Ian S. Lustick - Böcker

Strategic decisions to reduce the size, scope, or ambitions of organizations - including states - in order to enhance future prospects, are among the most difficult and least well-understood choices made in collective life. This volume makes a bold effort to identify the conditions in which less really is more. Each contributor to the volume analyzes the possibilities for institutional redesign, including state contraction, for responding effectively to destabilizing and often violence-laden conflicts. Among the countries discussed in detail are Turkey, Pakistan, Morocco, Congo, Jordan, Indonesia, Russia and the former Soviet Union, Iraq, and India. An impressive array of experts assess strategies that go against the grain, strategies to 'righsize' and even 'downsize' states by changing their external and internal borders. Typically this means opposing prevailing prejudices against partition and 'seraratist' solutions as well as paying high political costs in the short run for more manageable political problems in the long run. Understanding the conditions under which such strategies can be entertained and successfully implemented is as difficult, and as important, as making this kind of option available to beleaguered states in a complex and rapidly changing world.

Critical Essays on Israeli Society, Politics, and Culture is the second volume in a series devoted to imaginative and critical consideration of recent books on Israel. It is a forum allowing some of the most insightful students of Israeli affairs, both in Israel and in the United States, to examine trends in Israeli literature and in scholarship pertaining to all aspects of Israeli life. Each contributor approaches Israel from a different angle, offering anthropological, religious, political, literary, and historical perspectives.Topics attracting particular attention in this volume include the psychological reactions of Israelis who emigrate from their country and the portrayal of the emigrant in Israeli literature; human rights; the role and content of the Jewish fundamentalist movement in Israel; changing relations to the Palestinian leadership in the occupied terrorists; the emerging issue of Israel as a binational society; psychoanalytic and political motifs in contemporary Israeli fiction; and the controversial findings of Israel's newest wave of "revisionist" historians.

The first principle of terrorism is to understand that the weak win by exploiting the strength of the powerful. When 9/11 terrorists with box cutters hijacked American airliners, they transformed America's preeminent transportation system into a devastating weapon of attack. They also set a trap with the promise of revenge and security as the bait. The hijackers' biggest victory was to goad our government into taking the bait by unleashing the War on Terror. The worry, witch-hunt, and waste that have ensued are, according to Ian S. Lustick, destroying American confidence, undermining our economy, warping our political life, and isolating us from our international allies.The media have given constant attention to possible terrorist-initiated catastrophes and to the failures and weaknesses of the government's response. Trapped in the War on Terror, however, questions the very rationale for the War on Terror. By analyzing the virtual absence of evidence of a terrorist threat inside the United States along with the motives and strategic purposes of al-Qaeda, Lustick shows how disconnected the War on Terror is from the real but remote threat terrorism poses. He explains how the generalized War on Terror began as part of the justification for invading Iraq, but then took on a life of its own. A whirlwind of fear, failure, and recrimination, this "war" drags every interest group and politician, he argues, into selfish competition for its spoils.Facing the threat of nuclear incineration during the Cold War, America overcame panic about nonexistent communist sleeper cells poised to destroy the country, a panic fueled by the destructive hysteria of McCarthyism. Through careful analysis of the Soviet threat, the nation managed to sustain a productive national life and achieve victory, despite the terrifying daily possibility of catastrophe. This book is inspired by that success. It points the way forward, not toward victory in the War on Terror but to victory over it. The first and most difficult step toward that victory is to know the enemy. In large measure, as Trapped in the War on Terror shows, that means understanding how al-Qaeda is making us our own worst enemy.

The two-state solution is doomed; the one-state reality is here to stayWhy have Israelis and Palestinians failed to achieve a two-state solution to the conflict that has cost so much and lasted so long? In Paradigm Lost, Ian S. Lustick brings fifty years as an analyst of the Arab-Israeli dispute to bear on this question and offers a provocative explanation of why continued attempts to divide the land will have no more success than would negotiations to establish a one-state solution.Basing his argument on the decisiveness of unanticipated consequences, Lustick shows how the combination of Zionism's partially successful Iron Wall strategy for dealing with Arabs, an Israeli political culture saturated with what the author calls "Holocaustia," and the Israel lobby's dominant influence on American policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict scuttled efforts to establish a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Yet, he demonstrates, it has also unintentionally set the stage for new struggles and "better problems" for both Israel and the Palestinians. Drawing on the history of scientific ideas that once seemed certain but were ultimately discarded, Lustick encourages shifting attention from two-state blueprints that provide no map for realistic action to the democratizing competition that arises when different subgroups, forced to be part of the same polity, redefine their interests and form new alliances to pursue them.Paradigm Lost argues that negotiations for a two-state solution between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River are doomed and counterproductive. Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs can enjoy the democracy they deserve but only after decades of struggle amid the unintended but powerful consequences of today's one-state reality.