Israel's Moment is a major new account of the foundation of the State of Israel from 1945 to 1949. Jeffrey Herf reveals how support for and opposition to the Jewish state in Palestine in the United States and Europe was very different from the way these positions came to be understood during the Cold War.

Israel's Moment is a major new account of how a Jewish state came to be forged in the shadow of World War Two and the Holocaust and the onset of the Cold War. Drawing on new research in government, public and private archives, Jeffrey Herf exposes the political realities that underpinned support for and opposition to Zionist aspirations in Palestine. In an unprecedented international account, he explores the role of the United States, the Arab States, the Palestine Arabs, the Zionists, and key European governments from Britain and France to the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Poland. His findings reveal a spectrum of support and opposition that stood in sharp contrast to the political coordinates that emerged during the Cold War, shedding new light on how and why the state of Israel was established in 1948 and challenging conventional associations of left and right, imperialism and anti-imperialism, and racism and anti-racism.

'Politics makes strange bedfellows. A pro-Zionist but anti-communist American president, a Soviet Bloc intent on rolling back British imperialism, and a mix of liberals and leftists still fired up by the anti-fascist élan born of the war: such was the international coalition that helped shepherd the State of Israel into existence. Jeffrey Herf 's lucid and well-researched new book provides a vivid account of how this coalition came to be. It is a story full of ironies and surprises.' Philip Nord, author of After the Deportation: Memory Battles in Postwar France