Bobby Kennedy’s Admiration for Israel

T. Belman. RFK JR is very pro-Israel. I just watched an interview of him in which he showed considerable historical knowledges about Israel. I began googling him to see what that was so and found this article among others. The Biden administration want to shut him up and thus accused him pf antisemitism.

The senator’s unwavering support for the Jewish state strengthened American-Israeli ties—and ultimately led to his assassination by a Palestinian gunman

By Shalom Goldman, TABLET ,JUNE 04, 2021

Robert Kennedy speaking at a pro-Israel rally at Madison Square Garden, 1967

In the months between his graduation from Harvard in the spring of 1948 and his enrollment in the University of Virginia Law School in the fall of that year, Bobby Kennedy embarked on an overseas trip at the urging of his father. Through the elder Kennedy’s Boston connections, the 22-year-old aspiring attorney landed a reporting job with the Boston Post. There, Kennedy convinced his editors to let him report from the Middle East on the Arab-Israeli war.

Kennedy arrived in early April and spent a few weeks in war-torn Palestine. From there, he wrote four very vivid and wide-ranging articles. He left Palestine before Ben-Gurion’s May 14th declaration of Israeli statehood and returned through Europe to the United States.

In early June, after Israel was established and diplomatically recognized by the major powers, the articles were published in a series under the byline “Robert Kennedy, Special Writer for the Post.” In the first article, under the headline “British Hatred by Both Sides,” RFK labored mightily to present the arguments of both Arabs and Jews. “There are such well-founded arguments on either side,” Kennedy wrote, “that each side grows more and more bitter toward the other. Confidence in their right increases in proportion to the hatred and mistrust for the other side not acknowledging it.”

In the subsequent three articles, however, RFK and his Boston Post editors no longer attempted to convey an objective view of the competing claims of Jews and Arabs. As the headline on his June 4th article indicates, RFK chose a side: “Jews Have a Fine Fighting Force—Make Up for Lack of Arms With Undying Spirit, Unparalleled Courage—Impress the World.” The article gets directly to the point: “The Jewish people in Palestine who believe in and have been working toward this national state have become an immensely proud and determined people. It is already a truly great modern example of the birth of a nation with the primary ingredients of dignity and self-respect.” Many similar articles appeared in the American press of the day. The surprising thing about these Boston Post articles was not their pro-Zionist sentiments, but the fact that they had been written by Joseph P. Kennedy’s son.

In the years immediately preceding the 1948 establishment of Israel, there was widespread sympathy for the Zionist cause in many sectors of the American public. As the historian David McCullough noted in his acclaimed biography of President Harry Truman, “In 1948, beyond the so-called ‘Jewish vote,’ there was the country at large, where popular support for a Jewish homeland was overwhelming. As would sometimes be forgotten, it was not just American Jews who were stirred by the prospect of a new nation for the Jewish people; it was most of America.”

Many non-Jewish members of what we might term “the creative class” were supporters of Zionism. Three that come to mind are the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, the literary critic Edmund Wilson, and the great entertainer Frank Sinatra. But while sympathy for the idea of Israel was strong, so too was opposition to it. In the 1940s, some Americans with political and cultural clout began organizing against the Zionist cause. They had a variety of reasons: Some were isolationists who did not want the United States entangled in Middle Eastern affairs; others sympathized with the Arab view that Zionism was a new form of European colonialism; and without a doubt, some in the emerging anti-Zionist camp were antisemites.

Among the most influential and strident opponents of such Jewish causes was Joseph P. Kennedy, patriarch and architect of the famed political dynasty. Though he was better known as a politician and a financier than as a member of the creative class, he worked during the 1920s in the Hollywood film industry, and it was there, two decades before the mid-1940s, that he developed and propagated his criticism of Jews and Jewish nationalism.

When he entered the movie business in the mid-1920s, Kennedy presented himself to potential investors as “thoroughly American,” and not “foreign,” a thinly veiled code for “Jewish.” According to Kennedy, Hollywood was run by “a bunch of ignorant Jews.” Bitter that he had not gotten into the industry earlier, Kennedy accused his successful Jewish rivals in Hollywood of having “unethically pushed their way into a wide-open virgin field.”

In 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Joseph Kennedy, who had helped FDR in his 1936 election campaign, as the U.S. ambassador to Britain. In London, Kennedy allied himself with British advocates for appeasement and befriended the Nazi-appointed German ambassador, who described him as “Germany’s best friend in London.” When war broke out in September 1939, Kennedy’s call for U.S. neutrality in the European conflict put him increasingly at odds with FDR. Kennedy blamed the “Jew Media” and the “Jewish pundits in New York and Los Angeles” for Roosevelt’s 1940 election victory and for moving toward U.S. support of England in its struggle against the Nazis.

