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The third chapter, ‘The Invention of a Hebrew Nation’, examines the enormous cultural foundation underpinning Matzpen’s political vision of a post-colonial existence for Israeli Jews. Matzpen built on a process of transformation that had worked to turn Diaspora Jews into new Hebrews, or Israelis. Drawing on the research of Yaacov Shavit and James Diamond into the movement of the Young Hebrews, or ‘Canaanites’, the chapter outlines an emerging Hebrew-language culture that blossomed in the young Israeli state of the 1950s and ’60s and defied the discourse of a unified Jewish people. This exposes a cultural context that had its roots in the Zionist Right, but grew far beyond its political origins. Culturally, it centred on the magazine Haolam Hazeh, which was published by Uri Avnery (1923–2018), and extended as far as Matzpen on its far-left fringe. This vibrant creative milieu included such figures as Shimon Tzabar, Amos Kenan, and Dan Ben-Amotz. Finally, the internal political differences within this milieu, gaps that the Six-Day War ultimately rendered unbridgeable, are highlighted.

The last chapter deals with the complex place of the Holocaust in the worldview of the Israeli Left. The chapter explores the degree to which Israeli leftists’ social and national utopias of socialist revolution and Hebrew nationhood contributed to their avoidance of the significance of the Holocaust and its impact on Jewish consciousness. The chapter illustrates that, from the outset, the notion of a new Hebrew nation was somehow detached from the Jewish experiences in Europe. By sticking to their faith in progress that was rooted in the Socialist teleology of history, the distance to the consequences of mass extermination increased further – despite the fact that Matzpen had inherited the revolutionary hopes of Eastern European Jewish Communists of the interwar period for whom this utopia had proven terribly futile. Thus, the book provides insight into a historical aporia: the tension between the effects of the Holocaust, on the one hand, and the unresolved Israel–Palestine conflict, on the other. Turning eventually to the activities of the Frankfurt Jewish group (in Germany) during the Lebanon war of 1982, the chapter shows how the quest for a road out of that aporia and to detach the interpretation of the Israel–Palestine conflict from the memories of the Holocaust is also part of Matzpen’s history and legacy.