When you think about a nation's conduct of foreign affairs, you tend to think about diplomats securing treaties,

ambassadors and prime ministers at great summit meetings of consequence and moment.

Reagan and Gorbachev at Reykjavik, or Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill at Yalta.

You might think about national security and the projection of force, about power and interest

and the defense of borders.

What all of these things that come to mind have in common is that the nation in question

has a state, with sovereign freedom to act and solemn obligations

to defend its citizens.

When we think about the Jewish nation and its conduct of foreign affairs, we are struck

by the fact that ancient Israel, the Israel described in the Hebrew Bible, had emissaries

and military power, and that the modern state of Israel has

a foreign ministry and intelligence operatives and an impressive military, but for the millennia

between ancient and modern Israel, the Jewish nation remained intact, though dispersed,

and stateless.

And that raises an intriguing question of whether one can detect continuities between ancient and

modern Israel in its conduct of the Jewish people's foreign affairs.

This is no mere question of politics for the continuities that one could discover would

reveal something about the enduring character of the Jewish people itself.

Welcome to the Tikva podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan Silver. My guest today is Immanuel Navon,

the author of The Star and the Scepter, a diplomatic history of Israel, a book that puts

the third Jewish Commonwealth established in the land of Israel, the one that declared its

independence in 1948, in the context of the, the one that declared its independence in

...