Ian Lustick’s Iron Dice. By Martin Kramer. Commentary, September 24, 2013. Also at Sandbox.
Two-State Illusion. By Ian S. Lustick. NJBR, September 15, 2013.
Kramer:
As both
Jonathan Tobin and Jonathan Marks have previously written here, University of
Pennsylvania political scientist Ian Lustick, author of a recent op-ed
promoting the “one-state solution” and featured prominently in the New York Times, isn’t an outlier. To the
contrary, American academe is full of Lusticks: 60-something Jewish radicals
who went through some transient phase of simplistic far-left Zionism before
discovering that the real Israel is complex. Disillusioned, they rode their
leftism to minor eminence as repentants in departments and centers of Middle
Eastern studies, where Jewish critics of Israel provide ideal cover for the
real haters. Such Jews used to be devotees of a Palestinian state, but now
they’re scrambling to keep up with the freakish fad of a “one-state solution”
set off by the late Edward Said’s own famous conversion (announced, of course,
on the pages of the New York Times,
in 1999). Because Lustick’s piece ran in the Times, it was a big deal for some American Jews who still see that
newspaper as a gatekeeper of ideas. In Israel, it’s passed virtually unnoticed.
Whatever
the article’s intrinsic interest, it’s particularly fascinating as a case study
in intellectual self-contradiction. For Lustick has reversed his supposedly
well-considered, scientifically informed assessment of only a decade ago,
without so much as a shrug of acknowledgement.
Let’s
briefly recap Lustick’s dismissive take on the two-state solution in his new
article. It is “an idea whose time has passed,” it is neither “plausible or
even possible,” it’s a “chimera,” a “fantasy.” The “obsessive focus on
preserving the theoretical possibility of a two-state solution is as irrational
as rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.” Conclusion? “The pretense that
negotiations under the slogan of ‘two states for two peoples’ could lead to
such a solution must be abandoned.” In fact, negotiations do actual harm:
“Diplomacy under the two-state banner is no longer a path to a solution but an
obstacle itself. We are engaged in negotiations to nowhere.”
The ultimate two-stater
Yet
only a decade ago, Lustick thought that the success of the “peace process” in
achieving its aim of two states wasn’t only plausible and possible. It was inevitable. Lustick explained his thesis
in a lengthy 2002 interview peppered with analogies and metaphors, including
this one:
I like
to think of it as a kind of gambler throwing dice, except it’s history that’s
throwing the dice. Every throw of the dice is like a diplomatic peace process
attempt. In order to actually succeed, history has got to throw snake eyes, 2.
And, you know, that’s not easy, you have to keep throwing the dice. Eventually,
you’re going to throw a 2. All of the leadership questions and accidents of
history, the passions of both sides, the torturous feelings of suffering, the
political coalitions, the timing of elections will fall into place.
What is
Lustick saying here? Remember that the odds of throwing snake eyes on any given
toss of the dice are 36 to 1, so only a fool or an idiot would despair after,
say, a dozen or even two dozen throws. Even failure is just a prelude to
success, since as long as you keep throwing, “eventually, you’re going to throw
a 2.” The old sawhorse that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and
expecting a different result is belied by the dice-thrower, who repeats the
same action knowing that each result will be different. And that’s why the
United States keeps repeating the diplomatic moves that Lustick now finds so
tiresome. The “peace processors” are just adhering to his logic, circa 2002,
which guarantees that one of these initiatives is destined to succeed—provided
there are enough of them.
And
what did Lustick in 2002 have to say to those Israelis who “want the West Bank
and Gaza to remain permanently under Israeli rule”? “You will have to roll a
13,” Lustick told them.
But you
can’t roll a 13, which is to say that the right has no plan for how it can
successfully keep the territories anymore. They don’t even advocate as a
realistic option expelling the Palestinians. So they have no plan. So if you
are the right and you know you have to roll a 13, the strategy is, don’t let
the dice get rolled, keep trying to stop every initiative and subvert it if it
gets started. . . . It’s the only rational thing to do in order to prevent
history from eventually producing what it will produce, which is a two-state
solution.
So the
Israeli version of a one-state solution—an Israel from the river Jordan to the
Mediterranean—was the hopeless cause of dead-enders who defied “history”
itself. In 2002, Lustick was certain that “one of these days,” Israel would
leave the West Bank:
Israel
is caught between the inability to make the issue disappear by making the West
Bank look like Israel, and the inability to make it disappear by actually
withdrawing, by getting through that regime barrier, that regime threshold.
Some day, one of these days, that regime threshold is going to be crossed.
The
Palestinian version of the one-state option? Lustick didn’t even mention it in
2002.
So
Lustick was the ultimate two-state believer. I don’t think even the inveterate
“peace processors,” whom he now dismisses so contemptuously, ever assumed that
repeated failures would bring them closer to their goal. Lustick did believe
it: one couldn’t “prevent history from eventually producing what it will
produce, which is a two-state solution,” and it was just a matter of time
before “that threshold is going to be crossed.” So certain was Lustick of the
inexorable logic of the two-state solution that he believed even Hamas had
acquiesced in it. And because Israel had spurned Hamas, Israel had squandered an
opportunity to turn it into a “loyal opposition.”
