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Tuesday, April 16, 2024

Israeli Assassinations and Public Scrutiny, by Ron Unz - The Unz Review

 

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The ongoing Israel/Gaza conflict just passed the six month mark, an astonishing development that almost no one would have imagined at the time it first began.

The length of the fighting is without precedent across the last seventy-five years of Israeli military history. In 1956, Israel allied itself with Britain and France and suddenly attacked Egypt, conquering the Sinai in a war that lasted little more than a week. Israel’s 1967 surprise attack against Egypt, Syria, and Jordan achieved complete military victory in just six days. Then Egypt and Syria returned the favor in 1973 and came close to overrunning Israel until an unprecedented American military resupply airlift allowed Israel to turn the tide and win a decisive military victory in less than three weeks. The main fighting in Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon only took a couple of weeks, while its 2006 invasion of that same country lasted about a month and its 2008 assault on Gaza was even shorter. Most of these previous half-dozen campaigns were fought against heavily-equipped conventional armies but their combined length totaled considerably less than the time Israel has now spent trying to defeat Gaza’s lightly-armed Hamas militants.

Furthermore, Israel’s lack of battlefield success against the entrenched Hamas fighters has become rather obvious. Few if any of the Israelis captured in the October 7th raid have been successfully freed and none of Hamas’ top commanders have been killed or captured. The extent of Hamas’ battlefield losses is unclear, but since the group consists entirely of adult males and the demographic profile of the Gazans reported killed seems very close to that of Gaza’s general civilian population, it seems likely that only a small fraction of Hamas’ 30,000 combat troops have fallen. Indeed, Israel’s failure to capture almost any Hamas members has led to grotesque incidents in which the Israelis seized and stripped male Gazan civilians and falsely paraded them around as captured Hamas militants for a propaganda video.

For decades, the Israelis had boastfully proclaimed their army to be one of the best in the world, but the huge humiliation they suffered on October 7th punctured that illusion, and six months of fighting in Gaza has hardly restored it. Although the IDF is lavishly equipped with top-quality weaponry, its discipline appears rather poor and its troops and their commanders seem extremely risk-averse, perhaps even cowardly. As a consequence, Israel has apparently avoided taking the battle to Hamas in the latter’s network of defensive tunnels and instead concentrated on punishing Gaza’s population of two million defenseless civilians with relentless bombardment and starvation, seeking to drive them out into Egypt’s Sinai desert, thereby allowing the Israelis to annex their land and create a Greater Israel.

As part of that process, Israel has annihilated most of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure. More than a hundred thousand residential buildings have been destroyed, including most of the mosques and churches, along with all of the local hospitals, schools, and universities, constituting the greatest series of public war crimes in living memory. Tens of thousands of Gazans have died in what is certainly the worst televised massacre of helpless civilians in the history of the world. That enormous death toll together with a multitude of explicitly genocidal public statements by top Israeli political and military leaders led to a series of near-unanimous rulings by the International Court of Justice declaring that the Palestinians were at serious risk of suffering a “genocide” at Israel’s hands, an almost unprecedented international legal verdict, let alone one directed against the once sacrosanct Jewish State.

So although Israel’s brutal and indiscriminate methods have minimized its military losses, they have also failed to defeat or destroy its determined opponent, amounting to some tactical Israeli successes but a potentially strategic victory for Hamas’s far weaker forces. Indeed, the front-page lead story in the print edition of Friday’s Wall Street Journal carried the headline “Israel Wins Battles But Risks War Loss.” A day earlier, a leading columnist in Israel’s most influential newspaper had even more boldly declared that Israel had lost the war, suffering “a total defeat.”

However, I think even these negative appraisals of Israel’s strategic situation ignore the broader consequences of this six month conflict. Therefore, they severely underestimate the potentially dire outcome for Israel, perhaps extremely damaging or even fatal to the survival of the Jewish State.

A central theme of my numerous American Pravda articles has been the enormous power of media in world affairs. By shaping the thoughts and beliefs of the individuals who control armies and nuclear arsenals, media influence is far more powerful than those merely physical weapons. And I believe that the greatest strategic impact of the Israel-Gaza conflict of the last six months has been in that realm.

The bitter struggle between Israelis and Palestinians may have attracted more global media coverage over the last half-year than during all its past decades combined. Many hundreds of millions or even billions of people who had previously paid little attention to the details or had casually taken their understanding from a few skewed MSM stories have now immersed themselves in the sea of gripping images and videos of devastated Gaza and its pitiful inhabitants so easily available on social media platforms such as TikTok and Twitter. These individuals may have developed very strong views about the situation.

