I S Lustick
Biographic Data
| ID | 28875 |
|---|---|
| NAME | I S Lustick |
| GIVEN NAMES | I S |
| FAMILY NAME | Lustick |
| SIGNATURE | LUSTICK I S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Pennsylvania |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7526-2679 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 105 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 696 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 99 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1974 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Controlling Others
How can regimes of ethnic domination be ended? That is the central question addressed in John McGarry’s book, The Politics of Domination: Taking, Keeping, and Losing Control over Other Peoples. Bef...
Must Every Golem Die
Settler-colonial projects often produce states that eventually turn against the purposes of those who created them. We see this in the American and Boer revolts against the British and the sabotage by British settlers in Ireland and French settlers in Algeria of efforts to integrate the native populations of those territories into the British and French states. We see it also in the relationship between the objectives of European states and Zioni…
Old and New Strategies for Exploiting Structural Change in Palestine/Israel
Marx’s observation that men make history, but not under circumstances of their own choosing, is a candidate for the most paraphrased aphorism in contemporary social science.3 It highlights the relationship between “structure” and “agency”—between patterns so stable that they can be treated as constants for relevant time frames and choices and actions made and taken by individuals and intention-guided groups. Structural analysis identifies large c…
Democracy, Liberal Zionism, and Civil-Military Relations in Israel
Two books on civil-military relations in Israel, published eighteen years apart, focus on Israel's future as a Jewish democracy. Peri's 2006 volume depicts the security establishment as a threat to civilian rule, whereas Ziv, in his 2024 book, portrays waning political influence of the Israeli military and security services as associated with democratic backsliding. The authors each favor the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict…
Israel on the Cusp
Political scientists distinguish between governments and regimes. A government is comprised of incumbents holding positions of authority specified within an institutionalized “regime,” that is, a legal order. Within a well-institutionalized regime, politics consists of legal struggles over what governments and government officials do. But when the issues in contention pertain to what governments are authorized to do, and not about what they shoul…
Israel, Annexation, and Sovereignty
From the early years of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, observers predicted that their de facto annexation might occur. Fifty-seven years later, it has happened. Although governed differently than other zones within the Israeli state, neither territory can be separated from Israel. Yet, the territories’ official status is that they are not part of the state. We offer four reinforcing analyses—legal, historical, discursive, an…
Annexation in right-wing Israeli discourse—The case of Ribonut
The one-state reality has dramatically changed the discursive landscape of the movement of Israeli settlers and their supporters who have waged a half century campaign to prevent territorial compromise as a basis for Israeli-Palestinian peace. Analysis of the discourse of the Sovereignty movement, as reflected in the pages of its journal, Ribonut , traces these changes and highlights the new challenges posed to the annexationist project by the pr…
The Palestinians, Israel, and BDS
Israel and the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS) have been in conflict within one another for nearly two decades. In this article we compare trajectories of Palestinian-led BDS mobilization and Israeli-led counter-mobilization by deploying two theoretical perspectives, a rationalist, strategic learning model and a political competition model. We find that the difference in balance of power on each side between state and civil soci…
Geopolitical Forecasting and Actionable Intelligence
In geopolitics, even rough probabilistic forecasts are difficult to make. Scenario design, table-top simulations and structured discussions are heuristic activities that focus the attention of analysts and increase policymaker satisfaction with intelligence products, but their usefulness is not based on confidence that forecasts are accurate. Traumatised by 9/11 and encouraged by advances in social science, computerised data collection and artifi…
Book Forum
Ian S. Lustick, Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019)
Israelis, Palestinians, and Americans
Once upon a time, the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was a solution, a pretty picture of the future that good-hearted and moderate people could imagine as providing enough justice and satisfaction to both sides as to be achievable by bargaining in good faith and with support from the international community. It remains a pretty picture of the future, but no longer an outcome that anyone knows how to achieve. A pretty pictu…
To Start a War
The Peace Process Carousel
More than 50 years of American diplomacy in the Arab-Israeli “peace process” have revealed it to be a carousel of constant activity with no forward movement. Despite chronic failure and embarrassment, it continues in great measure because of the cumulative effects of the influence of the Israel lobby in the United States, through cycles of opportunity, initiative, retreat, and compensation. Mathematician John Nash’s theory of an inefficient equil…
The Changing Political Role of Israeli Arabs 1
The changing attitudes or Israeli Arabs, and especially the changing political significance of the Arab vote, have enhanced political opportunities for Arabs. In Israel's forty-year history, many Arab members of the Knesset who had been elected on lists affiliated with the Labor Party resigned during their terms and sought re-election on their own—but none had succeeded. As Israeli Arabs gained in self-confidence, security and pride, they increas…
The Political Road to Binationalism
