Review: Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality, by Ian S. Lustick

Ian Lustick, professor and Bess W. Heyman Chair in political science at the University of Pennsylvania, is a seasoned analyst of Israel and the Middle East. Lustick's well-written and carefully researched new volume stands poised to become an important intervention in the literature on Israel/Palestine. This may especially be the case in liberal Zionist circles where the key argument—namely that the two-state solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict, while always a long shot, is now implausible—may be less familiar ground. For those steeped in Palestine studies, the ideal of a democratic and secular state shaped discussion for decades because it stood as a contrast to Palestinian dispossession, statelessness, occupation, the...