Although I don’t use social media myself and I have always carefully followed the Middle East conflict, the same conclusion still applies. It’s quite possible that I have spent more hours on the topic during the last six months than in all the past decades since I was in grade school. I’ve certainly written more about Israel and Palestine since October 7th than in the previous thirty years combined.

I’d always been aware that many hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had become refugees in the aftermath of Israel’s 1948 establishment, but the details had been vague in my mind. However, Israeli scholar Ilan Pappe’s exhaustive archival research documented the true facts and by reading his historical work late last year I filled in many of those gaps. The true circumstances of the creation of Israel were really quite outrageous, with heavily armed Zionist settlers, most of them relatively recent arrivals, launching a planned campaign of massacres and brutal atrocities to expel some 800,000 native Palestinians from the lands they had inhabited for a thousand or two thousand years. I summarized much of this history in a long article.

Some of the crimes committed by the Zionists to terrorize the Palestinians and drive them from their homes were quite shocking. Whereas the recent story of Hamas militants roasting an Israeli baby in an oven was merely an atrocity-hoax, we have eyewitness testimony that back in 1948, the Zionist militants did indeed throw a young Palestinian boy into an oven and burn him alive, with his father soon following along behind him.

Israel’s present-day Zionists have certainly continued this pattern of behavior, committing every conceivable war-crime and atrocity, including the massacre of starving Palestinians at a food distribution site and driving over living prisoners with tanks and other military vehicles, as I explained in a later interview.

 

Although my own writings may sometimes influence opinion-leaders, they have limited general circulation. But similar perspectives have now begun to reach much wider audiences.

For decades, media figures have understood that any sharp criticism of Israel or Jewish behavior represented the deadly “third rail” of their profession, fatal to any career. But six months of Israel’s military failures combined with its horrific atrocities committed against the helpless civilians of Gaza has gradually emboldened some individuals to begin breaking that powerful taboo.

Tucker Carlson certainly ranks as the most influential conservative media figure and his forced departure last year from his top-rated FoxNews show took him to Twitter, where he soon launched a lengthy interview program on Elon Musk’s relatively uncensored platform. In February he interviewed Russian President Vladimir Putin for two hours, setting some Internet records for viewership and swamping the audiences of nearly all his broadcast television competitors.

Last week he released an equally bold segment on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a 43 minute interview of a Christian Palestinian pastor from the holy city of Bethlehem, who described the severe oppression that he and his Christian flock suffered at the hands of Israel’s extremist Jewish government and the militant settlers it supported. Carlson emphasized how strange it seemed that America’s conservative Christian leadership did absolutely nothing for their Christian brethren in the Middle East but instead wholeheartedly supported Israel’s anti-Christian activities with money and political support.

The Tweet containing that clip has now been viewed some 18 million times and may begin to have an impact upon America’s Christian conservatives and the Republican Party they dominate. The entire segment is quite powerful and I would urge everyone to watch it, either on Twitter or on Youtube:

But for those who lack the time, some of the most telling statements have been extracted and distributed in various other Tweets, such as this one, now viewed more than 4 million times:

The material presented in that explosive interview may greatly shock many American Christians, but it merely represents the tip of an enormous iceberg of hidden facts, and if they decided to carefully investigate the topic they would encounter far greater revelations. In a 2018 article, I drew upon the seminal research of the late Prof. Israel Shahak of Hebrew University to highlight some important aspects of traditional Talmudic Judaism that are not widely known in America:

And while religious Judaism has a decidedly negative view towards all non-Jews, Christianity in particular is regarded as a total abomination, which must be wiped from the face of the earth.

Whereas pious Muslims consider Jesus as the holy prophet of God and Muhammed’s immediate predecessor, according to the Jewish Talmud, Jesus is perhaps the vilest being who ever lived, condemned to spend eternity in the bottommost pit of Hell, immersed in a boiling vat of excrement. Religious Jews regard the Muslim Quran as just another book, though a totally mistaken one, but the Christian Bible represents purest evil, and if circumstances permit, burning Bibles is a very praiseworthy act. Pious Jews are also enjoined to always spit three times at any cross or church they encounter, and direct a curse at all Christian cemeteries. Indeed, many deeply religious Jews utter a prayer each and every day for the immediate extermination of all Christians.

Over the years prominent Israeli rabbis have sometimes publicly debated whether Jewish power has now become sufficiently great that all the Christian churches of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and other nearby areas can finally be destroyed, and the entire Holy Land completely cleansed of all traces of its Christian contamination. Some have taken this position, but most have urged prudence, arguing that Jews needed to gain some additional strength before they should take such a risky step. These days, many tens of millions of zealous Christians and especially Christian Zionists are enthusiastic advocates for Jews, Judaism, and Israel, and I strongly suspect that at least some of that enthusiasm is based upon ignorance.

