A professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, Ian Lustick is recently the author of Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality, a book that bemoans Israel’s supposed failure to create a Palestinian state in the territory now under its control. To Lustick, this failure can be attributed to an Israeli inclination toward “distrust and territorial maximalism rather than inclinations to compromise,” compounded by a culture of “Holocaustia” that “tells Israeli Jews what it means to be a Jew,” and facilitated by the power of the “Israel lobby.” Yisrael Medad writes in his review:
Mandate-era history is ignored by Lustick, which would have provided some qualifying historical context to his central argument. The truth is that the two-state solution was not “lost” recently, but had been attempted, and had failed, and failed again, long ago.
Lustick does not confront the character of “Palestinian Arab nationalism,” the course of its history, or its hostility to the entire notion of a Jewish homeland. This failure is typical of proponents of the two-state solution. One might say it is a necessary failure.
The cornerstone of the Arab rejection of two-state solution was laid in July 1919 at the Syrian Arab Congress in Damascus. The resolutions adopted there, in their essence, remain in place: “We reject the claims of the Zionists for the establishment of a Jewish commonwealth in that part of southern Syria which is known as Palestine, and we are opposed to Jewish immigration into any part of the country.”
Read more on Fathom: https://fathomjournal.org/book-review-paradigm-lost-from-two-state-solution-to-one-state-reality/