Correcting RFK Jr on Israel’s Policies Toward Gaza

As I have previously commented, as a previous supporter of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s presidential candidacy, after watching him try to defend Israel’s genocide in Gaza, my moral conscience left me with no choice but to withdraw my support. Since then, I hadn’t seen him comment about the situation for some time but was notified today that he discussed Gaza in the following video (the discussion of Gaza begins at about 1:14:18):

It is painful for me to watch this because he fundamentally mischaracterizes the nature of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. I feel I have a moral and professional duty to correct the record.

To start with, I share Mr. Kennedy’s view that there is no possible justification for the horrific atrocities perpetrated by Hamas on October 7 against Israeli civilians. I regret that he does not share my view that neither can there be any possible justification for the horrific atrocities perpetrated by Israel against Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

Kennedy claims that Iran planned the 10/7 attacks (which Hamas called “Operation Al Aqsa Flood” for reasons I’ll explain in a forthcoming article). I know of no evidence to support that claim. The US government has acknowledged having no such evidence, and as the New York Times reported on November 8,

In weeks of interviews, Hamas leaders, along with Arab, Israeli and Western officials who track the group, said the attack had been planned and executed by a tight circle of commanders in Gaza who did not share the details with their own political representatives abroad or with their regional allies like Hezbollah, leaving people outside the enclave surprised by the ferocity, scale and reach of the assault.

I was glad to see Kennedy acknowledge that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “has nurtured Hamas” much the same way that the US “nurtured Al Qaeda”. Specifically mentioning Israel’s allowance of funds from Qatar into Gaza, however, Kennedy says that Netanyahu’s aim in doing so was “presumably to buy peace”, which is a completely untenable interpretation of the policy. On the contrary, the explicit aim of Netanyahu’s policy of treating Hamas as a strategic ally was to block any movement toward peace negotiations with the Palestinians. (I’ll also document this at great length in the same forthcoming article mentioned above.)

Regarding 10/7, when the host asks Kennedy his reaction to a recent New York Times article reporting that Israel knew of Hamas’s plan a year in advance but failed to act on the intelligence, Kennedy denies that they had foreknowledge. I view this, too, as untenable given the Times report, which provides clear evidence of foreknowledge. That said, I also do not share the belief that Israel deliberately allowed the attacks to happen. I agree with Kennedy that it was rather a policy failure, which failure was a direct consequence of Netanyahu’s policies. Kennedy mentions how military forces had been relocated from the Gaza armistice line fence (not a “border” as routinely described) to the West Bank, for example.

After briefly commenting on the Israeli military’s failure to stop the attacks, Kennedy rightly points out that Hamas is responsible for its own actions on 10/7. But then he spends the rest of his time hypocritically trying to blame the Palestinians for the consequences of Israel’s actions in the sixteen years leading up to 10/7 and in the two months that have since passed. Nothing is Israel’s fault, in his characterization. Everything bad that has happened to the people of Gaza is Hamas’s fault, and Israel bears no blame for any of it whatsoever.

This is simply not a serious analysis of the situation. On the contrary, it is completely untenable.

Disturbingly, in the context of Israel’s ongoing military operation in Gaza, dubbed “Operation Swords of Iron”, he goes on to describe the civilian population along with Hamas as the “enemy” while praising Israel for not going so far as to “completely flatten” Gaza—as though anything less than the total obliteration of Gaza and its people is somehow praiseworthy and civilized behavior. Israel’s horrific war crimes are uncivilized enough despite falling short of the complete obliteration of everything and everyone in Gaza.

Given what has actually been happening on the ground in Gaza, I consider this to fall dangerously close to incitement of genocide.

In essence, Kennedy repeats the Zionist propaganda trope that Israel has “the most moral army in the world”, which absurd belief I thoroughly dismantled in my book Obstacle to Peace: The US Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. This claim is completely incompatible with the actual nature of the Israeli Defense Force’s (IDF’s) operations in Gaza, such as the 2008-09 “Operation Cast Lead” and the 2014 “Operation Protective Edge”.

Prior to “Cast Lead”, for example, the IDF had announced its intent to implement what it called the “Dahiya Doctrine”, which was an explicit policy of deliberately using disproportionate force to punish the civilian population. In other words, Israel openly announced its intention to commit war crimes in Gaza, and that is precisely what it proceeded to do with systematic attacks on the civilian infrastructure and indiscriminate attacks killing civilians, including attacks on hospitals, UN-run schools where civilians were taking shelter, and the main UN warehouse where humanitarian aid was being stored.

It’s important to also point out that, prior to Operation Cast Lead, there had been a ceasefire that was strictly honored by Hamas and violated by Israel.

