ABSTRACT

Starting with the foreign policy of the Jewish state, the task here is more difficult than analyzing the foreign policy of any other state. Israel finds itself in a very small group of democratic polities that follow the original intention of the doctrine of self-determination, namely that the nation does indeed define the state.2 This definition, which causes many constitutional problems and domestic complications, is also carried over to the foreign policy sphere. Israel as a Jewish state is a divided polity in all respects: the nation is divided between a territorial state and a diaspora, the state is divided between Jews and Arabs, and the national land or territory, as perceived by the Jewish primordial narrative, is also divided between Jews and Palestinians. Hence, limiting the analysis to the Jewish dimension of Israeli foreign policy would not make the task simpler. A combination of international Jewish and Israeli politics and foreign policy seems to be the right way to pursue in the enterprise of building an appropriate conceptual framework of world Jewish politics.3