What’s your opinion on Stalin? How he was involved in Israel’s founding and how many early Israeli communists admired him, but there also be in the Doctor’s Plot and his other wrongdoings to Jews and otherwise.
Very complicated. With regard to the Doctors' Plot: it's mostly a Khrushchevite conspiracy theory. As with all such theories there is some kernel of truth, but what's been made out of it is largely ahistorical or at best very difficult to prove. In general, I think it's important that we examine history with nuance and - especially in the case of a multinational and democratic centralist state like the USSR - do our best to avoid Great Man Theory. Dr. Jarrod Tanny has done some incredible work with regard to Judeo-Soviet history, and for the most part he recognizes that the suffering Judeans faced during the early period (i.e., with the CPSU helmed by Lenin, and then Stalin) was not strictly Judeophobic in most senses, but due to a combination of factors that were also affecting other groups. Suffice it to say: what was experienced during that time was - for the most part - not the decision of any one man, but the product of a historically Judeophobic country (the Russian Empire) being newly under the control of masses seeking hard solutions to past problems and often going overboard. Imagine modern "cancel culture", but in a state where those people have the political power to actually have you physically arrested instead of merely ostracized. So most of the wrongdoings against Judeans at that time, I try not to ascribe too narrowly to any singular leader or source: because oftentimes it was a deeply, annoyingly collective activity in which nobody had a full view of what was going on. I tend not to care for the word "Stalinism", but if that term has any utility, I would say it's for the specific bureaucratism and the almost over-democratization of things like justice and punishment in those early years (much the same took place in China during the Cultural Revolution as well), when the state and the masses got a bit paranoid and collaborated a bit too closely. As Einstein later noted, some of it was legitimate - but there was a lot of clear excess and injustice too.
There are some cases, like the trials of the supposed "Trotskyite-Titoist-Zionists" in the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, that - despite Judeophobia as a likely secondary cause - clearly had a more political motive, not directly related to ethnicity. In that instance, the trials were basically one big coverup where the CPSU (which had maintained an official anti-nationalist line since the beginning and considered Zionism a form of bourgeois nationalism) threw those Czechoslovakian officials under the bus to divert attention away from the fact that Stalin, Molotov, and Gromkyo had gone against the rest of the part in 1948 and - through the Czechoslovakian party as a broker - funneled funding and weaponry to the Israeli Zionists. Basically, it was considered a bad look that the General-Secretary of the CPSU had supported Zionism, so they used those Czechoslovakians (most of whom were Judeans, but not all) as convenient patsies, pretending it was just those guys who were pro-Zionist, not the leaders of the CPSU itself.
Regarding Stalin's personal relationship to Judeans and to Israel though, that seems to have evolved a lot over time. In his younger years, especially prior to the revolution, he denied Judean nationhood and directly characterized Zionism as a bourgeois nationalist cause (as did Lenin; although he was primarily talking about the Herzlite wing of the wider national movement). He also frequently made jokes back then at the expense of Judean comrades - pointing out that Mensheviks were almost all Judean for example - which while not full-on bigoted per se, can be called microaggressions. By the 1930s and certainly the 40s though, his views seem to have shifted considerably. He directly banned Judeophobia (both as part of a general ban on ethnic discrimination and in particular since Lenin regarded Judeophobia as a uniquely insidious bourgeois trap), and oversaw the failures of the Yevsektsiya (which he disbanded) and Komzet's establishment of the JAO (a project the party initially intended to be an alternative to Zionism, but which Stalin considered such a total waste of time that he tried to actively work towards dismantling it). Due to these factors and more, by the time WW2 was over and Stalin was faced with many hundreds of thousands of Shoah refugees, the grave threat of Judeophobia, inability to offer reparations, etc., and - also because of the capriciousness of the British Empire and the objective material successes of the Zionist movement in the Levant, including their revitalization of Hebrew, development of productive forces and collectivized agriculture, etc. - he decided to go against the historic party line along with close comrades Gromkyo and Molotov to not only support Israel at the UN and on the battlefield, but to do so in no uncertain terms (which shocked even the Zionists who were very pro-Soviet at the time). When Gromkyo addressed the UN in 1947 about the partition plan, he read a statement prepared with Stalin's authorization that explicitly called Judeans/Israelis indigenous, and defended their right to be free of both their oppression in the diaspora and from colonial subjugation at home.
So it's complicated. I've left out a lot here, but these are some of the reasons I try to have a balanced view of Stalin and of that period in Soviet history. There's a lot more to be said of the Khrushchev or Brezhnev eras when it comes to Judeo-Soviet problems, but that's a separate post for another time.
