In his introduction to In the Storm of Epochs, the book written by the leader of the Communist Party, Shmuel Mikunis, Moshe Sneh wrote: ‘As it conducts its various struggles, each individual communist party, like the international Communist Movement, is incessantly confronted with the dilemma of coordinating, reconciling and accommodating the class moment with the national, and the national with the international.’ This was also the dilemma faced by Israeli communism. Some political movements examine the contemporary world order and determine their international orientation accordingly. Communism, however, is a prime example of conceptual dogmatism giving rise to a predetermined attitude to the political situation. The orientation of the Israeli Communist Party towards the USSR was fixed and unchanging. Its principal preoccupation was to adapt this orientation to the internal political scene, while at the same time reconciling it with nationalism, which is particularist by its very nature. No other Israeli political party was as much a captive of its ideological world, and so subject to domination by a world power, as the Communist Party.

The history of the Palestine Communist Party (PCP) is one of schism and division. The party's emergence was overshadowed by the Bolshevik Revolution and the establishment of the Third International (the Comintern). The party was founded by a breakaway group of the radical wing of Left Po'alei Zion, who were adamantly anti-Zionist and wanted to join the Comintern. At the founding meeting of the first communist faction in Palestine, in March 1919, it was resolved that ‘The Party is diametrically opposed to General Zionism and will not participate in any of its institutions.’