Israel is a “crazy state,” a “rogue regime and international pariah,” which “has no right to exist,” stated University of Pennsylvania political science professor Ian Lustick during a fall lecture in Washington, DC. Such anti-Israel vitriol characterized the Arab Center-Washington, D.C.’s conference at the National Press Club, where Lustick and other speakers dreamed of replacing Israel with a single, ostensibly democratic Palestinian state.
About 150 people ultimately filled a room for a daylong conference on “Shifting Tides: Palestine, U.S. Elections, and Pathways Forward.” Israel-hating luminaries in the audience included Medea Benjamin in her usual Code Pink attire, Georgetown University professor and Muslim slavery apologist Jonathan A. C. Brown, Tom Getman, Phyllis Bennis, and Miko Peled. One woman wore the radical chic symbol of Palestine, the keffiyeh, over her black blouse.
He described the famed but doomed 1943 uprising there by Jews against their Nazi exterminators as an “intifada”— the Arab word for “uprising” that has marked bloody Palestinian terrorist campaigns against Israeli Jews.
Lustick’s keynote address, transmitted via video given his COVID 19 infection, was of a piece with fellow conference panelists like Assal Rad, author of Don’t Say Palestine, who presented Israel’s existence as a crime against humanity. What she fabricated as a recent “Gaza genocide” represented the “culmination of centuries of colonialism” and of “land theft, dispossession, apartheid,” amounting to Zionism’s historic “erasure of Palestine.” Lustick correspondingly analogized Israel to the Nazi Third Reich with reference to the slogan “Don’t give in to despair” written in Yiddish by Jews on a wall in Poland’s Warsaw ghetto during World War II. He described the famed but doomed 1943 uprising there by Jews against their Nazi exterminators as an “intifada”— the Arab word for “uprising” that has marked bloody Palestinian terrorist campaigns against Israeli Jews.
Assuming a moral pedestal à la Martin Luther King, Jr., Lustick dreamt of merging all the territories and their Arab and Jewish populations in the former Palestine Mandate between the Jordan River and Mediterranean into one single state. In what any well-intentioned person would consider a nightmare, he would have a prosperous, democratic Jewish state of Israel join the deeply antisemitic Arabs of the corrupt, conflicted-ridded Palestinian territories in a single polity. While he had previously supported creating a Palestinian state alongside Israel, he now considered such a two-state solution an “impossibility.”
Israel, which not only governs its own citizens but justifiably exercises security controls over Palestinian territories, would thus undergo “full integration of all those living in the territories ruled by the same government.” Israel’s “partial democracy” would therefore experience an “extension of citizenship and political rights to historically excluded, despised, and oppressed populations”—i.e., Palestinians who support Hamas jihadists. Rather than “decolonization,” Israel “is not a problem of separating the colony from the metropole,” but rather “of democratizing what is an expanded and thereby transformed metropole.”
Lustick denounced Israel’s Jewish nation state as “Jewish supremacy over non-Jews,” a “regime of silent apartheid,” even though Israel’s Arab minority enjoys the blessings of liberty of which other Middle Eastern Arabs can only dream. In contrast to this bleak outlook, he visualized “co-resistance among Jews and Arabs” in some sort of civil rights movement for his single Palestinian republic; “in the long run, the crucial alliance will be between Jews and Arabs.” He nonetheless conceded that Israel’s “right wing is going to win the election one way or the other” in this year’s Israeli elections, for the Israeli electorate has shifted massively to the right, particularly following unremitting jihadist attacks.
Signs of Israel’s increasing unpopularity in America cheered Lustick, for “unconditional American aid” to Israel has “propelled ruthless and fanatical ultra-nationalists to power.”
Signs of Israel’s increasing unpopularity in America cheered Lustick, for “unconditional American aid” to Israel has “propelled ruthless and fanatical ultra-nationalists to power.” “The Israel lobby’s hammerlock on U.S. policy in the region is the main problem in the Middle East. It prevents peace, produces wars, and drags America into those wars,” he asserted. Lustick ignored recurring policy differences between America and its strategic ally Israel while promoting the often-antisemitic tropes that Middle Eastern wars concern no American interests and exist only exist because of Israel.
While discussing progressive American Jewish disenchantment with Israel, Lustick cited “one of the most popular books in the American Jewish community, especially among young people.” This “book about the Jewish Bund in Europe before World War II,” namely Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund, described an “anti-Zionist way of being proudly Jewish.” Thus, Jews could “celebrate ourselves as citizens and be loyal to wherever we are rather than in Palestine, rather than in Israel,” Lustick stated. He left unmentioned that World War II’s Nazi genocide destroyed the Jewish Bund in Eastern Europe’s shtetls-turned killing fields and manifested like never before the need for a secure Jewish state.
Institute for Middle East Understanding policy director Josh Ruebner during his presentation added to the chorus of Israel demonization. In America, the “whole country is outraged by our duplicity in this genocide” in Gaza and Israel’s “apartheid regime” is now a political liability, he claimed. He perceived a “Sun City moment for Palestine” among American media personalities condemning Israel, a reference to the South African resort city famously boycotted by American entertainers during apartheid.
Daniel Levy, president of the U.S./Middle East Peace Project, also accordingly described Israel “in a doom loop.” Yet Israeli Jews “will have equal rights in a post-ethno supremacist state future” in a unified Palestine. This binational or even Arab-majority state will be a “better guarantee” for Jewish “future safety and security.”
Palestinian veneration for Barghouti who, like the ruthless founding father of the Palestinian cause, the Egyptian-born Yasser Arafat, is no Ghandi, emphasizes the deadly realities that no singing of “We Shall Overcome” can obviate.
Israeli Jews would overwhelmingly disagree, particularly given the panel comments of Jehad Abusalim, executive director of the Genocide Center, which spuriously tries to substantiate a “Gaza genocide.” He described the “long history of Israel’s systematic targeting of Palestinian leaders” as “part of its broader campaign against Palestinian institutions,” and not the killing of Palestinian terrorists as justified as any America’s killing of Al Qaeda jihadists. Abusalim also looked to Marwan Barghouti as a Palestinian national leader, for he has “legitimacy and creditability” and a “high level of respect among Palestinians.” This results, Abusalim alluded, from Barghouti currently serving multiple life sentences in an Israeli prison for having masterminded terrorist plots that killed at least five individuals.
Palestinian veneration for Barghouti who, like the ruthless founding father of the Palestinian cause, the Egyptian-born Yasser Arafat, is no Ghandi, emphasizes the deadly realities that no singing of “We Shall Overcome” can obviate. Lustick’s proposed single Palestinian state would not bring Arabs and Jews together in some sort of secular or even socialist society. Rather, Jews would confront a Muslim-majority population dominated by illiberal and anti-Jewish sharia norms, as the writer Salman Rushdie has noted. Lustick’s musings at the University of Pennsylvania are yet another example of lavish, yet wasted, public and private expenditures on Middle East Studies, which repeatedly maleducate and misinform and must, therefore, reform or end.
