Ian Lustick

Overview

Ian Lustick is an advocate of the radical one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Lustick has condemned the former President of Harvard, Lawrence Summers, for calling the "Divest from Israel" movement, i.e. the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, anti-Semitic.

In a March 21, 2013 Los Angeles Times column titled “Israel needs a new map,” Lustick called Zionism — the belief that Jews have the right to self-determination in their own national home, and the right to develop their national culture — an “obstacle to Jewish welfare and security.”

Lustick is a Middle East Studies and Political Science professor at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn).  

Endorsing Anti-Semitic Hate Speech

In 2016, Lustick signed a letter to Vassar College President Catherine Bond Hill defending Jasbir Puar, an anti-Israel Rutgers professor who gave a lecture at Vassar College in February 2016 titled “Inhumanist Biopolitics: How Palestine Matters.”

Puar began her speech by calling for armed struggle against Israel. She went on to demonize Israel, suggesting that Israelis harvest the organs of dead Palestinians. Puar also claimed that Israel was maiming and "stunting" Palestinians via food restrictions — despite Gaza having one of the highest obesity rates in the world.

Puar also opined that the reason Israeli Jews have not killed Palestinians is “[t]hey need the Palestinians alive in order to keep the kind of rationalization for their victimhood and their militarized economy.”

The letter addressed to President Hill slammed objections to Puar’s libelous incitement against Israel, as attacks on freedom of speech and the integrity of “an invited guest.”

The letter also cited an October 2015 report by the Center for Constitutional Rights and Palestine Legal that conjured anti-Semitic conspiracies of a powerful Israel lobby controlling the U.S. government and silencing legitimate criticism of Israel. The letter claimed the report revealed “the ways in which ‘a network of lobbying groups... funded by, working in coordination with, and/or staunchly supportive of the policies and practices of the Israeli government primarily drives efforts to silence speech on behalf of Palestinian rights’.” The letter also claimed “these groups… are supported or even initiated through many millions of dollars in donations from right-wing, hawkish Israel advocates …”

Lying to Demonize Israel

In a September 15, 2013 New York Times opinion piece, Lustick wrote that Israel’s vision of a two-state solution envisions “an archipelago of huge Jewish settlements, crisscrossed by Jewish-only access roads” in the West Bank.

The West Bank has never had Jewish-only roads; Lustick misleadingly describes roads on which Israeli citizens — whether Jews, Muslims and Christians — can freely travel, but to which vehicles with Palestinian Authority registration have restricted access, as being Jewish-only.

Lying To Disguise Hamas’ Anti-Semitic Genocidal Intent

In a March 22, 2006 article, Lustick stated fraudulently that the terror group Hamas "is mainly popular because one of the things it is trusted to do is probably be ready to live with Israel, even if not officially, for a very long time."Hamas’ charter unequivocally calls for the violent destruction of Israel and the genocide of world Jewry.

In a June 17, 2010 Forbes column called “Israel Could Benefit From Hamas,” Lustick doubled down, claiming that Hamas offered Israel a temporary truce to live side-by-side with a Muslim Palestinian state. No such offer was ever made.

In a 1995 report, Lustick likened the objectives of Hamas to Israeli political parties: “There must be elections including Hamas if Hamas will participate, just as Tsomet and Likud are allowed to participate in Israeli elections, although they do not endorse the peace process.”

Endorsing Bloody Revolution Over Negotiation As The Path To Democracy

During an October 9, 2013 panel called "Two States or One? The Future of Israelis and Palestinians," Lustick stated axiomatically that “negotiations toward a two state solution is not an available route to a two-state outcome” (1:55:55). Lustick went on to state that since many democracies have emerged through violent, bloody revolutions, this is the way things must be, thus implying that this is the way things ought to be.

Promoting Israel-Hater Max Blumenthal

On November 14, 2013, Lustick held an event at UPenn to promote Max Blumenthal’s book “Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel.” The book was dubbed “The Israel Hater’s Handbook” by Eric Alterman of progressive magazine, The Nation, who wrote “[i]t is no exaggeration to say that this book could have been published by the Hamas Book-of-the-Month Club (if it existed) without a single word change once it’s translated into Arabic.”

Propagating The Libel That Israelis Are Warmongers

According to a Campus Watch report, Lustick was a signatory to a 2002 open letter suggesting that Israel would use the war in Iraq to engage in "ethnic cleansing" against Palestinians. No retractions were ever issued for the letter after its claims failed to materialize.

The letter also selectively highlighted and decontextualized statements made by individuals and ascribed them to the entire county.  

Social Media and Weblinks

Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/ian.lustick

Twitter:https://twitter.com/Ian_Lustick

Wikipedia:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Lustick