© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden,  | doi:./- Asian Review of World Histories  () – brill.com/arwh Toward a Global History of Young Israel Oded Heilbronner Shenkar College for Engineering, Art and Design, Ramat Gan, Israel; The Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya, Israel; The Hebrew University, The Faculty of Agriculture, Rehovot, Israel oded.heilbronner@mail.huji.ac.il Abstract This article argues that the first two decades of Israeli state-building can be compared structurally to some main processes in postwar Western-European societies, and that this approach productively situates Israel within a global perspective, uncovering new relationships between the local and the global. In addition, it proposes a method- ological reading of the young Israeli society before the Six-Day War and a theoretical framework in which to place it. It provides an analysis of this young society from the perspective of Western history, constituting a new reference point that does not strive to negate other common approaches. If, until now, the history of the first two decades of Israel has been examined from a local and particular point of view – whether the state-building process or political, social, and national controversies – I propose to view the Israel of the 1950s–1960s as a postwar society that underwent the same structural processes as other Western European societies during those years, despite domestic differences. Keywords global history – Israel – postwar – historiography – the West This article proposes a methodological reading of, or rather a theoretical framework for understanding the young pre-Six-Day War Israeli society. In the spirit of the famous saying by the Marxist sociologist Nicos Poulantzas – “he who does not wish to discuss imperialism should also stay silent on the subject of fascism” – it could be said that “he who does not wish to discuss global his- tory should also stay silent on the subject of the history of the State of Israel in its first decades” (1974, 17).