Israel was a socialist country — by the accurate definitions Ben Levi gave — for the first three decades of its existence. Even today, most of the land is either owned or controlled by the government. David Ben-Gurion was a socialist, so was Moshe Sharett, so was Levi Eshkol, so was Golda Meir, so was Yitzhak Rabin.
And for the most part the dati and charedi parties had no objection. The dati parties were part of every single government under every Prime Minister I mentioned, and the founder of the main dati party, Rabbi Dr. Yosef Burg, was a huge talmid chacham. The charedi parties were part of the first three governments but stopped being a part of them for reasons other than socialism.
Had Israel been a free market economy in the 1950s it is unlikely that the then desperately poor country would have been able to support the huge number of huge immigrants it welcomed. Command economies work well in crises — the US had command economies for both World War I and World War II.