‘Assuring the security of Israel and the Jewish People as a whole is an existential imperative for Israeli statecraft, at whatever cost to Israel and others.” This is one among many salient arguments in Yehezkel Dror’s latest book, Israeli Statecraft: National Security Challenges and Responses.
Dror, a well-known figure in local circles, has been a member of The Hebrew University’s department of political science since 1957. He was an employee of the RAND corporation think tank in the US and a mover in foreign policy circles for many years. His latest volume has been published as part of a series at the Begin-Sadat (BESA) Center at Bar-Ilan University.
Statecraft is a broad concept, one the author uses to denote “coherent, longterm, and broadband, political-security paradigms, assessments, frames of appreciation, orientations, stances, and principles, dealing with issues of much importance to national security.” In setting out what he seeks to examine, he identifies some important characteristics of the Israeli statecraft experience. He notes, for instance, that “there is very little movement of professionals between academia and [the] statecraft elite, in contrast to US practices,” and further mentions “the lack of statehood and statecraft tradition, which reduces the availability of useful historical memory and causes the absence of a ‘statecraft aristocracy.’
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