Kennedy also essentially parrots the Zionist propaganda trope that Israel withdrew from Gaza out of the goodness of its heart only to be met in response with thousands of rockets fired by Hamas. He accompanies this narrative with the claim that Hamas “hijacked” the Palestinian government, which is a reiteration of the Zionist propaganda claim that Hamas came to power by means of a “coup” against the Palestinian Authority (PA).

Partially to his credit, Kennedy does not deny that Gaza has been appropriately described as the world’s largest open-air prison. Instead, he acknowledges this by responding, “Well, yeah!” Instead of denying it, much to his discredit, he tries to justify it.

To that end, he falsely claims that, prior to Hamas becoming the governing authority in Gaza, Israel had an “open border” with Gaza, and he falsely claims that Israel only built a fence around Gaza in response to Hamas launching attacks against Israel after taking control of Gaza. He also claims that, when Israeli military forces and settlers were withdrawn from Gaza in 2005, Israel gifted the Palestinians in Gaza with greenhouses to make Gaza self-sufficient in food production, in addition to offering “for free” to build a seaport for Gaza.

In the past several years, I have gained a tremendous amount of respect for Mr. Kennedy for his leadership in the fight against medical tyranny and the systematic violation of the right to informed consent under so-called “public health” policies that have nothing to do with public health and everything to do with power, control, and profits for the pharmaceutical industry. Indeed, Mr. Kennedy wrote the Foreword to my book The War on Informed Consent, and while we’ve never met in person, we have corresponded on many occasions, and I’ve considered him a friend.

I also have found him to have sensible positions on matters of US foreign policy, such as the war in Ukraine. While I have differing views on how the economy functions and favor freedom in the marketplace as opposed to inevitably harmful government interventionism, I also have considered him to be someone who is very open-minded and willing to reason, to learn, and to change his views if newly acquired knowledge requires it.

However, when it comes to the Israel-Palestine conflict, I do not see him exercising these great qualities of his character. I do not pretend to understand why, but for whatever reason, he seems wholly committed to the racist ideology of Zionism, regardless of the historical facts, such as the fact that the “Jewish state” of Israel was established by ethnically cleansing most of the indigenous Arab inhabitants from their homes in 1948.

Consequently, I have no words to express my deep disappointment in seeing him try to defend Israel’s 16-year blockade of Gaza aimed at collectively punishing the civilian population in clear violation of international law.

His claim that there was an “open border” prior to 2005 is false. While Israel did upgrade the fence around Gaza in more recent years to prevent Hamas from tunneling underneath it, his claim that there was no fence before 2005 is an absurd lie. To demonstrate the falsity of that claim, it is sufficient to point out how the head of Israel’s National Security Council, Giora Eiland, appropriately described Gaza in 2004 as a “huge concentration camp”.

More recently, Eiland has explicitly advocated genocide in Gaza. Israel must “make Gaza a place that is temporarily, or permanently, impossible to live in”, he wrote in a Ynet article, which is the online edition of the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. He went on to say that “every building” in Gaza “will be a military target”, that Gazans should be told to evacuate to UN-run schools and the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, “and immediately after that the Air Force will attack these targets”. Israel’s military operation, he added, should be aimed at blocking Gazans’ access to goods necessary for survival such as electricity, fuel, and water.

In another article published in Ynetnews, the English-language online edition of Yedioth Ahronoth, Eiland wrote that Israel’s aim should be “to create conditions where life in Gaza becomes unsustainable.” Israel had already shut of electricity and blocked delivery of fuel and water into Gaza, but that wasn’t enough. “Israel needs to create a humanitarian crisis in Gaza” to compel Palestinians to flee for their lives to Egypt—as though this were possible for them given Egypt’s refusal to open the Rafah border crossing to refugees for the simple reason that Egypt is not willing to take responsibility for a humanitarian catastrophe caused by Israel.

Eiland went on to say that there is essentially no such thing as a civilian target in Gaza. Even humanitarian aid convoys would be considered a military target, with the overall aim of making Gaza “a place where no human being can exist.”

I could go on at great length documenting similar expressions of the genocidal intent of Israel’s military operations in Gaza, but I don’t have time at the moment to do so. It suffices to point out that, while Eiland is no longer a government official, the policy he has advocated is precisely the policy that Israel has implemented in its military operation in Gaza, and this is precisely the policy that Mr. Kennedy is shamefully trying to defend.

Coming back to Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, contrary to Kennedy’s characterization, this did not end Israel’s status under international law as the Occupying Power in Gaza. On the contrary, Israel continued to maintain control over Gaza’s borders, airspace, and territorial waters, and it continued to maintain the blockade of Gaza that had been in place since it first invaded and occupied Gaza in 1967.

