On June 5, 1968, Robert Kennedy, just hours after winning the Democratic presidential primary in California and likely on his way to nomination as the Democratic candidate in the upcoming election, was assassinated by Jordanian immigrant Sirhan Sirhan.
Sirhan was reported to have been enraged by Kennedy’s strong support for Israel in the Six Day War of the previous June. The war had been precipitated by the mobilization of Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian forces under the leadership of Egypt’s military junta head, Gamel Abdul Nasser. Nasser had imposed a blockade on Israel, moved a force of some 100,000 men towards Israel’s border and declared that the time had come to annihilate the Jewish state. Israel, after weeks of international failure to de-escalate the situation, preempted hostilities and emerged victorious.
Robert Kennedy had had more direct involvement with the Jewish state than simply supporting it during and after the June 1967 war. His involvement went back to its birth.
In November 1947, the United Nations had voted to divide what remained of Mandate Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. (The British had been given a mandate by the League of Nations in 1922 to oversee creation of a Jewish National Home in the ancestral Jewish homeland; territory that had in recent centuries been part of the Ottoman Empire. Britain was similarly entrusted with a mandate to create an Arab state in what is now Iraq. But the British had separated over 70% of Mandate Palestine - all the land east of the Jordan River - to create yet another Arab state, Transjordan.) The Jews of the Mandate accepted the UN decision, but the Arabs of the Mandate and surrounding Arab nations rejected it, and Palestinian Arabs and infiltrating militias from surrounding states immediately unleashed attacks on the Jews. In April 1948, the Jews were preparing to declare their independence while the armies of five Arab states were preparing to invade to crush the nascent Jewish state and British forces were preparing to leave the following month.
Robert Kennedy arrived in the Mandate in early April 1948, planning to write on the events there for the Boston Post. His dispatches - published in June 1948 - convey the perspectives of both the Arabs and the Jews of the Mandate. He clearly sympathizes with the Jews and their efforts to realize the promise of a state, and he is particularly critical of what he sees as British hostility to the Jews, hostility extending even to British involvement in Arab murders of Jews and a general abetting of the Arab cause. Some have suggested that Kennedy’s sympathies were likely influenced in part by his seeing British anti-Jewish actions as an amalgam of antisemitism and British imperial interests and as very similar to the long history of British anti-Irish policies.
On October 7, 2023, in a move reminiscent of the Palestinian Arab and neighboring Arab states’ agenda in 1947-48, and Nasser’s 1967 mobilizing for a war of annihilation against Israel and rallying allies to join him in the anticipated extermination, Yahya Sinwar, head of Hamas in Gaza, launched an assault on Israel. He urged his patron, Iran, and others of Iran’s client terrorist organizations - Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Iran-linked Iraqi militias - to join in the hoped-for destruction of the Jewish state. His cadres killed 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, often raping, burning alive, torturing and mutilating their victims, and kidnaped 250 additional victims.
But unlike Robert Kennedy’s stances in 1948 and in 1967, stances shared widely at the time by Americans, including Democrats, the response in October 2023, particularly in Democratic bastions such as academia, was widespread, militant support for the perpetrators of the massacre and for their agenda of Israel’s extirpation “from the river to the sea.”
And the anti-Israel bias has infected much of the Democratic leadership. Jew-hatred is purveyed by members of Congress such as Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, and the anti-Israel agenda has long been pushed by the dozens of Democratic members who make common cause with the Council on American-Islamic Relations - named by the government as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case that resulted in convictions for financing Hamas - and other, similar organizations. Their antisemitism and antizionism now largely define the Democratic delegation’s stance on Israel. Members commonly spout the “genocide” Big Lie of the last three years, vote to withhold arms from Israel as it fights a seven-front war against Iran and its proxies, and seek to end the American-Israeli alliance.
Some complain of the supposed excesses of Israel’s right-wing government. But military experts in America and elsewhere, such as John Spencer, Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at West Point, assert that Israel has done more to protect civilian lives than any other army facing similar military challenges.
It is true that the Israeli electorate has swung more to the Right. But it has done so in response to making repeated efforts to advance peace with the Palestinians and having those efforts elicit only more terror and large-scale murder of Israelis. In the Oslo Process of the 1990’s, Israel allowed establishment of the Palestinian Authority (PA), handed it extensive control over Gaza and much of the West Bank, and offered the PA a state in those areas. But Yasser Arafat rejected the offer, advanced no counter-proposal and instead launched a suicide-bomb terror war that cost over a thousand Israeli lives. The PA continues to use its media, mosques and schools to call for the killing of Israelis and to reward those who act on these exhortations with stipends via its “pay to slay” policy. Its leaders likewise repeatedly assert that they will never recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state in any of the territory “from the river to the sea.”
