Sold – Robert F. Kennedy Supports Israel’s Nationhood and Security During the Six Day War, the Very Action That Led to His Assassination by a Palestinian a Year Later

Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, brother of slain President John F. Kennedy and former U.S. Attorney General, was the almost certain Democratic nominee for president in 1968 when he was gunned down in Los Angeles on June 5, just after giving his California primary victory speech. His Palestinian assassin, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, said he killed Kennedy due to his vocal support for Israel.
 
In April 1948, one month before Israel declared independence, Robert Kennedy, then 22, traveled to Palestine to report on the conflict for the Boston Post. He arrived in a chaotic and dangerous land on the eve of the British departure, when Jewish Jerusalem was under Arab siege and Arab armies were pouring into the territory. The British authorities were hampering the Jews' efforts to defend themselves. Kennedy wrote four dispatches from the scene that were published in June 1948, praising the Jewish cause. "The Jewish people in Palestine who believe in and have been working toward this national state have become an immensely proud and determined people," Kennedy opined. "It is already a truly great modern example of the birth of a nation with the primary ingredients of dignity and self-respect." One of his dispatches was headlined, "Jews Make Up for Lack of Arms with Undying Spirit, Unparalleled Courage." In another account, Kennedy described his traveling with Haganah fighters in a convoy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The young reporter was critical of a slippage of the American government's support for Jewish statehood, and supported it himself. Two decades later, his continuing pro-Israel stand did him good service as a candidate and then U.S. Senator from New York, which had a large Jewish population.

Sirhan was a Palestinian who had been born in 1944 in Jerusalem. During the Israeli War of Independence that broke out when he was four years old, Jewish insurgents seized his house, and his family was forced to flee. He was nearly killed in an Irgun (Jewish paramilitary) bombing at the Damascus Gate, and witnessed other violent attacks that deeply traumatized him. As a young refugee in Jordan, Sirhan attended a school where teachers exhorted students to struggle for Palestinian rights. Later his family moved to California, and he was there when Israel seized East Jerusalem and other Arab territories in the Six Day War from June 5-10, 1967.

During the 1968 presidential campaign Sirhan came to identify Robert Kennedy, who he had originally supported, as a friend of Israel. His 1968 diary entries include such statements as "RFK must die" (January 31) and "My determination to eliminate RFK is becoming more of an unshakable obsession" (May 31). Three weeks before committing his crime, he watched a documentary about Kennedy's involvement with Israel on CBS television. Soon afterward he heard a radio tape of Kennedy telling an audience at a Los Angeles synagogue that he would maintain "clear and compelling" support for Israel. After hearing it, a relative later testified, Sirhan ran from the room with "his hands on his ears, and almost weeping".
Sirhan timed his attack on Kennedy to coincide with the first anniversary of the opening of the Six Day War. At his trial, he sought several times to place his crime in the Palestinian context. "When you move a whole country, a whole people, bodily from their own homes, from their land, from their business," he said, "that is completely wrong…That burned the hell out of me."

Typed Letter Signed, on his Senate letterhead, June 9, 1967, during the Six Day War itself, to Dr. Theodore Kahn of Neponsit, NY, affirming his support for Israeli nationhood and security even as the guns were still firing. "Thank you for letting me have your views on the war in the Near East. We can welcome the United Nation's call for a cease fire, but a cease fire is not enough. We must deal with the causes of the conflict by ensuring a permanent and enforceable guarantee of Israel's right to live secure from invasion, and free passage for ships of all nations through the Gulf of Aqaba and the Suez Canal…" This is the first letter of RFK dealing directly with the subject that led to his assassination that we have had.

Foreign interventions and entanglements often produce unpredictable, even unimaginable long-term consequences. The murder of Robert Kennedy is one of the best examples, as if Kennedy had not reaffirmed his support for Israel in 1967-8, Sirhan might never have pulled his trigger. And Kennedy's death led to the election of Richard Nixon as President and the end of the Liberal Era in the 20th century United States.