The History of Anti-Palestinian
Bias from Wilson to Bush

A few years ago, I had the temerity to write to David McCullough, the biographer of Harry Truman, to tell him I thought he was wrong about an aspect of Truman's character. I had seen McCullough on a C-SPAN rebroadcast of a talk on Truman. Speaking about the recognition of Israel in 1948, McCullough emphasized his belief that the reason Truman had persevered in recognizing the new state of Israel despite the opposition of many in his administration was that his high moral values would not permit any other course. Truman, McCullough said, simply had to "do the right thing" by rescuing the Jews in the aftermath of the Holocaust and giving them a state in Palestine, and his courage in standing up to the naysayers clearly demonstrated his strength of character.

What I wrote to McCullough is that Truman's stubbornness seemed to me to show the strength of his convictions but not the strength of his character--that he did indeed "do the right thing" by helping Jews after the Holocaust, but he did not "do it the right way." The right way would not have involved displacing another entire population--the Palestinians who lived on the land Truman helped give away. Yet there is no evidence that Truman ever showed concern for this part of his moral project on behalf of Israel.

McCullough was nice enough to write back. He said he thought Truman had not been malicious but had simply lacked understanding, and in a revealing remark, he acknowledged that Truman "just didn't know enough about [the Palestinians] and their situation"--which he said, quite accurately, is still true of most Americans. "The great shame," he wrote, "is that a reasonable discussion of the subject remains so difficult to achieve in any public way."

Which brings me to my point: Reasonable discussion of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and particularly of the Palestinian perspective, has always been "so difficult to achieve in any public way," and since the days of Woodrow Wilson immediately after World War I, this has been as true of policymakers as it has of ordinary citizens and the media. There has been much evolution in U.S. policy on the Palestinian issue over the years, but one reality has held true consistently: every president in the last 85 years, since World War I, has tried to one degree or another to ignore the Palestinian issue in the hope that it would somehow go away--that someone else would resolve it, or that it could be swept under some rug, or that the Palestinians would just not air their grievances.

But by ignoring the issue--by studiously not knowing what the Palestinians' real grievances have been all these years--the United States has kept the conflict going, and escalating, for over half a century. By not understanding and taking into account the Palestinian perspective equally with the Israeli perspective and assuming that Palestinians are motivated simply by hatred of Jews rather than by the fact of their expulsion and flight from Palestine, the United States has actually created the conditions that have led to most, or perhaps all, of the region's wars.