Episode 1.15: The Two-State Solution: An Autopsy – Ian Lustick

The Andrea Mitchell Center Podcast

Interviewer: MATTHEW BERKMAN. In his book Paradigm Lost, IAN LUSTICK argues that negotiations for a two-state solution between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River are doomed and counterproductive. Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs can enjoy the democracy they deserve but only after decades of struggle amid the unintended but powerful consequences of today's one-state reality. In his discussion with political scientist Matthew Berkman, and basing his argument on the decisiveness of unanticipated consequences, Lustick shows how Zionism's partially successful Iron Wall strategy for dealing with Arabs, an Israeli political culture saturated with a specific way of remembering the Holocaust, and the Israel lobby's dominant influence on American policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict, combined to scuttled efforts to establish a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Yet, he maintains, the death of the two-state solution has also unintentionally set the stage for struggles that, along with new international pressures such as the BDS movement, might ultimately establish a more broadly inclusive democracy in the single state of Israel. Ian Lustick holds the Bess W. Heyman Chair in the Political Science Department of the University of Pennsylvania.