“Diplomacy involves compromise between ideals and realpolitik, between principles and interests,” according to The Star and the Scepter author and international relations expert Emmanuel Navon (From Israel with Hope), a lecturer at Tel Aviv University and IDC Herzliya, whose new work aims to fill a lacuna in the existing literature on Israeli foreign policy by giving a systematic and updated account thereof that is additionally informed by the lengthy diplomatic history of the Jewish people.
In its attempt to adumbrate Israel’s relations with the nations across time and space, the work evidences admirable ambition and posits a winning idea. As a history, The Star and the Scepter delivers a matter-of-fact account of Jewry’s international relations; it concerns itself with praxis, not theory (and therefore a theoretical treatise remains a major desideratum). In this current effort, Navon employs a wide lens to retrace the interactions between Jewish polities and neighboring countries and empires, and between individual Jewish statesmen and gentile rulers during Jewry’s nearly bimillenary statelessness, a unique phenomenon in the annals of world history. He limns Israel’s precarious balancing act between faith and power, or idealism and pragmatism, binaries symbolized by the star and the scepter respectively, and ascribes Jewry’s survival “to a strong sense of historical mission, as well as to the constant adaptation of that mission to the real world.”
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