Oil drives our Israel policy: New government documents reveal a very different history of America and the Middle East

The protection of American oil interests has been at the heart of U.S. policies for decades

Irene L. Gendzier

The role of the United States in the Arab-Israeli conflict is an inextri­cable part of history in this region. Confronting that role is indispens­able to understanding both U.S. policy in the conflict and its course. A knowledge of the foundation of U.S. policy in the Middle East in the postwar years is indispensable to an understanding of current U.S. policies in the Middle East in which oil, Palestine, and Israel play such significant roles.

The record of U.S. policy from 1945 to 1949 challenges fundamental assumptions about U.S. understanding and involvement in the struggle over Palestine that continue to dominate mainstream interpretations of U.S. policy in the Middle East. Coming to grips with the U.S. record and its frequently mythified depiction of the struggle over Palestine is criti­cal. Those engaged in the creation of the Common Archive, a project of Zochrot, the Israeli NGO, in which Israelis and Palestinians have joined to reconstruct the history of Palestinian villages destroyed by Israel in 1948, clearly understand the importance of this record. Palestinian historians have long written about this history, and Israel’s “New His­torians” have confirmed it in their challenge to the dominant Israeli narrative of the war of 1948.