Arab Republics
The straightforward answer something like:
the Arab Republic of Egypt
Syrian Arab Republic
Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic
as well as now defunct Arab Republics in Libya, Yemen and elsewhere.
Here Arab:
The Arabs, also known as the Arab people, are an ethnic group mainly inhabiting the Arab world in Western Asia and Northern Africa. A significant Arab diaspora is present in various parts of the world.
It is worth mentioning a common mistake of conflating Arabs and Muslims:
- Not all Arabs are Muslim - a significant part of them are Christians (of various Christian denominations) as well as Druze and Jews
- Not all Muslims are Arabs - the obvious examples are Turks and Persians, but in general Islam spreads well beyond the Arab World.
Frame challenge: what "Jewish" really means?
However, it is incorrect to interpret "Jewish" as a purely ethnic term: as it may refer to religion, ethnic origin, culture, nation, and whatever other reasons for which people are identified and identify themselves as Jewish.
The term Jewish state was coined by Theodor Herzl, whose 1896 pamphlet about the solution to the Jewish question in Europe was called Der Judenstaat (The Jewish state) and serves as the departing point of the Jewish movement for national self-determination, commonly known as Zionist movement.In this respect Herzl used the term Jewish in the same sense as France is the French State, Germany is the German state, and so on.
Emergence of nation-state
Indeed, XIX-th century was characterized by the emergence of the concept of nation state, which would be later codified in by the League of Nations and the UN charter as self-determination, but which was largely non-existent before XIX-th century. Indeed, up to then one's "nationality" was determined by the ruler of the territory - of the territory was ruled by the French King, one was French, if by Russian Czar - one was Russian. Most modern states didn't exist at all - either because they were split into many small principalities (like Germany) or because they were part of larger empires (Finland, Baltic states, Poland, Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia, Serbia, Croatia, Bulgaria, etc.)
French revolutions and other revolutions overthrowing monarchies created a need for a different principle of describing people as a single state, and this is where the nation appears. Initially it was largely treated in ethnic terms, and this idea lingered for a long time, before being fully discredited by Nazis. Thus, France was supposed to be state of French people, the descendants of Gauls (or at least Franks). This readily created problems, like:
- parts of France did not consider them French and may speak dialects very different from French (like Breton in Brittany.)
- How should one treat, e.g., Italians, living in France - do they become ethnically French after certain number of generation?
- What to do with the border region, like Alsace, which is mixed German-French, and where one speaks Alsatian/Alemannic language similar to the German dialects of Swiss and Luxembourg?
Furthermore, the population typically didn't have any concept of national identity - e.g., Russia peasants were loyal to their village commune and the Czar, but had no idea of what Russia means. Nomadic tribes in the Arab peninsula had string sense of Clan allegiance, but no reason to feel themselves any more Arab than they were Ottoman (I recommend George Antonius' The Arab Awakening as an example description of national revival and emergence a national independence movement.)
It took more than a century before we reached the modern state, where being French/German/British is viewed simply a matter of citizenship, rather than one's ethnicity. But one still hears claims like "Dès que l'on devient français, nos ancêtres sont gaulois" (The moment one becomes French, one's ancestors are Gauls.)
How do Jews fit into a nation-state?
Another consequence of the European revolutions was the separation of the church and the state, rendering the religion a private matter. If until then the Jews were viewed as a group apart due to their religion, they now were becoming equal citizens, with the full civil rights. Indeed, many Jews believed that with disappearance of the religious discrimination they would be simply assimilated into the host nations. By the end of the XIX-th century it became obvious that this was not happening - that Jews were viewed as foreign/different, regardless of them living in their host nations for centuries, mastering local language and customs and even sometimes even converting to Christianity (Karl Marx' father is a notable example.) In other words, they began to be treated as an ethnic rather than a religious category. (Although in Russia the discrimination of millions of its Jewish population continued to be justified on purely religious grounds all the way up to the end of monarchy. Contrary to widespread misconception, it was not Bolsheviks, but the preceding Provisional government which granted Russian Jews their civil rights.)
This period was also characterized by Jewish cultural revival - known as Haskala - Jewish renaissance. In other words, Jewish people acquired all the attributes normally associated with a nation... except for the territory. It is in this context that Herzl spoke of the Jewish state.
Remarks
Unfortunately even today some prefer to ignore the complexity of Jewishness, and describe it as a purely ethnic or a purely religious category. Many arguments aiming at smearing Israel are built along these lines, like:
- Jews are an ethnic group, and therefore Israel is an attempt to create an ethnically pure state - then follows comparison with Nazis
- Jews are a religious group, and Israel is a theocracy, like the Islamic Republic of Iran or the Handmaid's Tale - something distasteful to modern Europeans
A piece of trivia: Herzl's other book, in which he outlines the social, political and economic structure of the future Jewish state is called Altneuland (The Old New Land). The Hebrew translator had difficulty rendering the title in the target language, and changed it to Tel Aviv (The Hill of Spring) - the name of a geographic location somewhere in modern Iraq, mentioned in the Bible (Tel Abib). Altneuland makes a curious reading - it represents a very progressive vision... but progressive by the standards of the XIX-th century Europe. E.g., while Herzl pictures Muslims as citizens with equal rights in his new state, he describes them as Ottoman Turks, seemingly unaware of their Arab identity (to his excuse, the Arab national movement was only emerging in those times.)
Update
A relevant quote from Rashid Khalidi's The Iron Cage:
This is not to say that there are not many myths worth debunk-
ing in the Palestinian version of events: there are indeed, particu-
larly ideas relating to the Zionist movement and Israel and their
connections with the Western powers, the relation of Zionism to
the course of modern Jewish history, particularly the central place
of the Holocaust in this history, and the reductionist view of Zion-
ism as no more than a colonial enterprise. This enterprise was and
is colonial in terms of its relationship to the indigenous Arab popu-
lation of Palestine; Palestinians fail to understand, or refuse to recognize, however, that Zionism also served as the national movement
of the nascent Israeli polity being constructed at their expense.
There is no reason why both positions cannot be true: there are
multiple examples of national movements, indeed nations, that
were colonial in their origins, not least of them the United States.
Deconstructing these ideas will be crucially important to an eventual reconciliation of the two peoples.
