But it is historically inaccurate to portray that support as either unwavering or one-sided.

The United States was the first nation to recognize the State of Israel. President Harry Truman, defying many of his advisers, supported U.N. General Assembly Resolution 181, which called to create two states out of British-ruled Mandate Palestine. 

Zionist leaders in pre-state Israel supported Resolution 181, although it fell far short of the territories promised to them after World War I. By contrast, Arab states rejected the proposal and chose war instead.

In Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, five Arab armies and multiple militias, some led by former Nazi officers and collaborators, massed to destroy the fledgling Jewish state. 

Israel won by the skin of its teeth, losing as much as 1% of its population. Israelis fought and bled for their freedom. And they did so on their own. 

Many of those who fought and died were Holocaust survivors, some fresh off the boats from Displaced Persons camps in Europe. 

They did not use American arms. The Israelis relied on a hodgepodge of weapons, many from the Czech Republic.

In fact, the U.S. government instituted an arms embargo and prosecuted those who violated it. By its very nature, the arms embargo favored the Arab states, who had an overwhelming numerical advantage. 

SEAN DURNS: THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC HAD ITS CHANCE

Transjordan, known today as Jordan, even fielded British-led and trained troops, meaning that, mere years after World War II, some British officers were quite literally on the same side as the Nazi officers who were advising Syria and other Arab nations. 

Opposition to the world’s sole Jewish state can make for strange bedfellows.

Paragons of the national security establishment, including George Marshall and James Forrestal, predicted that the Israelis would be wiped out. The CIA estimated that “without substantial outside aid,” Israel “would be able to hold out no longer than two years.”

They were all wrong.

Eisenhower administration officials, such as Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, wanted to create distance between the U.S. and Israel. They viewed the Jewish state as a liability and thought, like Marshall and others before and since, that support for Israel had been a strategic mistake. 

Israel, Dulles believed, was a barrier to making allies in the Arab world. His predecessor, Dean Acheson, similarly thought that Israel’s reestablishment “would imperil all Western interests in the Near East.” 

None of the major defense bureaucracies — the State Department, the CIA, the Pentagon — believed writ large that Israel was an asset. Quite the opposite, in fact. And they acted accordingly.

The Eisenhower administration increased support for an organization called American Friends of the Middle East, a “CIA front that sought to weaken support for the Jewish state in the U.S.,” as the historian Michael Doran has noted.

And, in a move that he would later come to regret, in 1956, Eisenhower forced Israel to cede land that it had won in the 1956 Suez War. 

To secure an Israeli withdrawal, the U.S. offered the Jewish state security guarantees that it would later break. 

When Egypt prepared for war against the Jewish state in 1967, the U.S. failed to live up to the commitments it had made. 

Israel, as it had done in 1956 and 1948, fought against the Arab armies that had gathered to destroy it. 

The U.S. was not sending massive arms shipments to Israel during this time period. 

Indeed, in many instances, America was either restraining the Jewish state or its bureaucracies, such as the CIA and State Department, were often working to undermine it.

In 1962, President John F. Kennedy initiated the sale of HAWK missiles to Israel. But they didn’t arrive in Israeli ports until 1965. The majority of the weapons used by Israel in the 1967 War were either made by Israel itself, the Czech Republic, or France, the nation’s chief arms supplier during its first two decades.

The modern U.S.-Israeli defense partnership didn’t start until the 1970s under President Richard Nixon. And this only occurred as a result of Israel demonstrating its military and intelligence prowess on multiple battlefields, on multiple occasions.

In the 1970s, the Nixon administration sought to establish a back channel to the Palestine Liberation Organization, a designated terrorist group that sought Israel’s destruction. To facilitate this channel, the CIA courted Ali Hassan Salameh, a PLO terrorist known as the Red Prince.

The CIA literally wined and dined the terrorist. The agency took Salameh and his wife on their honeymoon to Disneyland, accompanying them on the rides and paying for the trip. 

The CIA “even supplied Salameh with encrypted communications equipment to enhance his security and it considered sending Salameh an armor-plated car to protect him from the Israelis,” as the journalist Ronen Bergman recounted in his 2018 book.

Salameh’s handler, Robert Ames, “expressed sympathy for the Palestinian cause.” In January 1977, Salameh visited CIA headquarters, where another CIA operations officer, Alan Wolfe, gave him a leather shoulder holster as a gift. Just four years previously, in 1973, Salameh’s PLO had murdered two American diplomats in Sudan.

After Salameh was killed in a car bomb, the CIA station chief in Beirut sent his son a condolence letter that said, “Today I lost a friend who I respected more than other men” and promised to honor his memory.

SEAN DURNS: IRAN’S NUCLEAR PROGRAM IS BURIED, NOT DEAD

Unsurprisingly, the Israelis weren’t happy with the CIA feting a terrorist committed to their destruction. 

Disagreements continued to pop up in the U.S.-Israel relationship. That, after all, is the nature of relationships, whether it’s between people or states.

The Israelis, for example, fiercely opposed the U.S. selling the Airborne Warning and Control System to Saudi Arabia. The Reagan administration did it anyway. 

Israeli military officials wanted to kill PLO head Yasser Arafat in Lebanon in the 1980s. The U.S. asked them not to. Israel complied.

And this is a very incomplete list, exempting major disputes and disagreements in every administration from Ford to Trump. Allies disagree. They have diverging interests. That’s normal. Indeed, it’s healthy.

The facts are clear. Israel hasn’t had a better ally than the U.S. Indeed, America’s support for Israel has been crucial. But it has never been unconditional. Far from it.