Parallax Views w/ J.G. Michael

On this edition of Parallax Views, is the two-state solution in the Israel/Palestine conflict dead? If so what are the possible futures moving forward for Israel/Palestine? Dr. Ian S. Lustick, the Bess W. Heyman Chair in the Political Science Department of the University of Pennsylvania, joins us to discuss why he believes the two-state solution is now an impossibility as argued in his 2019 book Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality. Recently, Dr. Lustick's book was just recently released in a Hebrew-language edition which is what helped precipitate this conversation.

Among the topics discussed in this conversation:

- The history of the the two-state solution including discussion of Great Britain, the Peel Commission, partition, the United Nations, Zionism, Palestinian Arabs, the 1967 Six-Day War, and the return of partition discussion in the 1970s

- Dr. Lustick's support for the two-state solution and his work on that matter starting in the 1970s; how Dr. Lustick's views evolved over time and why he no longer believes the two-state solution is within the realm of possibility

- The use of the term "one-state reality" rather than solution in the title of the book; the loss of the two-state solution as a paradigm of thought; the promise and hope that exists within new ways of thinking about Israel/Palestine

- The question of the Israel lobby (specifically AIPAC) and U.S. foreign policy; John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's critique of the lobby as related to U.S. national interests and the ways in which Dr. Lustick's analysis is both in way similar to and different to Mearsheimer and Walt's analysis

- The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement

- Revisionist Zionism, Likud Party founder and Israel's sixth Prime Minister Menachem Begin, Zionist thinker Vladimir "Ze'ev" Jabotinsky, and the "Iron Wall" strategy

- Secret negotiations, sabotaging of peace processes, and the failure of Oslo Accords

- Gaza and the West Bank

- President Joe Biden's comments on Israel/Palestine early on in his White House tenure and why Dr. Lustick believes they are significant

- The nature of political change, the evolution of the Democratic Party from supporting Jim Crow to being the party of the first black President Barack, and the abandonment of the "Demographic" argument in regards to Israel/Palestine

- What does Dr. Lustick have to say about, for example, Gazans than can't wait for decades long changes through a long protracted struggle?

- The theme of unintended consequences in Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality

- Commenting on the human rights-centric approach to Israel/Palestine as advocated by Palestinian human rights attorney Zaha Hassan and others

- Peter Beinart and the changing of the guard on the issue of Israel/Palestine and the two-state solution

- And much, much more!