Contrary to popular belief, as I also detail in my book Obstacle to Peace, the blockade did not begin in 2007 after the ostensible Hamas “coup” in Gaza. At that time, the blockade policy was merely escalated to increase the level of collective punishment of the civilian population of Gaza, such as by blocking importation of such goods as chocolate, potato chips, and cement. At one point, the Israeli government literally calculated the number of calories required to prevent Palestinians from starving as the basis for the amount of food that Israel allowed into Gaza.

The outright siege of Gaza was once again escalated after the 10/7 attacks for the explicit purpose of preventing goods necessary for human survival from entering Gaza, in accordance with the operative plan outlined by Giora Eiland.

To set the historical record straight, the Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s “disengagement plan” involving the withdrawal of military forces and settlers from Gaza in 2005 was specifically aimed at shifting resources from maintaining the illegal occupation and settlement regime in Gaza to the illegal occupation and settlement regime in the West Bank. Additionally, the plan was aimed at blocking any moves toward peace negotiations with the Palestinians.

Here is how Sharon’s senior advisor Dov Weissglass explained the purpose of the “disengagement plan”:

The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process. And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a [US] presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of [the US] Congress. . . . The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.

As for Hamas’s rise to power in Gaza, it must be noted that Israel initially supported Hamas as a counterforce to undermine the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) under the leadership of Yasser Arafat, who had dangerously accepted the two-state solution to the conflict premised on the applicability of international law, including implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 242 requiring Israel to withdraw its forces to the 1949 armistice lines in the aftermath of the war it started in 1967 to take control of the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula, the Syrian Golan Heights, and the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

In January 2004, Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin announced a major policy shift for the group by expressing Hamas’s willingness to accept a Palestinian state alongside Israel along the 1949 armistice lines (a.k.a. the 1967 lines or the Green Line), with a 10-year truce to establish mutual goodwill. Israel’s response was to assassinate Yassin, a quadriplegic, as he was rolling out of a mosque in his wheelchair.

Reflecting the shift in policy, Hamas in 2004 and 2005 participated in municipal elections and in numerous instances defeated Fatah, the party of PA leader Mahmoud Abbas, to win control of local councils. One of the main reasons why Hamas did so well in elections was the recognition by Palestinians that the function of the PA under the Oslo Accords was to serve as Israel’s collaborator in enforcing its occupation regime.

Indeed, as I document in extensive detail in Obstacle to Peace, the whole purpose of the US-led so-called “peace process” was to block implementation of the two-state solution favored by virtually the entire international community apart from Israel and its superpower benefactor.

In January 2005, Hamas issued a document outlining the idea of a unity government with Fatah that again expressing acceptance of a Palestinian state alongside Israel along the 1967 lines. At the same time, Hamas announced its intent to maintain a ceasefire.

Israel’s withdrawal of forces from Gaza was completed on September 12, 2005, and contrary to the standard propaganda narrative, the answer from Hamas was not incessant rocket fire. There were no rockets fired until September 23, when, in response to an IDF raid in the West Bank that killed three Islamic Jihad members, the group fired rockets at Israel. At the same time, Hamas was holding a rally in Gaza City when a truck exploded, killing or wounding dozens. While the cause remains uncertain, Hamas blamed a strike from an Israeli Apache helicopter that had been seen flying over Gaza City and retaliated with rocket fire. On September 25, Hamas announced that it was returning to its ceasefire, and it did so.

In January 2006, Hamas published a manifesto that Western media agencies found remarkable for its absence of any mention of a goal to eliminate Israel. Hamas said it reflected their position of seeking a Palestinian state along the 1967 lines, without prejudice to the internationally recognized right of Palestinian refugees from the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine to return to their homes.

Israel’s response to Hamas’s shift away from armed conflict toward political engagement was to try to prevent Hamas from participating in parliamentary elections. The US also interfered in the elections, violating Palestinian election law by spending $1.9 million to bolster Fatah and threatening to withhold aid to the PA if the elections resulted in a Hamas-led government. Hamas nevertheless defeated Fatah, resulting in a Hamas-led government in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

The response from Israel and the US was to cut off aid to the PA, thus pressuring Fatah to collude with the US and Israel to try to overthrow the democratically elected government, including by arming and training Fatah special forces for that purpose. The coup attempt failed, and Hamas ended up taking complete control over the Gaza Strip, while the PA continued to rule the enclaves in the West Bank where it has administrative authority under the Oslo Accords. PA “President” Mahmoud Abbas thus remains in power despite his legal term having ended in 2009.

