Two days before his assassination, John F. Kennedy’s administration demanded that Israel allows Palestinians displaced in 1948 to return home.
It was one of the last foreign policy confrontations of his presidency — and one Israel refused outright.
Archived Hebrew headlines from that week are blunt: “Israel does not accept the US proposal under any circumstances.” The American plan, shaped under Kennedy’s direction, called for implementing Article 11 of UN Resolution 194 — the right of return for Palestinian refugees.
Behind the scenes, it sparked a diplomatic crisis. Israel’s leaders accused Washington of “giving in to Arab pressure.” Prime Minister Levi Eshkol told the U.S. ambassador the proposal was “completely unacceptable” and expressed his resentment to the US ambassador to Israel
In Tel Aviv, Ben-Gurion convened his top ministers — Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan, Moshe Sharett — and made the strategy clear: deny, reframe, obscure. They would insist the refugees had “fled of their own free will,” that they had simply left, expecting to return as “lords and masters.”
It was one of the earliest and most enduring lies in the official narrative — one that turned a planned expulsion into a voluntary disappearance. Even though Ben-Gurion himself had received detailed military reports on forced expulsions and home demolitions — in Lod, Ramle, and dozens of villages across the north — he ordered that the world be told otherwise. The displacement would be rewritten as flight.
By 1963, Kennedy’s State Department was pressing for the return of several hundred thousand refugees. Israel offered to discuss only 20,000–30,000 at most. The rest were to remain exiled, their villages erased, their history replaced with “hasbara” — a state-sponsored campaign to bury the truth.
The United States, for a brief moment, tried to confront the truth: that the displacement of Palestinians was not a tragedy of war, but a deliberate policy.
And then — history turned. Kennedy was killed. The pressure evaporated.
The refugees never went home. 80 years later we are still debating.
https://substack.com/@mirala/note/c-173919321?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=3eo7b7
