The early Zionist settlers, being solid European socialists and anarchists, basked in the sympathy of at least some portions of the European left.  In  the late nineteen-twenties and early thirties, however, the world Communist movement came out in favor of the Arab resisters.  Then, in the nineteen-forties, both the Communists  and the democratic left in Europe returned to, or re-affirmed, their original sympathy for Zionism--only to have things switch again in the nineteen-fifties, when Israel lined up as an ally of the British and French imperialists.

The 1967 war, in which the Israelis seized a lot of land, seemed to confirm Israel's imperilaist nature.  The Soviets became fierce enemies of Zionism.  Palestinian Marxists stepped forward, Soviet resources poured in.  And, under those cirucmstances,  the New Left came up with one more interpretation of the Middle Easter conflict, in which the New Left's vision of a lingering Nazism of the modern life was suddenly reconfigured with Israel in the a leading role.  Israel became the crypto-Nazi site par excellence, the purest of all examples of how Naszism had never been defeated but had instead lingered into the present in ever more cagey froms.  What better disguise could Nazism assume than a Jewish State?

[Paul Berman, Power and the Idealists pp. 53-54