On the most basic level, the religion of most traditional Jews is actually not at all monotheistic, but instead contains a wide variety of different male and female gods, having quite complex relations to each other, with these entities and their properties varying enormously among the numerous different Jewish sub-sects, depending upon which portions of the Talmud and the Kabala they place uppermost. For example, the traditional Jewish religious cry “The Lord Is One” has always been interpreted by most people to be an monotheistic affirmation, and indeed, many Jews take exactly this same view. But large numbers of other Jews believe this declaration instead refers to achievement of sexual union between the primary male and female divine entities. And most bizarrely, Jews having such radically different views see absolutely no difficulty in praying side by side, and merely interpreting their identical chants in very different fashion.

Furthermore, religious Jews apparently pray to Satan almost as readily as they pray to God, and depending upon the various rabbinical schools, the particular rituals and sacrifices they practice may be aimed at enlisting the support of the one or the other. Once again, so long as the rituals are properly followed, the Satan-worshippers and the God-worshippers get along perfectly well and consider each other equally pious Jews, merely of a slightly different tradition. One point that Shahak repeatedly emphasizes is that in traditional Judaism the nature of the ritual itself is absolutely uppermost, while the interpretation of the ritual is rather secondary. So perhaps a Jew who washes his hands three times clockwise might be horrified by another who follows a counter-clockwise direction, but whether the hand-washing were meant to honor God or to honor Satan would hardly be a matter of much consequence…

Another fascinating aspect is that up until very recent times, the lives of religious Jews were often dominated by all sorts of highly superstitious practices, including magical charms, potions, spells, incantations, hexes, curses, and sacred talismans, with rabbis often having an important secondary role as sorcerers, and this even remains entirely true today among the enormously influential rabbis of Israel and the New York City area. Shahak’s writings had not endeared him to many of these individuals, and for years they constantly attacked him with all sorts of spells and fearful curses aimed at achieving his death or illness. Many of these traditional Jewish practices seem not entirely dissimilar to those we typically associate with African witch-doctors or Voodoo priests, and indeed, the famous legend of the Golem of Prague described the successful use of rabbinical magic to animate a giant creature built of clay.

In an interesting podcast interview last week with one of his former students, Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University seemingly alluded to his recent discovery of Shahak’s remarkable research, which he found just as shocking as I originally had.

Not having any interest in religion myself, I’ve never paid any attention to such things, but those beliefs obviously dominate the thinking of the fiercely committed Talmudic Jews who have become such a powerful factor in Israel’s government and politics, and their spiritual dogma could have fateful consequences. Last month I watched a presentation suggesting that those fervent Messianic Jews may be on the verge of reestablishing ritualistic sacrifices as preparation for the plans to destroy the 1500 year old holy Islamic mosques of the Temple Mount and rebuild the Jewish Third Temple in their place, all in preparation for the coming of the Jewish Messiah.

From what I’ve read here and there, Christians have traditionally identified the Jewish Messiah with the Antichrist of their own Scriptures, so under such an interpretation America’s numerous Christian Zionists, including such leaders as Rev. Franklin Graham and Rev. John Hagee, have actually spent their entire careers in service to the followers of the Antichrist, hardly a pleasant discovery for those pious Christians.

 

Uncovering these religious and eschatological elements of Israeli behavior may be most important to conservative Christians across the world and in America. But I think that if properly interpreted, some of Israel’s other recent actions have enormous implications for patriotic but secular Americans.

During just a single 24-hour period, news reports around the world described several separate Israeli actions, any one of which could have reasonably dominated the global headlines for days or even weeks.

IDF forces pulled out of the grounds of the totally destroyed al Shifa hospital, the largest in Gaza, leaving behind hundreds of summarily executed civilian victims, including medical workers and patients. Hospitals are normally sacrosanct in war and when the Israelis had first hit that hospital complex with a missile in November, they had dishonestly claimed that the Palestinians had accidentally attacked their own hospital, but the IDF has now deliberately destroyed all of Gaza’s dozens of hospitals.

Around the same time, the Israelis used three consecutive drone strikes to kill all the members of a relief convoy of the World Central Kitchen, the organization that the American government had tasked with bringing food supplies into Gaza. The WCK leadership is very close to top figures in the Biden Administration and the convoy had fully coordinated all its movements with the Israeli government, so the latter’s claim of mistaken friendly fire seems highly implausible. Israel’s government and Israeli activists have been deliberately blocking all food deliveries to Gaza’s starving population of two million and it is widely suspected that the targeted killing of the members of the relief organization closest to the American government was intended to terrorize all other aid groups into abandoning their efforts and leaving the Gazans to their grim fate.

