ABSTRACT
Of late, however, a kind of magical thinking had become increasingly mainstream. A critical
mass of Israeli leaders and voters now took their political and diplomatic cues from charismatic
heroes and the ‘cunning of history’:
The difference between the two accounts, Harkabi argues, lies in the historical narrative within
which each locates human action. Zionist realism stressed the workaday accumulation of
national assets because human beings have only limited powers in the face of an indifferent uni-
verse: realist prudence meets an ontology of sundered history.
