The Founding Myths of Israel : Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State

This text proposes a radical interpretation of the founding of modern Israel.

The founders claimed that they intended to create both a landed state for the Jewish people and a socialist society, but this book argues that socialism served the leaders of the influential labour movement more as a rhetorical resource for the legitimation of the national project of establishing a Jewish state than as a blueprint for a just society.

The book demonstrates how socialist principles were consistently subverted in practice by the nationalist goals to which socialist Zionism was committed.