Here
lies the problem—perhaps dishonesty is a better word—in Lustick’s latest piece.
Lustick ’13 never takes on Lustick ’02, to explain why “history,” destined to
lead to two states only a few years ago, is now destined to end in one state.
It’s tempting to make light of the seemingly bottomless faith of “peace
processors,” and I’ve done it myself, with relish. But the case Lustick made
for them in 2002 had a certain logic. The case he’s made against them in 2013
is weak. Indeed, he never really builds much of a case at all.
Is it
the number of settlers? If so, he doesn’t say so. Lustick knows how many
settlers there are, and he numbered them in a lecture in February. In 2002, he
says, there were 390,000 (West Bank and East Jerusalem). In 2012, he says,
there were 520,000. That’s 130,000 more (two-thirds of it, by the way, natural
growth). Presumably, some significant proportion of the 130,000 have been added
to settlements whose inclusion in Israel wouldn’t preclude a two-state
solution, because of their proximity to pre-1967 Israel. So we are talking
about some tens of thousands. Which 10,000 increment, between 2002 and 2013,
put Israel past the “point of no return”?
Lustick
doesn’t say. In the Times, he claims
that American pressure could have stopped Menachem Begin’s re-election in 1981,
precluding the building of “massive settlement complexes” and prompting an
Oslo-like process a decade earlier, in the 1980s. It’s a we’ll-never-know
counter-factual, but it doesn’t solve the conundrum. Lustick knew all this in
2002, and it didn’t dampen his faith in the historic inevitability of the
two-state solution. So the question remains: what’s happened since 2002 to
change Lustick’s mind so drastically?
“The state will not survive!”
Here we
come to Lustick’s supposedly original contribution to the “one-state” argument.
He isn’t repeating the usual claim that Israeli settlements have made a
Palestinian state unachievable. He’s arguing that the Israeli state is unsustainable. “The disappearance of Israel as a
Zionist project, through war, cultural exhaustion or demographic momentum, is
at least as plausible” as an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank. The best
indicator? Israelis say so! “Many Israelis see the demise of the country as not
just possible, but probable. The State of Israel has been established, not its
permanence. The most common phrase in Israeli political discourse is some
variation of ‘If X happens (or doesn’t), the state will not survive!’”
I don’t
know any research that’s established “the most common phrase in Israeli
political discourse,” and I’m guessing that Ian Lustick doesn’t either. He just
made it up. In his February lecture, he did cite one work, from 2009, that
counted how many articles published in the left-wing Haaretz employed the phrases “existential danger” or “existential
threat.” There’s a bump up after 2002 (Second Intifada), then a spike up in
2006 (Second Lebanon War). The “study” proves absolutely nothing. After all,
this is Haaretz, the Wailing Wall of
the Israeli left. A perfectly plausible explanation is that the paper’s
editorial bias, exacerbated by the eclipse of the left, has tended to favor
doomsday prognostication.
And
Lustick is contradicted by real research on real people, which he either
ignores or of which he’s ignorant. The Israel Democracy Institute’s latest
large-scale poll, for 2012, shows that optimists outnumber pessimists among
Israeli Jews by a margin of 79 percent to 18 percent. Over 85 percent say
Israel can defend itself militarily and only 33 percent think Israel will
become more isolated than it now is. The Tel Aviv University academic who
oversees the poll summarized the results: “It is important to note that most Israelis
view the country’s future optimistically. Our national resilience rests heavily
on the fact that even though people are negative on Friday evenings at their
family dinner table and the zeitgeist is discouragement, when you scratch a
little deeper, people are not really depressed here.” That may be an
understatement. Israel is ranked eleventh in the world in the latest
UN-commissioned World Happiness Index, which hardly correlates to any level of
depression.
According
to the Peace Index poll ahead of this Jewish New Year, only 16 percent of
Jewish Israelis think the country’s security situation will worsen. 46 percent
think it will stay the same, and 28 percent will it will actually improve—this,
despite the chaos in Syria and the Sinai, and the spinning centrifuges in Iran.
The only thing Israelis are persistently pessimistic about is the “peace
process,” but that doesn’t sour the overall mood—except for the small minority,
including those op-ed writers for Haaretz,
who apparently constitute Lustick’s “sample.”
(Lustick
also alludes to “demographic momentum” as working against Israel, and he has
puttered around with figures in an attempt to show that Israelis are lining up
to emigrate. He got away with this until an actual demographer, Sergio
DellaPergola, took a hammer to one of his amateur efforts and left nothing
intact. It’s a must-read takedown.)
Israel the balloon
But in
the end, for Lustick, it doesn’t really matter how prosperous or stable or
viable Israel appears to be, even to Israelis. That’s because Israel is like…
wait for it… a balloon. “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.” Zionist Israel is a bubble that’s bound
to burst. It’s been inflated by American support, and the “peace process” has
protected it from rupture. But the larger the balloon gets, the more
devastating that rupture will be. In February, Lustick revealed that he is
writing an entire book on this thesis, evoking “history” again, with a fresh
analogy to exchange rates:
History
will solve the problem in the sense of the way entropy solves problems. You
don’t stay with this kind of constrained volatility forever. When you constrain
exchange rates in a volatile market by not allowing rates to move even though
the actual economy makes them absurd, rates will eventually change, but in a
very radical, non-linear way. The more the constraint, the less the adaptation
to changing conditions, the more jagged and painful that adaptation is going to
be.
