The Vexed History of Zionism and the Left

That Zionism and the left were once on better terms is by now a familiar story. In the years after the Holocaust, leftists in Europe and the United States supported Israel’s founding. The Soviet Union was an early backer and enabled the provision of crucial military aid during the 1948 war (though the Soviets soon switched to backing Israel’s Arab adversaries). Labor Zionism, the ideology of the kibbutzim, spoke of building a model socialist society, and many radicals in the West saw Israel as proof that a socialism gentler than the Soviet variety was possible. Under David Ben-Gurion and his successors, the country’s hegemonic political culture—that of its political and military elite—was expressly secularist and socialist, though more völkisch than Marxist. As late as 1972, Prime Minister Golda Meir was feted by her comrade leaders in Vienna at the 12th Congress of the Socialist International.