It's very telling, imo, that for Harris what a state actually does in its day to day functions, how it wages war, the kinds of actions it does and crimes it commits, is less important for him than a kind of vague signifier for what a state is allegedly meant to represent.
I agree with every word Sam Harris says here about Israel, and I'll go further. The preoccupation with this country is antisemitism. There is no other explanation for how that, of all the world's many brutal dictatorships and ongoing famines, all of Europe and the Middle East is obsessed with this tiny scrap of land and what the people that rule it defensively and democratically, in a sea of aggressive tyrants, are doing. Any country subjected to such unrelenting scrutiny by those already predisposed to be suspicious of it would come out looking evil, and that's before the lying and semantic games.
If you believe that no criticism of Israel can be antisemitic, and that the antisemitic Arab world is not interested in destroying it, with the applause of most of antisemitic Europe, I'm sorry, but you live in an alternate reality and we have nothing to discuss.