ABSTRACT
This paper explores Gershom Scholem’s notion of an ‘apocalyptic sting’—a messianic political
theology which, he feared, haunted Jewish and Israeli politics through the Hebrew language. The
paper makes four key moves. First, I unpack Scholem’s ‘sting’ in relation to contemporary
Israeli religious radicalism. Second, I tie that notion of a sting to Frankfurt-School discussions
of reification and its political effects. Third, I survey attempts to critique the effects of that sting
through the work of Yehoshafat Harkabi, an Israeli International Relations (IR) realist who drew
on-and sought to contribute to-the broader tradition of what is today variously called classical
or critical realism. Drawing on the negative dialectics of Theodor Adorno, I then seek to draw
out and deepen Harkabi’s reflexivity, deriving from it a vocation for critical realism in the
context of contemporary Israeli security discourse.