Better,
thinks Lustick, that the “peace process” in pursuit of the two-state solution
be shut down now, so that both sides can slug it out again—this time to
“painful stalemates that lead each party to conclude that time is not on their
side.” Israel, which has defeated the Palestinians time and again, has to stop
winning. Pulling the plug on the “peace process,” he writes in the Times, would
set the
stage for ruthless oppression, mass mobilization, riots, brutality, terror,
Jewish and Arab emigration and rising tides of international condemnation of
Israel. And faced with growing outrage, America will no longer be able to offer
unconditional support for Israel. Once the illusion of a neat and palatable
solution to the conflict disappears, Israeli leaders may then begin to see, as
South Africa’s white leaders saw in the late 1980s, that their behavior is
producing isolation, emigration and hopelessness.
And that’s where we want to be! Enough
rolling of the diplomatic dice! It’s time to roll the iron dice! It may sound
cynical to you, but Lustick thinks it’s destiny: “The question is not whether
the future has conflict in store for Israel-Palestine. It does. Nor is the
question whether conflict can be prevented. It cannot.” Remember, this is
someone who just a few years ago insisted that a two-state solution was
inevitable. Now he argues exactly the opposite. The world should get out of the
way and let the inescapable violence unfold—only this time, the United States
won’t be in Israel’s corner, and so Israel will be defeated and forced to
dismantle itself.
The
problem with rolling the iron dice, as even an armchair historian knows, is
that the outcome is uncertain. What Lustick would like “history” to deliver is
a defeat of Zionist Israel of such precise magnitude as to create a perfect
equilibrium between Jew and Arab. But it may well be that the outcome he
desires is the equivalent of rolling a 13, because Israel has deep-seated
advantages that would be magnified greatly were Israel ever to find itself up
against a wall. (The fortieth anniversary of the 1973 Yom Kippur war may be an
apt moment to remember that.) Or something in his scenario could go wrong. As
Clausewitz noted about war, “No other human activity is so continuously or
universally bound up with chance.”
One of
the possible outcomes Lustick imagines is that “Israelis whose families came
from Arab countries might find new reasons to think of themselves not as
‘Eastern,’ but as Arab.” Given that even “the Arabs” don’t think of themselves
anymore as “Arabs” (especially when they gas or bomb one another), and that
Jews never thought of themselves as “Arabs” even when they lived in
Arabic-speaking countries and spoke Arabic, one wonders how many thousands of
dice rolls it would take to produce that
outcome.
Prophet of Philly
In the
end, it’s pointless to debate Lustick on his own hypothetical grounds, invoking
rolling dice, bursting balloons, and volatile exchange rates. That’s because
nothing has happened since 2002 between Israel and the Palestinians, or in
Israel, that can possibly explain his own total turnaround. I suspect his Times article has nothing to do with the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and everything to do with Lustick’s attempt to
keep his footing in the shifting sands of American academe.
Ever
since Edward Said veered toward the “one-state solution,” the pressure has been
growing, and it’s grown even more since Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said
Professor at Columbia, finally gravitated toward the same position (something I
predicted he would do well before he actually did it). This turn of events left
Lustick in the rear of the radical vanguard and far from the action. Ever since
Tony Judt passed on, there’s been a vacancy for a professorial Jewish supporter
of the “one-state solution.” So this is Lustick’s late-career move, and I anticipate
it will do for him a bit of what it did for Judt, transforming him from an
academic of modest reputation into an in-demand hero. Invitations will pour in.
Soon we will hear of a controversy involving an invitation rescinded, which
will raise his standing still higher. And it’s quite plausible that the Times piece will land him a heftier
advance for his next book (as of February, “I’ve not written the conclusion
yet”), and the promotional push of a major publisher.
In
anticipation, Lustick is already casting himself as a prophet of Israel,
exemplified in this quote from an answer he gave to a question last winter:
I
argued in 1971 that 1,500 settlers in the West Bank were a catastrophe that
would lead Israel into a political dungeon from which it might never escape. I
was laughed at. I also argued for a Palestinian state alongside of Israel in
the early 1970s, but it took twenty-five years before the mainstream in Israeli
politics agreed with that. It may take another twenty-five years before they realize
that what I’m saying is true now and will be even truer if Israel is still
around in twenty or twenty-five more years.
This is
not a human measure of prescience, as Lustick himself has acknowledged. How far
in advance would anyone have been able to imagine the Iranian revolution or the
fall of the Soviet Union? Lustick: “Ten years? No. Five years? Maybe two, if
you were very, very good.” If, as Lustick claims, he consistently sees the
future of Israel twenty-five years forward, he must inhabit a sphere far above
the regular run of prognosticating political scientists. He is now compiling
the Book of Ian. Read it, O Israel (enter credit card here), and weep.