From 1948 to 1967 the proportion of non-Jews living under Israeli jurisdiction averaged about 13 percent. Virtually all were Israeli citizens. After the 1967 war the proportion of Arabs living under the jurisdiction of "the Jewish state" has risen from 34 percent to 38 percent. This chapter addresses the question of the long-term response of the Israeli political order to the increasing size and sophistication of a formally enfranchised Arab elec…
When do institutions suddenly collapse? Zones of knowledge and the likelihood of political cascades
The Red Thread of Israel's “Demographic Problem”
The Occupation after 51 Years
Ariel Handel, Marco Allegra, and Erez Maggor, eds., Normalizing Occupation: The Politics of Everyday Life in the West Bank Settlements (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 244 pp. Hardback, $90.00. Paperback, $35.00. Sara Yael Hirschhorn, City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 368 pp. Hardback, $39.95. Gershon Shafir, A Half Century of Occupation: Israel, Palest…
The Holocaust in Israeli Political Culture
New Approaches to Israel‐Palestine Peace
The Balfour Declaration a Century Later
Response by Ian Lustick to Comments
Making Sense of the Nakba
Zionist claims to rightful rule of most or all of Palestine/the Land of Israel ultimately depend on naturalizing those claims into common sense, for Jews, of course, but also for the international community. Following the 1967 war, Israelis in favor of withdrawing from occupied territories have relied on distinguishing between the justice of the 1949 Armistice Lines, and the process that led to the State of Israel within those lines, versus the i…
Symposium
Israel Needs a New Map
Stability in Deeply Divided Societies
This paper examines the consociational approach to the study of deeply divided societies and notes its weaknesses. It argues that the absence of a well-developed alternative "control" approach to the explanation of stability in deeply divided societies has resulted in the empirical overextension of consociational models. Control models, focusing on how superordinate groups manipulate subordinate groups rather than on the emergence and functioning…
History, Historiography, and Political Science
Social scientists who use history as a laboratory for theory development use the work of historians to construct background narratives which can then be coded according to theoretically relevant categories. Yet, virtually no attention has been paid to how these historical monographs are to be chosen. On most periods and themes of interest available accounts differ, not only substantively but also with respect to the implicit theories and conceptu…
Secessionism in Multicultural States
Institutional frameworks powerfully determine the goals, violence, and trajectories of identitarian movements-including secessionist movements. However, both small-Nand large-Nresearchers disagree on the question of whether "power-sharing" arrangements, instead of repression, are more or less likely to mitigate threats of secessionist mobilizations by disaffected, regionally concentrated minority groups. The PS-I modeling platform was used to cre…
The Absence of Middle Eastern Great Powers
Propelled by the oil boom of the mid-1970s the Middle East emerged as the world's fastest growing region. Hopes and expectations were high for Arab political consolidation, economic advancement, and cultural efflorescence. With falling oil prices and a devastating war between Iran and Iraq, these hopes had dimmed somewhat by the early 1980s. In 1985, however, the spectacular image of an Arab great power was still tantalizing. A Pan-Arab state, wr…
Lijphart, Lakatos, and Consociationalism
Arend Lijphart's 1969 article on consociational democracy was a compelling critique of prevailing theories of democratic stability and the launching pad for one of the most widely regarded research programs in contemporary comparative politics. However, Lijphart and others who adopted consociational approaches encountered severe logical, theoretical, and empirical criticisms of their work. The success of the program and its apparent imperviousnes…
Explaining the Variable Utility of Disjointed Incrementalism
Much of mainstream organization theory has been concerned with the implications for organizational design and policy process of high levels of uncertainty or complexity in task environments. Decentralization, disjointed incrementalist decision strategies, and quasi-market coordinative mechanisms have been advanced as rational responses to the complexity of most problems in the socio-political sphere. This article presents and illustrates four con…
Unsettled States, Disputed Lands
Are We Trapped in the War on Terror
Israeli state-building in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip
The most significant political division within Israel since 1967 has beenbetween those Israelis who favor the permanent incorporation of the portions ofEretz Yisrael(The Land of Israel) captured in the Six Day War and those Israelis who favor relinquishing most or all of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in return for a peace agreement with the Arab world and resolution of the Palestinian problem. Although usually considered an issue of security, ideo…
Taking Evolution Seriously
Social science in general and political science in particular have been resistant to the mobilization of evolutionary and specifically Darwinian ideas for analytic and explanatory purposes. This paper documents a disconnect between political scientists and standard evolutionary theory. Historical institutionalism is identified as a subfield particularly well-suited, but presently ill-equipped, to benefit from evolutionary thinking. Key concepts i…
Abstractions, Ensembles, and Virtualizations
Israeli Immigration/Emigration
Reinventing Jerusalem
For the Land and the Lord
The Red Thread of Israel's “Demographic Problem”
Has Israel Annexed East Jerusalem
The Oslo Agreement as an Obstacle to Peace
The most sophisticated American and Israeli Jewish opponents of the Oslo peace process pay lip service to the agreement while ignoring its political content and insisting that it be understood as a legal document and a basis for pushing Israeli prerogatives and punishing Palestinian "violations." Substituting adversarial legal standards for the modus operandi of a political parternship is thus a calculated technique for destroying the credibility…
Israel's Dangerous Fundamentalists
What Counts is the Counting
