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.[1]
Early life and education
Lustick was born in 1949 in
Syracuse, New York. His father was a pediatrician. Eager to get out of the 'rat race' of metropolitan life, the family relocated to
Watertown in the northern rural area of
Jefferson County, New York where his grandfather was a farmer. 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 higher centres of learning.[2] 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.
He was subsequently appointed professor of government at
Dartmouth College,[4] where he taught for 15 years.[5] He then became a
Chair of the Political Science Department at the
University of Pennsylvania, where he held the Richard L. Simon Term Professor in the
Social Sciences. At present Lustick is the Bess W. Heyman Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania.[1]
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.[11] 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 implement a
one-state solution.
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'.[12]
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).[f] At the same time, he argued that Lustick shared shortcomings discernible in the works of Israel's
revisionistNew 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.[18]
In 2019 he came out with a new book Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality 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." [19]
State-building failure in British Ireland & French Algeria. Berkeley, Calif. : Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley, c1985. (x, 109 p.)
Critical essays on Israeli society, politics, and culture, editors Ian S. Lustick and Barry Rubin. Albany : State University of New York Press, c1991. (xi, 204 p.)
Unsettled states, disputed lands : Britain and Ireland, France and Algeria, Israel and the West Bank-Gaza. Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, 1993
Arab-Israeli relations : historical background and origins of the conflict, edited with introductions by Ian S. Lustick. New York : Garland, 1994. (xiii, 409 p.)
Palestinians under Israeli rule, edited with introductions by Ian S. Lustick. New York : Garland, 1994 (xiv, 333 p).
Economic, legal, and demographic dimensions of Arab-Israeli relations, edited, with introductions by Ian S. Lustick. New York : Garland Pub., 1994. (xii, 349 p.)
Arab-Israeli relations in world politics, edited with introductions by Ian S. Lustick. New York : Garland Pub., 1994. (xiii, 345 p.)
The Conflict with the Arabs in Israeli politics and society, edited with introductions by Ian S. Lustick. New York : Garland, 1994. (xi, 369 p.)
The conflict with Israel in Arab politics and society, edited with introductions by Ian S. Lustick. New York : Garland Pub., 1994. (xii, 393 p.)
From war to war : Israel vs. the Arabs, 1948-1967, edited with introductions by Ian S. Lustick. New York : Garland Pub., 1994. (xii, 321 p.)
From wars toward peace in the Arab-Israeli conflict, 1969-1993, edited with introductions by Ian S. Lustick. New York : Garland Pub., 1994. (xiii, 355 p.)
"The absence of Middle Eastern great powers : political "backwardness" in historical perspective", International Organization, 1997 (51):4, pp. 653–683.
Right-sizing the state : the politics of moving borders, edited by Brendan O'Leary, Ian S. Lustick and Thomas Callaghy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001
Exile and return : predicaments of Palestinians and Jews, edited by Ann M. Lesch and Ian S. Lustick. Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, c2005.
^'Seldom . .had the American government or the American political system as a whole reacted to a problem more irrationally than it has in responding to the attacks of September 11, 2001, with the War on Terror. The result has been not only waste on a colossal scale and camouflage for a host of selfish and destructive projects by well-positioned zealots but the emergence of a War on Terror that is itself a more fearsome enemy than the terrorists it was putatively designed to fight.'[7]
^Lustick drew an historical analogy with the junto(a term early used of a group dominating the
Whig party in Great Britain) or cabal of politicians and activists who manoeuvered America into a
war with Mexico and the
annexation of Texas in order to secure a further expansion of the country west and south of its established borders.[8]
^'The mechanisms that power this whirlwind are nbot under the control of any group or collection of individuals.'[10]
^'Indeed, it is Ian S. Lustick's theory that if it weren't for the preoccupying regional conflict between Arabs and Jews, Israel would find itself caught in another war, this one civil.'[4][15]
^'In the writings of one such theorist the most "vitriolic language" is not aimed at Gentiles,"but for Israeli opponents of Gush Emunum, especially those who object to the fundamentalist movement on liberal democratic grounds' (p.123). Democracy as a political system has been the target of numerous attacks from the pens of fundamentalists, and the very idea of majority rule deemed foreign and subversive of Torah Judaism. Only at peril can one ignore the possibility of violence being used against Jewish opponents of the fundamentalists should they achieve a position making this feasible.'[16]
^'no better documented source in English for anyone interested in greater understanding of both the parties and the leading representatives of this phenomenon' and its increasing influence in a society often heralded as sharing the values of American democracy and as a bastion of liberal thought in a sea of revolutionary and unreliable Arab regimes'.[17]