And in perhaps the most shocking incident of all, the Israeli government bombed part of Iran’s Damascus Embassy, killing several high-ranking Iranian generals, a total breach of international law that has no precedent in the last several centuries. Such a blatant Israeli assassination strike against traditionally inviolate diplomatic quarters was an obvious act of war intended to provoke the sort of Iranian retaliation that would draw America into a regional military conflict. The Iranians have now responded with a large wave of drone and missile attacks, and the next few days may see whether the Israeli gambit succeeds.

This pattern of outrageous behavior continued and the following week the Israelis targeted and killed the three adult sons of the top-ranking Hamas leader and former Gazan prime minister with whom they had been negotiating. Apparently none of the victims were themselves Hamas militants and several grandchildren also died in the attack. A couple of months earlier, the Israelis had previously targeted and assassinated the Hamas official in Beirut who had been their negotiating partner on hostage exchange issues. Around the same time, a very well-connected Israeli journalist revealed that Israel’s airstrikes against suspected Hamas militants relied heavily upon an AI system called “Where’s Daddy?” aimed at striking them at home so that their entire families would also be killed.

The common thread across all of these incidents is Israel’s remarkable indeed overwhelming focus on assassination as its central tool of military conflict or statecraft, coupled with absolutely no respect for normal international law or even basic human decency. Although these numerous cases might shock many Americans, I was not particularly surprised due to my past reading of the history of such Israeli activities. These had been the subject of an extremely long article that I had written in early 2020.

Israel-born Ronen Bergman of the New York Times is one of the best-connected Western journalists based in that country and in 2018 he published Rise and Kill First, a highly authoritative account of the Israeli Mossad and its history. I read that book a year or two later and described the contents towards the beginning of the article it had prompted me to write:

The author devoted six years of research to the project, which was based upon a thousand personal interviews and access to an enormous number of official documents previously unavailable. As suggested by the title, his primary focus was Israel’s long history of assassinations, and across his 750 pages and thousand-odd source references he recounts the details of an enormous number of such incidents.

That sort of topic is obviously fraught with controversy, but Bergman’s volume carried glowing cover-blurbs from Pulitzer Prize-winning authors on espionage matters, and the official cooperation he received is indicated by similar endorsements from both a former Mossad chief and Ehud Barak, a past Prime Minister of Israel who himself had once led assassination squads. Over the last couple of decades, former CIA officer Robert Baer has become one of our most prominent authors in this same field, and he praised the book as “hands down” the best he had ever read on intelligence, Israel, or the Middle East. The reviews across our elite media were equally laudatory.

Although I had seen some discussions of the book when it appeared, I only got around to reading it a few months ago. And while I was deeply impressed by the thorough and meticulous journalism, I found the pages rather grim and depressing reading, with their endless accounts of Israeli agents killing their real or perceived enemies in operations that sometimes involved kidnappings and brutal torture, or resulted in considerable loss of life to innocent bystanders. Although the overwhelming majority of the attacks described took place in the various countries of the Middle East or the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza, others ranged across the world, including Europe. The narrative history began in the 1920s, decades before the actual creation of the Jewish state or its Mossad organization, and extended down to the present day.

The sheer quantity of such foreign assassinations was really quite remarkable, with the knowledgeable reviewer in the New York Times suggesting that the Israeli total over the last half-century or so seemed far greater than that of any other nation. I might even go farther: if we excluded domestic killings, I wouldn’t be surprised if Israel’s body-count greatly exceeded the combined total for that of all other major countries in the world. I think all the lurid revelations of lethal CIA or KGB Cold War assassination plots that I have seen discussed in newspaper articles might fit comfortably into just a chapter or two of Bergman’s extremely long book.

Although Bergman’s text was absolutely overflowing with a vast number of planned or successful Mossad assassination plots, whether directed against hostile Arabs, Westerners, or even Israel’s own top political and military leaders, the author emphasized that his book was produced under strict Israeli censorship, so we can reasonably assume that a great deal of the touchiest material was excluded from the text. Therefore, although I relied upon the Bergman book as the central foundation of my analysis, I concluded that it was far from comprehensive and always carefully read between the lines, while supplementing it with a great deal of additional material.

Indeed, I noted that some of Bergman’s very telling omissions were rather obvious to anyone reasonably versed in the topic.

Bergman’s book runs some 350,000 words and even if every single sentence were written with the most scrupulous honesty, we must recognize the huge difference between “the Truth” and “the Whole Truth”…

Having thus acquired serious doubts about the completeness of Bergman’s seemingly comprehensive narrative history, I noted a curious fact. I have no specialized expertise in intelligence operations in general nor those of Mossad in particular, so I found it quite remarkable that the overwhelming majority of all the higher-profile incidents recounted by Bergman were already familiar to me merely from the decades I had spent closely reading the New York Times every morning. Is it really plausible that six years of exhaustive research and so many personal interviews would have uncovered so few major operations that had not already been known and reported in the international media? Bergman obviously provided a wealth of detail previously limited to insiders, along with numerous unreported assassinations of relatively minor individuals, but it seems strange that he came up with so few major new revelations.