Seven years ago, heightened anxieties in Israel about an Arab threat to Israel's Jewish majority triggered an influential campaign to change perceptions of who is winning the demographic battle. Proposals to annex 60% or more of the West Bank are based in part on its success in persuading many Israelis and others of the nonexistence of 1 to 1.5 million missing Palestinians. This campaign's estimates of Arab and Jewish population for 2004 and beyo…
Yerushalayim, al-Quds and the Wizard of Oz
In the famous American movie “The Wizard of Oz,” Dorothy, her three companions, and her dog, brave innumerable dangers to petition the Wizard — the Wizard of Oz — for his help. But although they ha
A bandoning the I ron W all
Yerushalayim and al-Quds
Israel's insistent portrayal of "Yerushalayim" as "united and indivisible" and as encompassing not only all of Arab al-Quds but vast surrounding areas had a crucial political purpose: to block any negotiated settlement with the Palestinians by creating a taboo against even discussing any separation. The campaign was successful in some ways but ultimately failed as a hegemonic project. This failure is reflected in the Barak government's willingnes…
The Quality of Theory and the Comparative Disadvantage of Area Studies
The 1990s were not kind to area studies. They were particularly cruel to Middle East specialists, and even more particularly, perhaps, to social scientists. The job market has slumped as relevant departments have lost positions. Departures and retirements were only irregularly replaced. Foundation officers and other officials in other grant-making agencies who promote guidelines and programs stressed thematics, policy-relevance, and cross-cultura…
Zionism and the state of Israel
(1980). Zionism and the state of Israel: regime objectives and the Arab minority in the first years of statehood. Middle Eastern Studies: Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 127-146
The Peace Process Carousel
More than 50 years of American diplomacy in the Arab-Israeli “peace process” have revealed it to be a carousel of constant activity with no forward movement. Despite chronic failure and embarrassment, it continues in great measure because of the cumulative effects of the influence of the Israel lobby in the United States, through cycles of opportunity, initiative, retreat, and compensation. Mathematician John Nash’s theory of an inefficient equil…
Leadership
In the field of political science in general and in the study of international organizations in particular, leadership has been a particularly neglected concept. It has served as a kind of residual category —a handy, or bothersome, exogenous variable. Attempts that have been made, in the international organization context, to isolate leadership as an independent variable and to proceed with comparative analysis have, at best, centered on whether …
Arabs in the Jewish State
Arabs in the Jewish State
Stability in Deeply Divided Societies
This paper examines the consociational approach to the study of deeply divided societies and notes its weaknesses. It argues that the absence of a well-developed alternative "control" approach to the explanation of stability in deeply divided societies has resulted in the empirical overextension of consociational models. Control models, focusing on how superordinate groups manipulate subordinate groups rather than on the emergence and functioning…
Zionism and the state of Israel
(1980). Zionism and the state of Israel: regime objectives and the Arab minority in the first years of statehood. Middle Eastern Studies: Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 127-146
Kill the Autonomy Talks
Arabs in the Jewish State
Explaining the Variable Utility of Disjointed Incrementalism
Much of mainstream organization theory has been concerned with the implications for organizational design and policy process of high levels of uncertainty or complexity in task environments. Decentralization, disjointed incrementalist decision strategies, and quasi-market coordinative mechanisms have been advanced as rational responses to the complexity of most problems in the socio-political sphere. This article presents and illustrates four con…
Israeli Politics and American Foreign Policy
Arabs in the Jewish State
News of Fellows and Scholars
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Israel's Dangerous Fundamentalists
Israeli state-building in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip
The most significant political division within Israel since 1967 has beenbetween those Israelis who favor the permanent incorporation of the portions ofEretz Yisrael(The Land of Israel) captured in the Six Day War and those Israelis who favor relinquishing most or all of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in return for a peace agreement with the Arab world and resolution of the Palestinian problem. Although usually considered an issue of security, ideo…
For the Land and the Lord
The the Land and the Lord
Changing Rationales for Political Violence in the Arab-Israeli Conflict
Changing Rationales for Political Violence in the Arab-Israeli Conflict
An historic transformation in the Arab-Israeli conflict has occurred. It can be identified by tracing change in the target audience of the violence employed by Zionists/Israelis and Arabs/Palestinians, as well as in the political rationale of that violence. The argument here developed is that there has been a substantial shift from solipsistic rationales (directed toward the beliefs, intentions, and behavior of one's own group) to other-directed …
Becoming Problematic
Critical essays on Israeli society, politics, and culture
Refuting Revisionism
Refuting Revisionism
"Vital, "The Future of the Jews
Reinventing Jerusalem
Writing the Intifada Collective Action in the Occupied Territories
The five-year-old Palestinian uprising, the intifada, was the first of many mass mobilizations against nondemocratic rule to appear in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, East Asia, and the former Soviet Union between 1987 and 1991. Although the Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is seldom included by the media or by social scientists in their treatments of this putative wave of “democratization,” many st…
Necessary Risks
Political science (82 works) · Law (61 works) · Politics (52 works) · Law (49 works) · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies (47 works) · History (45 works) · Sociology (40 works) · History (37 works) · Computer Science (29 works) · Philosophy (24 works)