this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2026
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OK, I can name one. It's Israel. Before 90s it was (administratively, politically, socially) socialist (not like marxist, but with collectives and communes and kibbutz, and much of economy being state monopolies). One reason after 90s everything changed about it was because there were certain reforms which, eh, significantly raised level of life, making all the old institutions unpopular. So it's no more socialist in anything.
A-and, of course, the part about collectivism was present. Some things I've heard about Israel before 90s emotionally reminisce USSR. Sort of a procrustean bed of a society, if you don't fit it's your problem.
Calling pre-1990s Israel socialist is like calling the Confederate States of America democratic.
Yeah, it was, except for a large disenfranchised population. If you count them as people too, then it's not. And don't come back at me with false distinctions about what was "Israel proper" versus the bantustans-- oh, sorry, "occupied territories." Those places have no real sovereignty.
Occupation is a normal legal term and its presence doesn't limit calling the system inside "Israel proper" socialist.
I think that to properly limit the difference we should compare how these all came to exist.
CSA were a split off part of a state created by rich landowners, and so it was a republic of rich landowners. Nothing surprising in that.
South Africa was part of the British Empire where natives were considered inferior from the very beginning, and their "bantustans" were sort of British traditional "to each his own" decorations, similarly to how even in the British Isles technically they have a United Kingdom and even Wales is not the same as England and so on, but in fact it's more or less one state. Tradition.
While Israel was initially a bunch of Zionist settlements on sparsely populated land, like Tel-Aviv and such, which didn't have much of said disenfranchised population and had lots of socialist traits in organization. Also among Zionists in the beginning of XX century the left part was far more numerous and popular than the right part (which has captured dominance in Israel since about 80s), especially after WWII, these things tend to make effect. That left part basically had just one Zionist idea - that Jews should have a nation-state in Palestine, all the rest was pretty normally leftist for the time (a bit obsolete by now, with planned economy traits and collectivism and so called meritocracy and so on).
Then that bunch of settlements in the war of 1948 became state of Israel. And then in subsequent wars it captured/occupied territories, without expelling much of populace. Which then lived under occupation status.
So the difference is that for Israel occupied territories were really occupied territories. There's a clear difference between Tel-Aviv and Haifa on one side and Hebron on the other. While in South Africa bantustans were sort of big zoos\reservations with people set here and there through its territory, and CSA was in its entirety a republic of rich landowners.