Israel’s response to Hamas foiling the conspiracy to overthrow the democratically elected Palestinian government was to escalate its blockade of Gaza to a state of siege in order to punish the civilian population of Gaza for having Hamas as their governing authority. “It’s like an appointment with a dietician,” Sharon’s senior advisor Dov Weissglass joked during a meeting of top Israeli officials about the planned blockade. “The Palestinians will get a lot thinner but won’t die.”

The US State Department confirmed this purpose of the blockade. As stated in a cable from the embassy in Tel Aviv to to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in November 2008:

Israeli officials have confirmed to Embassy officials on multiple occasions that they intend to keep the Gazan economy functioning at the lowest level possible consistent with avoiding a humanitarian crisis…. As part of their overall embargo plan against Gaza, Israeli officials have confirmed to econoffs [US Embassy economic officers] on multiple occasions that they intend to keep the Gazan economy on the brink of collapse without quite pushing it over the edge.

This is the policy that Mr. Kennedy is vainly and hypocritically trying to defend with his comments in the above video.

Kennedy also maintains that the reason why Gazans remain in such extreme poverty is because Hamas steals international humanitarian aid to use for military purposes. While there is no question that Hamas, like the PA, is a corrupt organization, and that Palestinian civilians are victims of Hamas as well as of the Israeli government, it is simply not true that Hamas is the reason for Gaza’s extreme poverty.

On the contrary, the system of tunnels that Hams has built that Kennedy mentions is a consequence of Israel’s blockade as opposed to a reason for that Israeli government policy. Under Israel’s illegal blockade, the tunnels served as an essential means by which Palestinians obtained goods like cement that Israel was blocking to prevent them from rebuilding after its periodic military operations involving deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure.

Kennedy also falsely claims that international humanitarian aid to Gaza is delivered directly to Hamas, which uses it all for military purposes. It is true that Hamas is the governing authority in Gaza, but the international community has taken care to ensure that humanitarian aid goes toward the purposes for which it is intended, and distribution of aid is determined by parties such as the Israeli government, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).

Even the funds provided by Qatar that Kennedy mentioned were under the direction of the Israeli government until an agreement was made for the distribution of those funds to be managed by the UN.

To support his characterization of Israel as some kind of beneficent actor, Kennedy claims that when Israel withdrew military forces and settlers from Gaza in 2005, it gifted greenhouses to the Palestinians only for Hamas to loot them. This is untrue. The greenhouses were not gifted, and Hamas was not responsible for their looting.

What actually happened was that the settlers dismantled half of the greenhouses, which was only halted by the efforts of private foundations and individuals, including predominantly American Jews, who donated $13 million for the greenhouses to be purchased from Israeli settlers. The greenhouses were transferred to the PA under a newly formed project to utilize them for the economic development of Gaza.

However, the PA failed to secure the greenhouses, and they were looted of supplies. The project continued, but after Hamas won parliamentary elections in early 2006 and the US and Israel imposed economic sanctions on the PA, the PA was unable to pay government salaries, and unpaid Fatah security staff left their posts, resulting in the greenhouses again being looted.

Also to support his characterization of Israel as a benevolent actor graciously trying to help the people of Gaza out of the goodness of its heart, Kennedy claims that Israel offered to built Gaza a seaport “for free”, but this generous offer was rejected by Hamas. Kennedy’s claim is pure fiction. The truth is that the seaport was already under development in 2000, years prior to Hamas becoming the de facto governing authority in Gaza, and Israel literally destroyed the seaport in July of that year in violation of the Oslo Accords.

As a result of Israel’s destruction of the project, donor states ceased funding it. While the PA tried to restart construction of the seaport again in 2005, the illegal blockade imposed by Israel following Hamas’s electoral victory and the failed coup attempt by Fatah to overthrow the elected government resulted in the cessation of the development project.

To claim that Israel bears no responsibility for the suffering of the Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza is incredible intellectual dishonesty. I would like to believe that such dishonesty is not within Mr. Kennedy’s character, and yet here I am confronted with it unavoidably.

To provide just a few additional salient facts, about 70 percent of the population of Gaza are refugees from the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine or their descendants. Half of the population are children who have known nothing but the misery of life inside the “huge concentration camp” that Israel has made of Gaza. Words cannot express my disappointment in seeing him try to defend Israel’s 16-year illegal collective punishment of the civilian population and its current genocide in Gaza.

I wanted to believe in Mr. Kennedy and to support his presidential candidacy. But my moral conscience simply will not allow me to do so considering his continued attempts to justify Israel’s systematic violation of the fundamental human rights of the Palestinian people, including Israel’s crimes against humanity in Gaza.

I consequently must consider Mr. Kennedy, whose organization Children’s Health Defense I have previously collaborated with, to be utterly discrediting himself as a defender of children and of human rights by persisting in his attempts to defend Israel’s indefensible war crimes against the civilian population of Gaza.