“The conflict over geographic Palestine — the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea — is widely misunderstood in the United States.” Observers have been writing versions of that sentence since 1948, when the state of Israel was created and the question of Palestine became crucial for the US presence in the Middle East.

And the sentence has remained essentially correct, even though perhaps no foreign affair is more closely watched by major media outlets or more ponderously discussed in highbrow journals of opinion.

For decades, the perplexity was rooted in uncritical acceptance of the stock narrative of Israel’s founding: “a land without a people for a people without a land.” As this people had been downtrodden for centuries and then murdered with mechanical savagery in Europe, this story of Israel offered a providential comfort. Increasingly, though, it is fear that explains the persistent confusion — fear of knowing too much, to borrow the title of Norman Finkelstein’s 2012 book, about the erosion of pro-Israel sentiment among liberal American Jews.