The changes and divisions on the left over the Israel-Palestine conflict forms the central theme of this archive based study. While the Labour Party's supported establishing a Jewish state in Palestine, as a modernising force, the communist movement opposed it, on the grounds that it facilitated imperial influence in the Middle East. In 1947, however, the British Communist Party rallied to the Zionist cause, leaving the Palestinian cause with no effective protagonists in Britain. The left's sympathy, at the time, was overwhelmingly with the Israeli state, considering its establishment a...

How did the various currents of the British left respond to two competing nationalisms seeking to found a state in Palestine? The Labour Party from 1917 onwards helped to popularise the Zionist project as a social democratic experiment that would bring progress to the Middle East. The party's colonial experts largely ignored the sectarian practices of the Labour Zionist movement, which through its trade union and kibbutzim, sought to build an exclusively Jewish economy. The British Communist party alone provided a critique of Labour Zionism but in 1947 in line with the Soviet Union's...