Everyone can agree that’s good. But there’s something melancholy about it all, like a ferocious hieroglyphic inscription from the court of a king that third-graders file by on their trip to the museum.

One lovely example from 1951, with graceful youth dancing and working in the sun, was discovered under a few layers of paint in an ultra-Orthodox yeshiva in Haifa; the building turned out to have once been a socialist club. Others have surfaced in banks and factories. “In the early years of the state, with this art, everyone wanted to say: I’m not just a capitalist, even if I’m running a bank,” Ms. Shalev-Khalifa said. “I’m a Zionist who’s building the homeland.”

The main characters in the mural at Ma’aleh Ha-Hamisha are five workers killed in an Arab attack while clearing a road in 1937. (The kibbutz, “Hill of the Five” in English, is named for them.) The artist’s theme isn’t revenge or glory, but the regeneration of the Jewish nation by manual labor. On one wall, the five workers clear rocks. On another wall, in a kind of abstract blur of earth tones, their bodies sprawl on the ground, but the workers are also standing above their bodies, as if they’ve come back to life. They don’t seem angry, just determined. One of them hands a sacred object to some children: a simple pick, representing labor.

The painter was an American from Los Angeles, Sheldon Schoneberg, who spent time in Mexico with disciples of Rivera at the Taller de Gráfica Popular, the People’s Graphic Workshop. Inspired by the kibbutz idea, he arrived the same year the state was founded, 1948. According to the story still current among members here, the American was sent first to the dairy barn, where he didn’t win any prizes for excellence in manual labor. When the kibbutz secretariat saw his sketchbook, they decided he’d better serve the socialist future if they gave him a few walls and some paint.

Mr. Schoneberg left other murals around in Israel before returning to the U.S. in 1956. His last one, on the wall of a community center in Haifa, showed a crowd of citizens moving uphill toward a white building representing progress. The artist made sure to include a man who, by his white headdress, was identifiably Arab, because the Zionist left believed the new state would join Jews and Arabs in common citizenship and free everyone from capitalist exploitation. (The mural was painted over years ago and survives only in photographs.)