Stalin likely thought it was a possibility, although it was definitely not a sure thing. Here is a transcript from an interview with Molotov, Stalin’s foreign policy man with whom Stalin generally thought alike.

Viacheslav Mikhailovich (Molotov), one point is not clear to me....

Only one? I have more.

In the formation of the state of Israel, the Americans were opposed.

Everyone objected but us—me and Stalin. Some asked me why we favored it. We are supporters of international freedom. Why should we be opposed if, strictly speaking, that meant pursuing a hostile nationalist policy?

In our time, it’s true, the Bolsheviks were and remained anti-Zionist. We were even against the Bund, though it was considered to be a socialist organization. Yet it’s one thing to be anti-Zionist and antibourgeois, and quite another to be against the Jewish people. We proposed, however, an Arab Israeli union, for both nations to live there together. We would have supported this version if it could have been arranged. Otherwise we favored a separate Israeli state. But we remained anti-Zionist.

After all, you had to realize it would be bourgeois.

Oh, Lord!

Why didn’t you make it [Israel] socialist?

Why? Why? If we had, we would have had to fight England. And America, too.... You might say we should have made Finland socialist, it would have been a simpler matter. We did not, and I believe we acted correctly. If we had crossed a certain line we would have gotten mixed up in utter adventurism. Adventurism. That is why we ourselves gave way in Austria.

The Jews had long struggled for their own state under a Zionist flag. We, of course, were against Zionism. But to refuse a people the right to statehood would mean oppressing them.

Israel has turned out badly. But Lord Almighty! That’s American imperialism for you.

So, what can we learn from this?

Molotov seems to have supported the creation of Israel for a number of reasons. He considers Israel’s creation a continuation of his communist support for national independence and freedom and has a certain level of sympathy for Jewish flavours of socialism despite his Bolshevik opposition to Zionism (there was a very strong Jewish left at the time internationally, which whilst not communist often had sympathy for the Soviet Union). It is also made very explicit that Molotov did not expect Israel to be governed by a Communist Party, instead he seems to have hoped for an amiable ‘bourgeois’ government which might lean towards the Soviet Union in foreign relations, something that was not out of the question given the UK’s entanglement with the various Arab powers of the region who did not look at all kindly on the creation of Israel. Also, something he doesn’t mention is that supporting the creation of Israel also allowed the USSR to divide the Western powers (the US was much more in favour of Israel’s creation than the UK), a standard Stalin era foreign policy gambit. Israel did not end up supporting the Soviet Union in the cold war for a whole range of reasons, (to list a few, late Stalinist antisemitism, a reluctance from the Soviets to allow citizens to immigrate to Israel, the massive amounts of money the US pumped into Israel, the creation of Arabic Socialism) however the possibility was there.