Top 26 Quotes by Ian Lustick

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.

When people today say 'racism,' they mean it's a nationalism they don't like. Racialism used to be a good thing, a looking-out for what was best for one group... Israel comes out of that 19th-century idea of nationalism. Many Arab states also have preferences. It's fundamentally unfair to decide that one is racism and the others aren't.

As long as Hamas needs the support it could conceivably get from the international community through the Palestinian Authority, it has an interest in playing nice with Fatah. And Fatah has an interest in playing nice with Hamas because it needs some source of legitimacy on the West Bank.

Just as a balloon filled gradually with air bursts when the limit of its tensile strength is passed, there are thresholds of radical, disruptive change in politics. When those thresholds are crossed, the impossible suddenly becomes probable, with revolutionary implications for governments and nations.

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?

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.

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.