Ian Lustick Explained

Ian Steven Lustick (born 1949) is an American political scientist and specialist on the modern history and politics of the Middle East. He currently holds the Bess W. Heyman Chair in the department of Political Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.

Early life and education

Lustick was born in 1949 in Syracuse, New York. His father was a pediatrician. His grandfather, Alex Lustick, was a farmer. Eager to get out of the "rat race" of Syracuse metropolitan life, the family relocated to Watertown in the northern rural area of Jefferson County, New York. Lustick likened conditions there to those of a shtetl, and he was occasionally the object of anti-Semitic harassment, though the family had a strong sense of patriotic attachment to the country, typical of Jewish immigrants of European background.

After graduating from high school, he attended Brandeis University, arriving in 1967 just as a countercultural wave of student activism was sweeping through higher centres of learning. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley in 1976. His dissertation was Arabs in the Jewish State: a study in the effective control of a minority population, later adapted into a book which was published in 1980.

Career

Lustick spent 1979–1980 as an intelligence analyst, specializing in the problems of Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories, for the Bureau of Intelligence and Research of the Department of State. Thereafter, in the summer of 1980, he returned to academia.

He was appointed assistant professor of government at Dartmouth College in 1976, where he taught for 15 years. He then joined the Political Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania, where he held the Richard L. Simon Term Professor in the Social Sciences. He then became Chair of the Department and was named the Bess W. Heyman Professor. In 2021 he moved to Emeritus status, but continues to teach and conduct research at the University of Pennsylvania.

He is a founder and past president of the Association for Israel Studies and past president of the American Political Science Association-Politics and History Section. Lustick became more broadly known with the publication of his book Trapped in the War on Terror (2006) in which he argues that the War on Terrorism is an irrational policy for fighting America's enemies. He argues that this policy was initially conceived of by a neo-conservative cabal at the Project for a New American Century who were determined to shift the direction of U.S. foreign policy towards unilateralism. Given a number of political features unique to the US system, Lustick concluded, the War on Terror has ultimately turned into something beyond anyone's control.

He has engaged in research involving applications of evolutionary and complexity theory to the development of computer simulations using agent-based models for research and policy analysis. Between 2010 and the present day, Lustick has returned to some prominence by writing articles that variously called for Israel to negotiate with Hamas over the future of the area and said that the only way to resolve the war between Israelis and Palestinians was to gradually democratize the "one-state reality" which Israel's de facto annexation of the territories it occupied in 1967 has produced.

He is a member of the American Political Science Association, the Association for Israel Studies, the Middle East Studies Association, and the Council on Foreign Relations.

Reception of his work

In a 1989 review of his early work the anti-Zionist rabbi Elmer Berger called Lustick a "first-class Zionist academic", and praised his "meticulous scholarship".

In 1988 Lustick published his For the Land and the Lord a study of religious fundamentalism in Israel. It appeared under the imprint of a series of monographs the Council of Foreign Relations considered a "responsible treatment(s) of a significant international topic worthy of presentation to the public." In this work, according to Joel Brinkley, he suggested that, were it not for Israel's on-going conflict with its regional neighbours, Israel itself might find itself embroiled in a civil war between the opposing poles of secular forces and fundamentalist religious Zionists.

Elmer Berger wrote that he knew of "no better documented source in English for anyone interested in greater understanding of both the parties and the leading representatives of this phenomenon" (of Israeli religious fundamentalism). At the same time, he argued that Lustick shared shortcomings discernible in the works of Israel's revisionist New Historians in that the territorial expansionism and racial discrimination documented as recent Zionist trends by the 1980s wave of young Zionist scholars – Lustick charts these traits as bursting into the secular mainstream of Israeli society with the emergence of messianic movements like Gush Emunim in the 1970s – underplayed, minimized or whitewashed tendencies that were intrinsic to Zionism from its pristine beginnings.

In 2019 he came out with a new book, Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality, which analyzes the origins and implications of the disappearance of the two-state solution.

George Washington University's Nathan Brown stated in his review that he found the book "accessible, forceful, and concise. Its tone will rub some readers the wrong way but strike others as admirably frank."

Selected publications

See also

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Citations

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External links

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