label fits. It is what happens to a public argument when its decisive term is the one nobody has defined, and whether an undefined word is a description a reader is weighing or an input already doing work of its own.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which bodies have published apartheid determinations about Israel?
B’Tselem published in January 2021, Human Rights Watch in April 2021, and Amnesty International in February 2022. Each rests its use of the term on the 1973 Apartheid Convention and the Rome Statute definitions, each reaches its conclusion on its own reading and definitions, and the Israeli government rejects the conclusion.
Where does apartheid get its legal definition?
The International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (1973) sets out the conduct at issue, and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (1998) lists the crime of apartheid at Article 7(1)(j), with an element requiring an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over another.
How can a non-Jew become an Israeli citizen?
Through the Citizenship Law (Knesset, 1952), which provides for citizenship by residence, by birth, by naturalization and by grant, operating alongside the Law of Return. Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics counted 2.130 million Arab citizens and residents in September 2025, 21.5% of the 9.888 million in the Bureau’s two population groups.
Does the Law of Return apply only to people who are Jewish?
No. The 1970 amendment extends the same immigration rights to the child and grandchild of a Jew, to the spouse of a Jew, and to the spouses of that child and grandchild, so people who are not Jews under the statute’s own definition are covered by it.
Why do historians disagree about 1948 if the numbers agree?
The disagreement is about mechanism, not scale. Morris (2004) attributes the exodus to causes varying by locality and phase, including attack, fear of attack, expulsion in particular sectors and flight, and rejects a single master plan. Pappé (2006) argues the displacement was planned expulsion.
What term does the political-science literature use instead?
Two competing terms with stated criteria. Smooha (1997) defined ethnic democracy and named Israel its archetype; Yiftachel (1999, 2006) defined ethnocracy and argued the regime is neither a democracy nor an authoritarian state. Neither author defines ethnostate.
How large are Israel’s non-Jewish citizen populations individually?
Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics counted 1.707 million Moslem residents at the end of 2021, approximately 152,000 Druze in February 2024, and approximately 184,200 Christians in December 2025. The releases carry different reference dates and several are preliminary, so the components do not sum to a current total.
Sources
- Becker, Ascone and Troschke, 2022. Antisemitic Comments on Facebook Pages of Leading British, French and German Media Outlets. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. DOI 10.1057/s41599-022-01337-8. Peer-reviewed.
- DellaPergola, 2025. World Jewish Population, 2024. In American Jewish Year Book 2024, Springer. Academic reference chapter.
- Enstad, 2026. Holocaust Inversion and Justification of Anti-Jewish Aggression: Evidence from Two National Surveys in Norway. American Psychologist. DOI 10.1037/amp0001704. Peer-reviewed (abstract-sourced).
- Harber, Bulska, Malloy and Vila, 2026. Antisemitism, Conspiracy Beliefs, and Anti-Israel Attitudes. American Psychologist. DOI 10.1037/amp0001635. Peer-reviewed (abstract-sourced).
- Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2022. The Moslem Population in Israel: Data on the Occasion of Eid al-Adha. Media Release 217/2022. cbs.gov.il. Official record.
- Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2023. The Population of Ethiopian Origin in Israel: Sigd Festival 2023. Media Release 362/2023. cbs.gov.il. Official record.
- Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2024. Israel’s Independence Day 2024. Media Release 141/2024. cbs.gov.il. Official record.
- Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2024. The Druze Population of Israel on the Occasion of the Nabi Shu’ayb Festival 2024. Media Release 124/2024. cbs.gov.il. Official record.
- Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2025. Israel’s Independence Day 2025. Media Release 134/2025. cbs.gov.il. Official record.
- Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2025. Population of Israel on the Eve of Rosh Hashana 5786. Media release. cbs.gov.il. Official record.
- Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2025. Christmas 2025: Christians in Israel. Media Release 413/2025. cbs.gov.il. Official record.
- Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2026. Israel’s Independence Day 2026. Media Release 117/2026. cbs.gov.il. Official record.
- Jikeli, Axelrod, Fischer, Forouzesh, Jeong, Miehling and Soemer, 2022. Differences Between Antisemitic and Non-Antisemitic English Language Tweets. Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory. DOI 10.1007/s10588-022-09363-2. Peer-reviewed.
- Knesset, 1950. Law of Return, 5710-1950, with Amendment No. 2, 5730-1970. Enacted text. Official record.
- Knesset, 1952. Citizenship Law, 5712-1952. Enacted text. Official record.
- Knesset, 2018. Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People. Enacted text. Official record.
- Morris, 2004. The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, 2nd edition. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521009676. Scholarly book.
- Pappé, 2006. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oneworld Publications. Scholarly book.
- Provisional Government of Israel, 1948. Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel. Official Gazette Number 1, 14 May 1948; Knesset English text at main.knesset.gov.il. Official record.
- Smooha, 1997. Ethnic Democracy: Israel as an Archetype. Israel Studies, 2(2). Peer-reviewed.
- United Nations, 1973. International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid. Treaty text. Official record.
- United Nations, 1998. Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, Article 7(1)(j). Treaty text. Official record.
- United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine, 1949. Report on Arab refugees. Official record.
- Yiftachel, 1999. Ethnocracy: The Politics of Judaizing Israel/Palestine. Constellations, 6(3). Peer-reviewed.
- Yiftachel, 2006. Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine. University of Pennsylvania Press. Scholarly book.