Book Review of Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality, by Ian Lustick

Book Review: Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality  by Ian Lustick, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019

Rev. J. Mark Davidson, Executive Director, Voices for Justice in Palestine, September 23, 2020

This is a very insightful and helpful book that sheds much-needed light on an important set of issues in Israel-Palestine. Prof. Lustick is Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. The central thesis of his book is that "there is one state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, and its name is Israel." In saying this, Lustick is only acknowledging the de facto reality on the ground.

I witnessed this reality first-hand when I traveled to the West Bank in the winter of 2013. After spending a few days in Jordan, I crossed into what has been geographically and historically known as Palestine for centuries. But the custom authorities who went through my luggage and asked me questions, examined my itinerary and eventually stamped my passport and permitted me to enter the land west of the Jordan River, were not Palestinians at all, but young Israeli border police. I was unmistakably entering Israeli-controlled space.

Lustick's main argument is that "the 2-state solution" has collapsed, has become the "lost paradigm." He devotes a chapter to thoroughly substantiating that claim, showing how the advocates of this shibboleth posit more and more wildly unrealistic scenarios for the hypothetical two states. They assert the "2-state solution" is not dead, it's "on life support". There are multiple reasons for the collapse of this paradigm. But the most destructive by far has been unchecked expansion of illegal Jewish-only "settlements" on stolen Palestinian land. Currently, there are over 600,000 Israeli Jews living in the West Bank on land that had been identified as part of a future Palestinian state. Settlement expansion was viewed as an ominous development when it first started decades ago. It was widely understood by all those committed to a just and sustainable peace in Israel-Palestine to doom the prospects for a "2-state solution." Despite being illegal under international law and in contravention to longstanding United States foreign policy, both Labor and Likud governments made the political calculation that it was domestically advantageous and could be enacted without Israel having to pay a significant price in the US or internationally, and proceeded to encourage vigorous settlement expansion. Lustick devotes a chapter on the Israel Lobby and its power in American politics and public opinion as evidence of how Israel came to operate with impunity. The result of unrestrained settlement expansion has been to create "facts on the ground" that make a viable, contiguous Palestinian state virtually impossible.

Talk of a "one-state solution", he believes, is premature. He is more interested in establishing a consensus recognition that there is a "one-state reality" in the land between the River and the Sea. However, he does discuss the elements of a "one-state solution." In essence, if Israel's future is to be other than as an apartheid state, it must become some sort of binational democracy with equal rights for all its citizens. The emerging state of Israel will no longer be a majority Jewish state built primarily to preserve the rights and privileges of its Jewish citizens.

In this regard, Lustick explores the impact of "Holocaustia" on Israeli politics. He demonstrates that Israel's leading politicians from Menachem Begin to Ariel Sharon to Binyamin Netanyahu exploited profound Holocaust trauma for political gain and to the explicit harm of Palestinians, who were cast as Nazis and compulsive Jew-haters. The persistent "security narrative" in Israeli politics and in Israeli-Palestinian relations was increasingly rooted in and justified by Holocaustia. From the standpoint of human rights, a militaristic Israel defending a Jewish state was always an exceedingly problematic vision, since it necessitated that millions of Palestinians would, at a minimum, lack basic rights, and maximally, would languish in apartheid.

Lustick believes that a binational democracy will emerge only out of decades of intentional shared struggle with Jewish Israelis and Palestinians forming political partnerships to fight for common interests. In essence, the "one-state solution" is a skeleton framework that must be fleshed out over time – likely a multi-generational project – to refashion the land between the River and the Sea into something it has never quite been – a pluralistic, egalitarian society, a modern nation-state for all its ethnicities, now including millions of Jews. It is likely to chart the same kind of territory of the civil rights struggle in the United States, throwing off an entrenched supremacist vision and embracing something akin to what Dr. King termed "the beloved community."

Such a vision may seem as wildly unrealistic as the current state of the "2-state solution." But, as Lustick says, "It is time to trade the festering problems of systematic yet unacknowledged domination for a better set of problems associated with learning to live with others as equals. In the end, it is only by thinking seriously about how to honor both democratic principles and the equal legitimacy of Jewish and Palestinian aspirations that Israeli, Palestinian, American, and European leaders can inject new life into a land too long stalked by death and bereft of hope."