THE FOUNDING MYTHS OF ISRAEL.

By Ze’ev Sternhell. Translated by David Maisel. Princeton Univ. Press. 419 pp. $29.95

Did the founders of modern Israel set out to create a socialist society? This book, published to coincide with the nation’s 50th anniversary, answers the question with an emphatic "no." Sternhell, a political scientist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, contends that the founders, facing the task of creating a nation out of disparate bands of immigrants, "had no patience for experimentation" with socialism or any other unproven philosophy. When forced to choose between advancing socialist principles and attracting capital, David Ben-Gurion, Berl Katznelson, and the other founders invariably picked the latter. Tax rates favored the wealthy, for example, and the quality of schools varied according to neighborhood income. The leaders’ pious invocations of socialist principles constituted "a mobilizing myth," the author asserts, "perhaps a convenient alibi that sometimes permitted the movement to avoid grappling with the contradiction between socialism and nationalism."

Sternhell detects similar hypocrisy in some Israeli leaders of the 1990s. During a protest against the Oslo peace accords in 1995, demonstrators waved signs depicting Yitzhak Rabin as an SS officer. According to the author, speakers at the rally—including Benjamin Netanyahu, now the prime minister—voiced no objections to the hyperbole. "For the Right," Sternhell observes, "Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres were comparable to the worst enemy the Jewish people ever had." One month later, Rabin was assassinated. Israel became, in the author’s dispiriting words, "the first democratic state—and from the end of the Second World War until now the only one—in which a political murder achieved its goal."

—Ami E. Albernaz