Nevertheless, in 2005 Israel unilaterally withdrew its entire presence from Gaza and handed Gaza to the PA, providing Palestinians with an opportunity to turn the territory into another Hong Kong or Singapore. That move toward peace likewise blew up in Israel’s face, with Hamas seizing control of Gaza from the Palestinian Authority in 2007 and launching four wars against Israel even before October 2023. The October 7 massacre came during a truce and while Israel was facilitating the transfer of billions of dollars to Hamas from Qatar and allowing thousands of Gazans to work in Israel, indirectly providing additional funds to Hamas.
Israelis have good reason to trust less in the possibility of peace. While many Israelis long chose to disbelieve the commitment of the PA and Hamas to Israel’s annihilation, and Hamas’s explicit commitment in its charter to the murder of all the world’s Jews as a religious obligation, the translating of those commitments into mass carnage by both the PA and Hamas has disabused most Israelis of their faith in the possibility of peace. The claim by many Democratic leaders that it is arbitrary Israeli policy that is responsible for the Democratic souring on Israel is another Big Lie, as their jaundiced characterization of Israeli policy ignores entirely the reality that Israel faces on the ground.
Yet another Big Lie is the recurrent claim that present hostility to Israel among Democratic Party leaders is not antisemitic. The roots of that hostility lie largely in the capturing of American academia and other Democratic bastions by the Red-Green alliance of antisemitic Far Leftists and Islamists.
The anti-Israel and anti-Jewish tropes so common on campuses are direct reprises of two streams of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hostility. One is large-scale funding of American Middle East Studies and other departments and promoting of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish indoctrination by foreign financing entities, most prominently Qatar. The other is campus leftist faculty adoption of Soviet anti-Jewish and anti-American propaganda as it evolved in the wake of the 1967 war and the subsequent emergence of the American-Israeli alliance. Critical Race Theory (CRT), so popular on campuses in recent decades, and its action arm of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI), regurgitate Soviet anti-capitalist and antisemitic formulas in its casting of social relations as a zero sum game and its characterizing of Jews as exploiters of that game. Any group doing well is alleged to be doing so at the unfair expense of others. America is a racist society and its capitalism is built on a racist system. Jews do well in America because they are white and take unfair advantage of white privilege. Israel is cast, absurdly, as a white capitalist colonial enterprise. These propaganda tropes have leached into grade schools - both through generating of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish curricula by university departments and direct funding of such grade school curricula by foreign sources - and into other institutions of the broader society, particularly Democratic aligned institutions.
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) platform, much of which parrots the anti-capitalist and anti-American memes of the USSR, includes as one of its four foreign policy goals the dissolution of Israel. Eleven DSA devotees ran as Democrats in the November 3 midterm elections. Another DSA member, Zohran Mamdani, was, of course, elected the Democrat mayor of New York.
Qatar, which invests such extensive resources in American educational institutions and in other institutions that shape American opinion, is a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood and of Hamas, an arm of the Brotherhood. Hamas’s declaration of a religious duty to kill all the world’s Jews is an element of Brotherhood dogma. That dogma asserts the supremacist objective of bringing the entire world under Islamic control. Hamas spokespeople have acknowledged this goal and characterized achieving control of “Palestine” as only a step towards the ultimate objective. The Muslim Brotherhood is the Sunni expression of Muslim supremacism, while the Iranian theocracy’s similar aspirations are the Shi’a version of Muslim supremacism.
Not all Muslims subscribe to the supremacist agenda and its anti-American and anti-Christian as well as anti-Jewish elements, and no doubt many, perhaps most, American Muslims do not. But support for Hamas on American campuses, in American streets and in many American mosques suggest that the agenda has a large constituency in America.
Michigan Democrats nominated Abdul el-Sayed, someone whose family reportedly has extensive connections with the Muslim Brotherhood, as their Senate candidate in the recent midterm voting, and his nomination garnered wide support within the Party. He then prevailed in the subsequent election. El-Sayed has denied any personal affiliation with the Brotherhood, but in 2012 he apparently signed a letter urging the head of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Mohamed Morsi, who had recently risen to the presidency of Egypt, to “purge” the nation’s media and police of opponents of the Brotherhood.
