The March visit of the Israeli PM to Washington has aroused opposition among Israel’s supporters in Congress as well as Democratic Party activists. At issue is the matter of protocol as well as principle. But there is something else afoot, namely, the realization that Netanyahu’s action risks alienating a political base that is increasingly skeptical of Israeli claims, including those about Iran’s nuclear arms. These were exposed as false by Israel’s own Intelligence agency. Then there was the PM’s association of this moment of his leadership of Israel with David Ben-Gurion’s in 1948. The absurdity of the drawing any such parallel was quickly noted by Israeli critics. Nevertheless, at the bottom of this latest controversy there is the threat of blowing open the taboo on plain talk about Washington’s relations with Israel regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The PM’s remarks about Ben-Gurion omitted mention of one of the more intractable features of his relationship with Washington in 1948:  US officials’ head-on confrontation with Ben-Gurion over the consequences of the struggle over Palestine.  From the President to the lowest ranking State Department officials, the United States pressed Ben-Gurion to accept the repatriation of Palestinian refugees, to cease illegal expansion of territory beyond the boundaries of the UNGA Partition Resolution 181 (Nov 29, 1947), and to accept the internationalization of Jerusalem, as recommended by UNGA Resolution 194 of Dec. 11, 1948.  More than six decades later, these remain the crucial elements to any resolution of the conflict. The talk in 1948 was not about an Iranian threat. It was about the Soviet intervention in the Middle East that some in the State Department believed to be imminent. The result was justification of a politics of US intervention across the Near and Middle East—from Greece to Palestine to Iran.

In May 1945, the State Department described the Palestine problem as “probably the most important and urgent,” particularly since it was located in the oil rich region of the Middle East. That zone, under the control of US oil companies, in addition to being important strategically, was recognized as constituting one of the greatest material prizes in history. Washington feared that support for Zionist objectives in Palestine would put this prize at risk. They were wrong. The oil continued to flow. But meanwhile the problem in Palestine continued to worsen.

In 1945 Truman approved the Harrison Report on the state of European refugees. Their dire condition led him to press Britain to allow the entry of 100,000 Jews to Palestine.  Behind Truman’s response were U.S. domestic controversy over immigration and the rise of a nativist racism that pressed for letting the Jews go to Palestine over allowing them entrance to the USA.

In 1946, Gordon Merriam, the Chief of the Division of Near Eastern Affairs of the State Department, called for an international response to the European-Jewish refugee problem. He insisted that Palestine be granted independence as a Class A Mandate, then under British control. Merriam and other State Department officials also insisted that there be an Arab-Jewish consensus as a prerequisite to resolving the conflict in Palestine.  Support for consensus was hardly new, but Merriam and the U.S. State Department now gave it vehement expression along with support for bi-nationalism. The latter position never became official policy however.

The partition of Palestine in Nov. 1947 put an end to all such talk in Washington. Partition elicited deep concern that the intervention of the major powers, including that of the US and the USSR, would be necessary for it to work. Washington rejected intervention while watching the devastating results of Partition in the months between the passage of the UN Partition Resolution and Israel’s unilateral declaration of independence on May 14, 1948. Above all, doubts increased among US officials about long- term Zionist goals. On Nov. 28, 1947, the CIA issued a report warning that “in the long run no Zionists in Palestine will be satisfied with the territorial arrangements of the partition settlement. Even the more conservative Zionists will hope to obtain the whole of the Negev, western Galilee, the city of Jerusalem, and eventually all of Palestine.”

On April 9, 1948, Thomas Wasson, the US Consul in Jerusalem, sent an account of the massacre committed by Jewish forces in the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin. Wasson was assassinated on May 23.  Before that event the overwhelming sentiment among US officials in Washington was to concede the failure of partition and to consider calling for a temporary trusteeship plan under UN auspices. Israel’s declaration of independence eliminated any such options. It also changed Washington’s view of the new state and its military potential. The abrupt turnabout in the US position—believed by some to have long been in the making—was inspired by the US military’s recognition that Israel was now the second most powerful military force in the Middle East after Turkey. This situation altered the regional balance of power and, with it, US policy.

One US policy that remained in place, however, was the insistence that Israel accept the repatriation of Palestinian refugees. Within a month of Israel’s independence, Secretary of State Marshall warned in a cable, “We consider overall solution Arab refugee problem intrinsic to final settlement Palestine problem, but believe increasingly critical nature refugee problem makes it essential that at least partial return of refugees should be permitted for those so desiring prior to achievement final settlement.” On August 31, 1948, the CIA described the refugee situation as, “the most serious population upheaval since the termination of World War II.” Two months later the US Ambassador to the UK said that the “Palestinian situation is probably as dangerous to our national interests as is Berlin.”

Israeli officials rejected the US position and all claims of responsibility for the expulsion of Palestinian refugees.  The President and State Department officials concerned with Palestine continued to criticize Israel but no action followed. In a matter of months they moved to accommodate Israeli policies and to legitimize Israel’s violations of international law. The Palestine question was relegated to a back burner. The reason was clear: Israel’s military success had convinced State and Defense Department officials that the combination of its location and military capacity could prove useful in US strategy, including the protection of its oil interests in the Middle East. US officials were well aware that Israel was the strongest state in the region amongst all the neighboring Arab countries. There was no image of David facing Goliath in their minds. As far as Washington was concerned, David was Goliath.

Sixty years later, in 2014, the Pentagon supported Israel’s invasion of Gaza. In the midst of controversy over the Prime Minister’s visit to Congress in 2015, The New York Times reported a budget proposal including $3.1 billion in aid for Israel. It did not raise the question of US support for an ally whose possession of nuclear arms was an open secret and whose failure to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was on record. Nor did it explain why Washington did not act in the face of the Prime Minister’s continued construction of settlements in Occupied Territory, a violation of international law and US policy.

The US has a long relationship with Israel as its special ally. In the midst of what appears to be only the latest example of a chronic inability to create a framework for a just, peaceful, or legally coherent resolution to the problem of Palestine, it may time to probe that alliance’s origins. If the Prime Minister’s visit turns out to be what prompted such a newly critical look into beginnings, he is to be thanked.

Irene Gendzier is the author of the forthcoming, Dying to Forget:  Oil, Power, Palestine, and the Origins of United States Foreign Policy in the Middle East (Columbia University Press, 2015).

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