Kudos to the Lenny Ben David of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs who has found and republished a series of four articles that the 22-year-old Robert Kennedy wrote for the Boston Post in late May and early June of 1948. (Hat-tip Dion Nissenbaum for that.)
I haven’t read all the Kennedy reporting in detail yet. Nissenbaum picks out some intriguing fragments at the top of his story.
What neither he nor Ben David mentions is that, as the youthful Kennedy walked around Jerusalem he may well have encountered a four-year-old Palestinian Christian child called Sirhan Sirhan, whose family’s life was probably– like that of all of Jerusalem’s Palestinians– deeply affected by the fighting of 1948 and its aftermath.
Almost exactly 40 years later it was Sirhan— by then a resident of Pasadena, California who suffered from sometimes severe psychological problems— who shot Kennedy to death in a hotel in Los Angeles. By some accounts, Sirhan had been enraged by Kennedy’s election-year demoagoguing on the Israel question. President Johnson had apparently been deflecting Israel’s requests that they be sent a batch of highly capable F-4 deep penetration fighter-bomber planes, offering them the less capable A-4’s instead. So in the primary campaign, Kennedy had begun demagoguing on that, criticizing Johnson for trying to enact that restraint.
I am noting this here absolutely not with any intention of excusing or even seeking to “explain” Sirhan’s quite unacceptable use of deadly violence, and not with the intention of raising in the present context the horrendous specter of “the A word” that so many in the Obama camp (actually, including myself) view with quite understandable dread.
I am noting it because– though all Palestinian movements and spokesmen have always been quite clear that Sirhan Sirhan had no connection with them and was absolutely not acting in their name– there still is that “Palestinian” angle to the story of Bobby Kennedy’s killing, which perhaps makes the rediscovery of Kennedy’s youthful writings on the topic even more poignant.
I’ll just close by recalling that in 1957, when John Kennedy was still a senator, he publicly articulated a very principled position of support for the Algerian liberation movement, an Arab liberation movement that was operating at the other (west) end of Mediterranean against that firm US ally, France. So the Kennedys had quite an interesting overall record on Arab liberation movements, as a family.
4 thoughts on “Bobby Kennedy, Palestinians, and Israel”
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Actually, at the point during which Kennedy voiced support for the Algerians, France wasn’t such a firm ally of the US (remember all the problems De Gaulle was causing for NATO/US as well as the very recent US-France clash over Suez etc.?).
Furthermore there are loads of indications anyway that the US position towards Algeria (like its position vis-a-vis the Suez War) had less to do with altruistic defence of anticolonial movements than with the kind of geopolitics that appeared as the world imperial metropole was shifting from London/Paris to Washington DC.
As for Senator Kennedy’s supposed principled positions, once he became president and coined the word “counterinsurgency”, his hand-picked hawks (including especially people like Rostow) brought over loads of French generals (including the infamous Aussaresses responsible for torture during the Battle of Algiers) to come and give lessons on COIN at Ft Bragg to US Special Forces (which if you recall, were Kennedy’s favoured warriors).
On the imperial baton being handed over see William Roger Louis’s excellent books on the end of British empire.
Not sure why the hateful one calls Kennedy’s position “demagouging.” Can’t Helena understand that one can take a sincere position in support of Israel?
Lahlek, De Gaulle wouldn’t have been causing problems for the US in 1957 as he wasn’t in power.
Joshua, do you ever have anything useful or constructive to say?
Watcher,
Yes. It’s necessary to point out that supporting Israel is not demagoguery but principled. How sad that our host sees the need to demean the views of one of the most inspirational politicians of the 20th century.