Before he left his post in London, Kennedy made a trip to California. In Hollywood, he invited some 50 studio executives, producers, and writers—almost all of them Jews—to meet with him. During the meeting, Kennedy harangued the assembled group, warning them of the dangers anti-Nazi films posed to “world peace.” According to actor and producer Douglas Fairbanks Jr., who attended the meeting, Kennedy “threw the fear of God into many of our producers and executives by telling them that the Jews were on the spot and that they should stop making anti-Nazi pictures.” Among the anti-Nazi films Kennedy criticized were Clouds over Europe and Confessions of a Nazi Spy, both distributed in 1939, as well as the British thriller Night Train to Munich, which was distributed in America in 1940. President Roosevelt’s decision to ask for Kennedy’s resignation stemmed in part from the account of that meeting supplied by Fairbanks, who was a close friend of the president.

To what extent did Kennedy’s pro-fascist and anti-Jewish attitudes influence his children? Joseph Jr., his eldest son and the first of his nine children, clearly adopted many of his father’s political and social attitudes. Writing from Germany in the spring of 1934, the 19-year-old Harvard student extolled the Nazi regime:

They had tried liberalism, and it had seriously failed. They had no leader, and as time went on Germany was sinking lower and lower. The German people were scattered, despondent, and were divorced from home. Hitler came in. He saw the need of a common enemy, someone of whom to make the goat. Someone, by whose riddance the Germans would feel they had cast out the cause of their predicament. It was excellent psychology, and it was too bad that it had to be done to the Jews. This dislike of the Jews, however, was well-founded … They were at the heads of all big business, in law, etc.

As historian Doris Kearns Goodwin noted, this letter “reveals a certain grounding in antisemitism that can only have come from his family background.” Joseph Jr.’s attitude about Germany did not change over the course of the 1930s. And in 1940, he helped found the Harvard Committee Against Military Intervention, an affiliate of the America First Movement. His father approved.

The idea that the descendants of Joseph P. Kennedy were cursed has long had a hold on the imagination of some American Jews. According to a story circulating among some Hasidic groups, a curse was placed on the antisemitic Kennedy patriarch by a group of Hasidim who had an ugly encounter with him aboard an ocean liner crossing the Atlantic from England to the U.S. It was the fall of 1939 and the Hasidim were fleeing the Nazis. Ambassador Kennedy was traveling to the States on this same liner. When he saw a group of Jews praying on deck, he complained to the captain and demanded that they be removed and sent below deck. The captain complied and a curse against the Kennedy was pronounced by the rabbis.

I myself encountered this idea before JFK’s assassination. As a 15-year-old student at an Orthodox yeshiva on New York’s Lower East Side, I attended the public funeral of one of the great Torah scholars of the generation. Thousands gathered to hear the eulogies. The speech that made the deepest impression on me was by a well-known rabbi who said that the families of politicians, like the Kennedys, who were indifferent to the fate of the murdered Jews of Europe, would be cursed for generations. Their children, to invoke biblical language, would have to suffer for the sins of their fathers. Though I forgot much of what I learned in that yeshiva, I never forgot that speech. And I was reminded of it each time I learned that a member of the Kennedy family had come to catastrophic harm.

In contrast to their father and their eldest brother, John and Robert Kennedy did not seem to harbor hostility toward Jews. In fact, as they entered politics, they developed sympathetic attitudes toward Jews and Zionism. They found their father’s opposition to a Jewish state, couched as it was in antisemitic and isolationist terms, deeply troubling. And they worked hard to change the perception that the Kennedys were antisemitic.

During his three terms as a Massachusetts congressman and two terms as a senator, JFK consistently supported Israel. Speaking to Massachusetts Jewish War Veterans in April of 1948, then Rep. Kennedy criticized President Truman for equivocating on the question of Jewish statehood and suggesting instead that a U.N. trusteeship should replace the departing British. The young congressman called it “one of the most discouraging aspects of recent American foreign policy.” When, in May of that year, Truman granted Israel recognition over the objections of State Department officials, JFK applauded Truman’s decision. Fourteen years later, during a 1962 meeting with Israeli Foreign Minister Golda Meir, it was JFK who first used the term “special relationship” to describe U.S. ties to Israel; previously, the phrase had been applied only to Britain.

And beyond this presidential rhetorical flourish, JFK transformed the American-Israeli relationship with his decision to sell American-made missiles to Israel. As Abraham Ben-Zvi, eminent historian of the U.S.-Israel relationship put it, “the emerging perception that Israel could become a valuable regional ally of the U.S., precipitated the September 26, 1962 presidential decision to sell Israel Hawk anti-aircraft, short-range missiles … The Kennedy administration decided, in 1962, to significantly expand its security ties with Israel, embarking on a course which sought to make Israel an integral part of any deterrence or containment scheme.”

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