The Meaning of Israel

Why did social democrats in the 1940s and 1950s idealise Zionism and Israel? And why did ‘the New Left’ of the 1960s denounce Israel as an apartheid state and a ‘bridgehead of imperialism’? The Meaning of Israel: Anti-Zionism and Philo-Zionism in the Postwar Left, a case study of Norway, offers new and intriguing answers to both questions. Previous national case studies of left ideas about Israel have tended to explain with reference to national peculiarities of the country in question (e.g. gui