El-Sayed has refused to declare support for Israel’s continued existence, has refused to acknowledge that Israel is a valuable American ally or even that Iran is a greater threat to America than is Israel, and would not condemn the attempt by a Lebanese American to drive a massive suicide bomb into a synagogue housing a Jewish pre-school with over a hundred children. The New York Times observed that, if elected, el-Sayed, “...would be the most anti-Israel U.S. senator since the formation of the Jewish state 78 years ago.” Yet, again, his candidacy won widespread support within the Party. Haley Stevens, who lost to el-Sayed by less than one percentage point in the Democratic primary, announced shortly before the November election that she was switching her support to el-Sayed’s Republican opponent, in part because she could not tolerate his antisemitism and antizionism. She was immediately subjected to unconscionable attacks by Party leaders.
Among those who have campaigned for el-Sayed has been the virtual head of the Party, former president Obama. But Obama has long been a promoter of the Muslim Brotherhood and has long had a jaundiced view of both Israel and America.
Shortly after his inauguration, Obama embarked on an international “apology tour,” seeking to make amends for what he regarded as past American abuses in the international arena. In the Middle East, his support of the Brotherhood led to the overthrow of pro-Western Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak and installation in 2012 of the aforementioned Mohamed Morsi. (Mubarak had for many years fended off Western criticism of his authoritarian governance by pointing out that the only alternative to his control of Egypt was the Muslim Brotherhood. But the tack failed to daunt Obama, for whom that alternative was an attraction.) When Egyptian pro-Western military leaders, with popular support, subsequently overthrew the Islamist regime in 2013, Obama condemned the coup.
Obama’s reaction to the October 2023 massacre in Israel was to balance his condemnation with criticism of the Jewish state. He declared on November 5, a month after the slaughter, “...what Hamas did was horrific and there’s no justification for it, and what is also true is that the occupation, and what is happening to Palestinians, is unbearable.” There is no acknowledgment by the former president that Palestinian leaders had repeatedly turned down offers of a state, including in 2000 and 2008, and that both Palestinian leaderships have insisted that they will settle for nothing less than Israel’s destruction.
In addition to his embrace of el-Sayed, Obama’s anti-Israel animus was also recently on display when he asserted, during a visit to Northern Ireland, that Israel, at its founding, “took land off people,” and, “those people understandably said, ‘This is injustice, and I want my land back.’”
Of course, Israel did not take land off the Palestinians at its founding; it took the land it had been granted by the United Nations and the Palestinians could have done the same instead of trying to destroy Israel. But they chose to go to war to seize everything “from the river to the sea,” which had never been theirs, and Obama appears to be lending support to that aspiration. He also says in the interview that for peace to come Israel needs to stop relying on its military strength and make compromises, But it is only Israel that has made compromises, including repeated offers of a Palestinian state, and the Palestinians who have insisted they will settle for nothing less than Israel’s annihilation.
Obama’s ahistorical, anti-Israel and anti-Jewish take on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is what has become the increasingly prevailing “truth” within the Democratic Party, a far cry from the decency embodied in Robert Kennedy’s perspectives and in the Party more generally during the years from his early reporting on Israel until his assassination.
In a Jerusalem Post story of October 8, 2026, Idan Kweller reported that the late Senator Kennedy’s son, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., posted a statement on X/Twitter in which, “[H]e rejected allegations that Israel is committing genocide in the Gaza Strip and claimed that the accusations were part of a global Muslim Brotherhood propaganda campaign funded by Qatar.”
“‘The Muslim Brotherhood’s Qatari-funded global propaganda campaign makes Joseph Goebbels look like a piker,’ Kennedy wrote. ‘The Genocide charge against Israel is laughable on its face, but it is an effective permission structure for antisemitism.’
“Kennedy went on to argue that antisemitism serves as a tool through which totalitarian systems, including Islamism, can mobilize the masses, build coalitions, and accumulate power.
“’Most of the westerners who parrot this charge are useful idiots deluded by this psyops campaign that hates Jews, Christians, Israel, and the USA pretty equally,’ he wrote.”
The article notes that the post was subsequently removed and that, “Neither Kennedy nor the US Health and Human Services Department has explained its deletion.” But Kennedy is now, of course, Secretary of Health and Human Services in the current Administration and his critique of Qatar may well have elicited concern from Administration officials.
Elsewhere, Kennedy made similar statements in the context of critiquing el-Sayed’s Senate candidacy and his connections with the Muslim Brotherhood. Kennedy’s observations in this vein have elicited sharp criticism from Democrats but are, in their solid foundations, a refreshing light cast upon the antisemitic and antizionist darkness emanating today from his father’s Party.
Sirhan Sirhan has been denied parole seventeen times since his incarceration. Maybe at some point the Democratic Party will champion his release and honor him with the mantle - or, more appropriately, the keffiyeh - of representing what the Party has become.
