Top 15 Ian Lustick Quotes

Israeli governments cling to the two-state notion because it seems to reflect the sentiments of the Jewish Israeli majority, and it shields the country from international opprobrium even as it camouflages relentless efforts to expand Israel’s territory into the West Bank.

Strong Islamist trends make a fundamentalist Palestine more likely than a small state under a secular government.

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

Democracies domesticate religious groups to become political players. That’s how it works.

My academic specialization is Arab-Israel relations.

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

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.

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

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.

There’s a good lesson for policymakers: It’s not the presence of the U.S. that is a problem for many people in the Arab region; it’s the type of presence we bring.

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.

Do I trust Yasser Arafat? Of course not. Why should I? Why should anyone trust a politician, whether Shimon Peres, Ariel Sharon, Bill Clinton, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Benjamin Netanyahu, George W. Bush, or Yasser Arafat?

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.

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.

There is some big thing about the world that produced all these people willing to kill themselves just to hurt us. On 9/11 we learned we’re part of that world, in the same completely crazy, drastic and arbitrary ways it hits other countries.