Indeed, some important gaps in his coverage are quite apparent to anyone who has even somewhat investigated the topic, and these begin in the early chapters of his volume, which include coverage of the Zionist prehistory in Palestine prior to the establishment of the Jewish state.

Bergman would have severely damaged his credibility if he had failed to include the infamous 1940s Zionist assassinations of Britain’s Lord Moyne or U.N. Peace Negotiator Count Folke Bernadotte. But he unaccountably forgot to mention that in 1937 the more right-wing Zionist faction whose political heirs have dominated Israel in recent decades assassinated Chaim Arlosoroff, the highest-ranking Zionist figure in Palestine. Moreover, he omitted a number of similar incidents, including some of those targeting top Western leaders. As I wrote last year:

Indeed, the inclination of the more right-wing Zionist factions toward assassination, terrorism, and other forms of essentially criminal behavior was really quite remarkable. For example, in 1943 Shamir had arranged the assassination of his factional rival, a year after the two men had escaped together from imprisonment for a bank robbery in which bystanders had been killed, and he claimed he had acted to avert the planned assassination of David Ben-Gurion, the top Zionist leader and Israel’s future founding-premier. Shamir and his faction certainly continued this sort of behavior into the 1940s, successfully assassinating Lord Moyne, the British Minister for the Middle East, and Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN Peace Negotiator, though they failed in their other attempts to kill American President Harry Truman and British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin, and their plans to assassinate Winston Churchill apparently never moved past the discussion stage. His group also pioneered the use of terrorist car-bombs and other explosive attacks against innocent civilian targets, all long before any Arabs or Muslims had ever thought of using similar tactics; and Begin’s larger and more “moderate” Zionist faction did much the same.

As far as I know, the early Zionists had a record of political terrorism almost unmatched in world history, and in 1974 Prime Minister Menachem Begin once even boasted to a television interviewer of having been the founding father of terrorism across the world.

 

In recent years, Israel has become notorious for its successful assassinations of numerous Iranian scientists associated with that country’s nuclear development program, and Bergman also provided various examples of Mossad’s previous killings aimed at frustrating the earlier nuclear efforts of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. However, as I discussed in early 2020 one of Israel’s boldest assassinations went unmentioned in his book, probably because it involved the death of a top American ally as well as a couple of our own important officials.

In 2005 John Gunther Dean, a high-ranking and long-retired former American ambassador broke his seventeen years of silence and revealed that he strongly believed that Mossad had been responsible for the 1988 death of Pakistani President Zia ul-Haq and nearly his entire government in a highly-suspicious plane crash that also cost the lives of our ambassador to that country and an accompanying American general. Dean was then serving as our ambassador to neighboring India, and according to him the Israelis had become extremely alarmed by Zia’s nuclear weapons development effort, fearful that he might share the product with other Muslim countries. Well-connected journalists reported that the Israelis had even unsuccessfully sought to enlist India in a joint military attack to destroy Pakistan’s facilities.

After the annihilation of Zia’s government, Dean had traveled back to Washington to provide his crucial information to top State Department officials, but instead he was immediately purged and incarcerated, then forcibly retired from his four decades of diplomatic service. The long article setting forth all these important facts was written by the former New York Times bureau chief for South Asia and appeared in a prestigious journal, but it was ignored and boycotted by the entire North American media, though it received a great deal of attention elsewhere in the world.

One reason for Dean’s suspicions was that during his earlier posting in Lebanon, the Israelis had sought his personal support in their local projects, drawing upon his sympathy as an American Jew. But when he rejected those overtures and declared that his primary loyalty was to America, an attempt was made to assassinate him, with the munitions being eventually traced back to Israel. Bergman’s book inadvertently confirmed these facts by revealing that the local militant faction officially claiming credit for the attack was actually an Israeli-created front group used for Mossad terrorist attacks in Lebanon.

Prior to the release of Bergman’s thick volume on the Mossad, much of our information had come from a couple of books published during the early 1990s by Mossad defector Victor Ostrovsky, the first of which became a huge national bestseller. When I’d originally read Ostrovsky’s books, I’d been quite cautious in accepting his shocking claims, but after rereading both of them in the light of Bergman’s wealth of revelations I found them much more plausible and also used external sources to confirm some of the details he provided. And if Ostrovsky can be credited, Mossad’s efforts were sometimes aimed at undermining or even assassinating important Western political leaders.

Ostrovsky’s most dramatic account focused upon the bitter 1991 political struggle between President George H.W. Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir over growing West Bank settlements, with Bush determined that they be restricted, thereby allowing the establishment of an independent Palestinian state as part of a reasonable Middle East peace agreement. According to the Mossad defector, hard-line elements of his own organization organized a plan to assassinate Bush, believing that Vice President Dan Quayle, heavily influenced by arch-Neocon Bill Kristol who served as his chief of staff, would be far more supportive of Israeli policy. Although I personally confirmed that important American national security officials took those reports of an Israeli assassination plot very seriously at the time, I had still been quite skeptical of Ostrovsky’s claims, but became much less so after reading Bergman’s massively documented volume, which strongly hinted that the 1995 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had probably involved elements of his own security services.

Two decades later, President Barack Obama became involved in a test of wills with Benjamin Netanyahu over similar matters, and some agitated Jewish leaders in America publicly called for Obama’s assassination. Although I never took those statements seriously at the time, in a recent podcast discussion Max Blumenthal claimed that Obama and top administration officials were actually very fearful that Mossad would assassinate our president, and since Blumenthal’s father Sidney was then a top Democratic Party political operative, someone quite close to Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, it’s certainly possible that such statements were based upon solid information.

 

These seemingly credible reports of possible Mossad assassination efforts against President Bush and President Obama should be kept firmly in mind when we consider the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, one of the landmark events of the twentieth century. There seems strong even overwhelming evidence that Mossad played a central role in the JFK assassination just as was originally proposed in the seminal 1994 book by Michael Collins Piper. As I discussed in one section of my early 2020 article:

For decades following the 1963 assassination, virtually no suspicions had ever been directed towards Israel, and as a consequence none of the hundreds or thousands of assassination conspiracy books that appeared during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s had hinted at any role for the Mossad, though nearly every other possible culprit, ranging from the Vatican to the Illuminati, came under scrutiny. Kennedy had received over 80% of the Jewish vote in his 1960 election, American Jews featured very prominently in his White House, and he was greatly lionized by Jewish media figures, celebrities, and intellectuals ranging from New York City to Hollywood to the Ivy League. Moreover, individuals with a Jewish background such as Mark Lane and Edward Epstein had been among the leading early proponents of an assassination conspiracy, with their controversial theories championed by influential Jewish cultural celebrities such as Mort Sahl and Norman Mailer. Given that the Kennedy Administration was widely perceived as pro-Israel, there seemed no possible motive for any Mossad involvement, and bizarre, totally unsubstantiated accusations of such a monumental nature directed against the Jewish state were hardly likely to gain much traction in an overwhelmingly pro-Israel publishing industry.

However, in the early 1990s highly regarded journalists and researchers began exposing the circumstances surrounding the development of Israel’s nuclear weapons arsenal. Seymour Hersh’s 1991 book The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy described the extreme efforts of the Kennedy Administration to force Israel to allow international inspections of its allegedly non-military nuclear reactor at Dimona, and thereby prevent its use in producing nuclear weapons. Dangerous Liaisons: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli Covert Relationship by Andrew and Leslie Cockburn appeared in the same year, and covered similar ground.

Although entirely hidden from public awareness at the time, the early 1960s political conflict between the American and Israeli governments over nuclear weapons development had represented a top foreign policy priority of the Kennedy Administration, which had made nuclear non-proliferation one of its central international initiatives. It is notable that John McCone, Kennedy’s choice as CIA Director, had previously served on the Atomic Energy Commission under Eisenhower, being the individual who leaked the fact that Israel was building a nuclear reactor to produce plutonium.

The pressure and financial aid threats secretly applied to Israel by the Kennedy Administration eventually became so severe that they led to the resignation of Israel’s founding Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion in June 1963. But all these efforts were almost entirely halted or reversed once Kennedy was replaced by Johnson in November of that same year. Piper noted that Stephen Green’s 1984 book Taking Sides: America’s Secret Relations With a Militant Israel had previously documented that U.S. Middle East Policy completely reversed itself following Kennedy’s assassination, but this important finding had attracted little attention at the time.

Skeptics of a plausible institutional basis for a JFK assassination conspiracy have often emphasized the extreme continuity in both foreign and domestic policies between the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, arguing that this casts severe doubt on any such possible motive. Although this analysis seems largely correct, America’s behavior towards Israel and its nuclear weapons program stands as a very notable exception to this pattern.

An additional major area of concern for Israeli officials may have involved the efforts of the Kennedy Administration to sharply restrict the activities of pro-Israel political lobbies. During his 1960 presidential campaign, Kennedy had met in New York City with a group of wealthy Israel advocates, led by financier Abraham Feinberg, and they had offered enormous financial support in exchange for a controlling influence in Middle Eastern policy. Kennedy managed to fob them off with vague assurances, but he considered the incident so troubling that the next morning he sought out journalist Charles Bartlett, one of his closest friends, and expressed his outrage that American foreign policy might fall under the control of partisans of a foreign power, promising that if he became president, he would rectify that situation. And indeed, once he had installed his brother Robert as Attorney General, the latter initiated a major legal effort to force pro-Israel groups to register themselves as foreign agents, which would have drastically reduced their power and influence. But after JFK’s death, this project was quickly abandoned, and as part of the settlement, the leading pro-Israel lobby merely agreed to reconstitute itself as AIPAC.

There are other notable elements that tend to support the Piper Hypothesis. Once we accept the existence of a JFK assassination conspiracy, the one individual who is virtually certain to have been a participant was Jack Ruby, and his organized crime ties were almost entirely to the huge but rarely-mentioned Jewish wing of that enterprise, presided over by Meyer Lansky, an extremely fervent supporter of Israel. Ruby himself had particularly strong connections with Lansky lieutenant Mickey Cohen, who dominated the Los Angeles underworld and had been personally involved in gun-running to Israel prior to the 1948 war. Indeed, according to Dallas rabbi Hillel Silverman, Ruby had privately explained his killing of Oswald by saying “I did it for the Jewish people.”

An intriguing aspect to Oliver Stone’s landmark JFK film should also be mentioned. Arnon Milchan, the wealthy Hollywood producer who backed the project, was not only an Israeli citizen, but had also reportedly played a central role in the enormous espionage ring to divert American technology and materials to Israel’s nuclear weapons program, the exact undertaking that the Kennedy Administration had made such efforts to block. Milchan has even sometimes been described as “the Israeli James Bond.” And although the film ran a full three hours in length, JFK scrupulously avoided presenting any of the details that Piper later regarded as initial clues to an Israeli dimension, instead seeming to finger America’s fanatic home-grown anti-Communist movement and the Cold War leadership of the military-industrial complex as the guilty parties.

John Newman spent twenty years in Military Intelligence before becoming a history professor, and his exhaustive analysis of declassified government intelligence files pointed to CIA counter-intelligence chief James Angleton as the crucial figure in the JFK assassination plot. Angleton was also the CIA official closest to the Mossad and partly on those grounds Piper had independently fingered him as the likeliest suspect.

Some additional evidence tends to support Piper’s arguments for likely Mossad involvement in the death of our president.

David Talbot’s influential 2007 book Brothers revealed that Robert F. Kennedy had been convinced almost from the first that his brother had been struck down in a conspiracy, but he held his tongue, telling his circle of friends that he stood little chance of tracking down and punishing the guilty parties until he himself reached the White House. By June 1968, he seemed on the threshold of achieving that goal, but was felled by an assassin’s bullet just moments after winning the crucial California presidential primary. The logical assumption is that his death was engineered by the same elements as that of his elder brother, who were now acting to protect themselves from the consequences of their earlier crime.

A young Palestinian named Sirhan Sirhan had fired a pistol at the scene and was quickly arrested and convicted for the murder. But Talbot emphasizes that the coroner’s report revealed that the fatal bullet came from a completely different direction, while the acoustical record proves that far more shots were fired than the capacity of the alleged killer’s gun. Such hard evidence demonstrates a conspiracy.

Sirhan himself seemed dazed and confused, later claiming to have no memory of events, and Talbot mentions that various assassination researchers have long argued that he was merely a convenient patsy in the plot, perhaps acting under some form of hypnosis or conditioning. Nearly all these writers are usually reluctant to note that the selection of a Palestinian as scapegoat in the killing points in a certain obvious direction, but Bergman’s recent book also includes a major new revelation. At exactly the same moment that Sirhan was being wrestled to the floor of the Ambassador Hotel ballroom in Los Angeles, another young Palestinian was undergoing intensive rounds of hypnotic conditioning at the hands of Mossad in Israel, being programmed to assassinate PLO leader Yasir Arafat; and although that effort ultimately failed, such a coincidence seems to stretch the bounds of plausibility.

The 1999 death of JFK’s son and namesake in an unusual light plane crash provoked an avalanche of conspiratorial suspicions. I have found no solid evidence that it was anything but the tragic accident portrayed by the media, but the immediate aftermath of his death did highlight an important ideological divide.

For six decades, members of the Kennedy family have been wildly popular among ordinary American Jews, probably attracting greater political enthusiasm than almost any other public figures. But this undeniable reality has masked an entirely different perspective found within a particular section of that same community.

John Podhoretz, a leading scion of the militantly pro-Israel Neocons, was opinion editor of The New York Post at the time of the fatal plane crash, and he immediately published an astonishing column entitled “A Conversation in Hell” in which he positively reveled at the death of the young Kennedy. He portrayed patriarch Joseph Kennedy as an unspeakable anti-Semite who had sold his soul to the Devil for his own worldly success and that of his family, then suggested that all the subsequent assassinations and other early deaths of Kennedys merely constituted the fine print of that Satanic bargain. So brutally harsh a piece surely indicates that those bitter sentiments were hardly uncommon within Podhoretz’s small ultra-Zionist social circle, which probably overlapped with similar right-wing elements in Israel. So this reaction demonstrates that the exact same political figures who were most deeply beloved by the overwhelming majority of American Jews may have also been regarded as mortal enemies by an influential segment of the Jewish state and its corps of Mossad assassins.

When I published my original 2018 article on the JFK assassination, I naturally noted the widespread use of assassination by Zionist groups, a pattern that had long predated the creation of the Jewish state, and I cited some of the supportive evidence contained in the two Ostrovsky books. But at the time, I still had considerable doubts about Ostrovsky’s credibility, especially regarding the shocking claims in his second book, and I had not yet read Bergman’s volume, which had just been published a few months earlier. So although there seemed considerable evidence for the Piper Hypothesis, I regarded it as far from conclusive.

However, I have now digested Bergman’s book, which documents the enormous volume of international Mossad assassinations, and I have also concluded that Ostrovsky’s claims were far more solid than I had previously assumed. As a result my opinion has substantially shifted. Instead of merely being a solid possibility, I believe there is actually a strong likelihood that Mossad together with its American collaborators played a central role in the Kennedy assassinations of the 1960s, leading me to fully affirm the Piper Hypothesis.

 

Once we recognize that Israel’s Mossad was probably responsible for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, our understanding of post-war American history may require substantial reevaluation.

The JFK assassination was possibly the most famous event of the second half of the twentieth century, and it inspired a vast outpouring of media coverage and journalistic investigation that seemingly explored every nook and crany of the story. Yet for the first three decades after the killing in Dallas, virtually no whisper of suspicion was ever directed at Israel, and during the quarter-century since Piper published his ground-breaking 1994 book, scarcely any of his analysis has leaked into the English-language media. If a story of such enormity has remained so well hidden for so long, perhaps it was neither the first nor the last.

If the Kennedy brothers did indeed perish due to a conflict over our Middle Eastern policy, they were certainly not the first prominent Western leaders to suffer that fate, especially when we consider the bitter political battles a generation earlier over the establishment of Israel. All our standard history books describe the mid-1940s Zionist assassinations of Lord Moyne of Britain and U.N. Peace Negotiator Count Folke Bernodotte, though they rarely mention the failed attempts on the lives of President Harry S. Truman and Britain Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin around the same time.

James Forrestal, the wealthy former CEO of a top Wall Street investment bank, became America’s first Secretary of Defense and ranked as one of the top figures in the Truman Administration. Given his role, he led the opposition to the creation of the State of Israel, arguing that it would become a strategic disaster for American interests in the Middle East, and as a consequence he was ferociously demonized by Zionist and pro-Israel elements. Soon after Truman’s unexpected 1948 reelection, Forrestal was forced to resign, confined to a mental hospital, and then soon died in an alleged suicide. But as I argued in my article, there seems very strong evidence that he was actually murdered, with Zionist operatives being the most likely suspects.

In his book, Piper suggested that some top-ranking former CIA officials who became strongly critical of Israeli influence were also probably killed by Mossad.

The facts behind all these important events have long remained almost totally hidden from the American people, and this occlusion sometimes even extended to major military incidents. For example, during 1967 Israel launched a deliberate air and sea attack against the U.S.S. Liberty intended to leave no survivors, killing or wounding over 200 American servicemen before word of the attack reached our Sixth Fleet and the Israelis withdrew. That constituted the deadliest assault on an American naval vessel since World War II and if any other nation had been responsible, our country would certainly have declared war. Instead, the American government and media have entirely concealed that history for the last half-century so that even today few Americans are aware that it ever happened. In 2021 I published a long article exhaustively reviewing all aspects of that event.

All of these important incidents and many more besides were discussed in great detail in an article that I published in late January 2020.

But although my work attracted quite a lot of readership at the time and drew more than 1,000 comments, the global Covid epidemic erupted very soon afterwards, completely sweeping aside all other issues. However, now that the Middle East and Israel’s remarkable pattern of political assassinations has returned to center stage, people may wish to reacquaint themselves with some of these facts. Given that the original article ran over 27,000 words, I’ve provided links to several of the main sections that might be of greatest interest.

If even just a fraction of the material I had presented were correct and became widely known in American society, our entire political landscape would be radically transformed. Six months of unrelenting Israeli attacks upon the population of Gaza may have caused enormous numbers of Americans to begin asking questions they had never previously considered. This may constitute the most important lasting legacy of the current Gaza war.

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