No, I'm not. Really frustrating to have to explain this repeatedly.

While ethnic cleansing undoubtedly occurred, it wasn't the original intent "at the core" of the Zionist project. Rather, the intent at the core of the project was - precisely as always stated - desire for Jewish self-determination, and (once again) they initially set out to attain that through peaceful and legal means and were happy to accept an internationally supported solution that did not involve ethnic cleansing.

I'm really not sure how to make this clearer: there was an entirely workable plan that would have gotten the Zionists what they wanted without ethnic cleansing, they accepted it, no further violence needed to occur. The proof is in the pudding: if ethnic cleansing was core to the project, such a plan could not have existed and/or the Zionists would not have accepted it.

Instead, the Arabs refused this, had zero interest in trying to negotiate any kind of peaceful solution, began to ethnically cleanse Jews throughout the Arab world [0], and launched an international war effort to subjugate or oust the Jews from the region.

The Israeli defense and retaliation ultimately included ethnic cleansing of its own. That's undeniable. But even here it wasn't core to the project; it wasn't a war goal at the beginning. Per Wikipedia [1]:

    Initially, the aim was "simple and modest": to survive the assaults of
    the Palestinian Arabs and the Arab states. "The Zionist leaders deeply,
    genuinely, feared a Middle Eastern reenactment of the Holocaust, which
    had just ended; the Arabs' public rhetoric reinforced these fears". As
    the war progressed, the aim of expanding the Jewish state beyond the UN
    partition borders appeared: first to incorporate clusters of isolated
    Jewish settlements and later to add more territories to the state and
    give it defensible borders. A third and further aim that emerged among
    the political and military leaders after four or five months was to
    "reduce the size of Israel's prospective large and hostile Arab
    minority, seen as a potential powerful fifth column, by belligerency
    and expulsion".

I don't mean to whitewash what the Israelis did in the war - any more than Palestinian supporters want to whitewash what the Arabs did and intended to do, I suppose. But I was replying to someone asserting that the State of Israel simply could not exist without ethnic cleansing, that to be a Zionist fundamentally means to support ethnic cleansing. This is what I'm disputing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_the_Muslim_...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Arab%E2%80%93Israeli_War#...

> you're pretending that a Jewish state isn't an ethnostate by definition

It isn't. Certainly not in a way that requires ethnic cleansing.

What definition are you using? Are all Arab states ethnostates? What about monoethnic countries [1]?

> Ethnostates are very very bad

Because they arise from ethnic cleansing. Nobody has a problem with Egypt or Finland being monoethnic, and I think it would be incorrect to call them ethnostates.

If Egypt and Finland (and Iceland and Palestine) are ethnostates, then we've broadened the definition to where they seem to be fine.

> it doesn't matter who's a "true" member of the group; it matters only that there is a group

Of course it does. If you can expand the group, you don't have a problem. The very act of nationhood is an exercise in defining groups of people.

One can have a liberal, democratic, Jewish state that isn't an ethnostate. Nothing about Israel's existence requires ethnic cleansing. That's just a weird own goal that argues for it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoethnicity