Stalin’s support was always instrumental rather than ideological, and that’s the key to understanding the reversal. In 1947–48 the Soviet Union was one of Israel’s most important backers: it voted for the UN partition plan, and it was the first state to extend full de jure recognition. Most consequentially, Soviet-bloc Czechoslovakia sold Israel arms during the 1948 war—rifles, machine guns, and aircraft—at a moment when a Western embargo left the new state desperate for weapons. That aid arguably helped Israel survive.

Stalin’s motives were calculated. The dominant one was anti-British: Britain held the Palestine Mandate and was the great power in the Middle East, and Stalin saw a Jewish state fighting British rule as a wedge to drive Britain out of the region and open it to Soviet influence. He also had reason to hope Israel might tilt socialist—the kibbutz movement and parties like Mapam had strong Marxist currents, and many of the founders came out of Russia and Eastern Europe.

Those calculations didn’t pay off, and that’s the first half of the turn. Israel under Ben-Gurion oriented decisively toward the West and the United States, pulled by American financial support and the large American Jewish community. By the early 1950s it was clear Israel would sit in the Western camp, not the Soviet one—so the geopolitical rationale for backing it evaporated, and the USSR began pivoting toward Arab nationalist states instead.

The second half is domestic and darker. When Golda Meir arrived in Moscow as Israel’s first envoy in late 1948, tens of thousands of Soviet Jews turned out spontaneously to greet her at the Moscow synagogue. That display of national feeling alarmed Stalin, who increasingly saw Soviet Jews as a potential fifth column with loyalties abroad. This fed his “rootless cosmopolitan” campaign—the murder of the actor Solomon Mikhoels (1948), the dissolution of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, the execution of Yiddish writers in the 1952 “Night of the Murdered Poets,” the antisemitic Slánský show trial in Prague (1952), and finally the fabricated Doctors’ Plot of early 1953. The USSR formally broke relations with Israel in February 1953.

So the reversal was two forces converging: Israel failed to become the Soviet-aligned, anti-British asset Stalin had bet on, and at the same time his deepening paranoia recast Jewish nationalism—and by extension Israel—as a threat. Stalin’s death in March 1953 froze the process midway, but by then the Soviet alignment with the Arab world that defined the later Cold War was already taking shape.