Ian Lustick Quotes

There’s still a role for the Association for Israel Studies. But not as the endpoint of scholarship and not as a fortress to defend Israel.

My academic specialization is Arab-Israel relations.

International peace and security depend on certain taboos that are easily recognized when they are broken. It can be more important for an intervention to take place because nuclear or chemical or biological weapons are used as opposed to just measuring how many people are killed.

What we have really now is a one-state outcome in which Israel is the one and only state between the Jordan River and the sea. It can do whatever it wants virtually throughout the area. But that’s not the kind of a state that’s going to be a basis for peace and stability in the region.

Whether we agree with them or not, politicians aren’t for trusting. They are for getting done what can be done to make really horrible problems into plain old lousy problems.

Most Israelis do want to keep Israel safe. The question is how do you do that.

If you put too much pressure on the Palestinian Authority, it will collapse – it will disappear – and Israel will have to formally re-occupy the West Bank and assume responsibility for the Palestinians there. The United States doesn’t want that. Israel doesn’t really want that.

I think about terrorism in terms of popcorn. You can’t tell which kernels are popcorn and which are not, but you assume you’ll always have some kernels that are going to pop.

For the U.S., as the largest player in the global environment, unintended consequences are magnified.

The fact is that democracy anywhere in the world, including in the United States, is not something that comes easy. And yet, we are committed to it, and equality and democracy are the only ways in the long run that Jews will be safe in the Middle East.

Americans should be wary of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt but not scared of them.

Just as a balloon filled gradually with air bursts when the limit of its tensile strength is passed, there are thresholds of radical, disruptive change in politics. When those thresholds are crossed, the impossible suddenly becomes probable, with revolutionary implications for governments and nations.

The leadership of the Palestinian Authority is not held in high regard by most of the population of the West Bank. They’re seen as living relatively high off the hog and certainly not accomplishing anything vis-a-vis the Israelis.

As long as Hamas needs the support it could conceivably get from the international community through the Palestinian Authority, it has an interest in playing nice with Fatah. And Fatah has an interest in playing nice with Hamas because it needs some source of legitimacy on the West Bank.

From a social networking point of view, Pakistan is not very far away.