Was JFK's Assassination A Zionist Coup?

unz |  November 22, 1963 was a coup d’état. That is the premise from which any discussion about JFK’s assassination should start. The coup was invisible at the time, because Johnson created an illusion of continuity. What changed dramatically only became public knowledge in the 1990s. In the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs in 2009, we read that, “Lyndon Johnson Was First to Align U.S. Policy With Israel’s Policies.”

Up to Johnson’s presidency, no administration had been as completely pro-Israel and anti-Arab as his. … Not only was he personally a strong supporter of the Jewish state but he had a number of high officials, advisers and friends who shared his view. … These officials occupied such high offices as the ambassador to the United Nations, the head of the National Security Council and the number two post at the State Department. They were assiduous in putting forward Israel’s interests in such memoranda as “What We Have Done for Israel” and “New Things We Might Do in Israel” and “How We Have Helped Israel.” … So pervasive was the influence of Israel’s supporters during Johnson’s tenure that CIA Director Richard Helms believed there was no important U.S. secret affecting Israel that the Israeli government did not know about in this period.[8]

Although Dimona was probably the most urgent reason for replacing JFK with LBJ, as Michael Collins Piper has shown in his groundbreaking book Final Judgment, it was not the only one. The problem of Dimona cannot be separated from the wider geopolitical context of the Cold War. For the Soviets were as worried as Kennedy about nuclear proliferation.[9] Against Piper’s theory, it has been argued that Kennedy had no power to stop Israel from getting the Bomb, and that there was therefore no necessity for Israel to kill him.[10] That may be true: the real danger for Israel was if both the United States and the Soviet Union joined their effort to thwart Israel’s nuclear ambition. When Khrushchev’s minister of Foreign Affairs Andrei Gromyko visited the White House on October 3, 1963 to discuss ways of expanding the progress of the Limited Test Ban treaty, Kennedy tasked his Secretary of State Dean Rusk to bring up the issue of Israel’s secret nuke program with Gromyko in his evening meeting at the Soviet Embassy.[11] If Americans and Russians agreed to stop Israel from getting the Bomb, Israel would have had to comply.

But worst than the risk of being deprived of their “Samson option”, the nascent cooperation between Kennedy and Khrushchev toward détente presented an even more distressing danger: their common support of Israel’s greatest foe, Egypt. This point is well made by author Salvador Astucia in Opium Lords: Israel, the Golden Triangle, and the Kennedy Assassination (2002, in pdf here)[12]:

Both Kennedy and Khrushchev had stronger ties with Egyptian President Nasser than with Israel. Their befriending of Nasser, a living icon symbolizing Arab unity, was a signal to Israel that both superpowers had more interest in the Arab world than in Israel’s continued existence as a Jewish homeland, let alone its expansion into neighboring Arab territories.[13]

“In short,” writes Astucia, “détente would mark the beginning of the end for Israel as a world power because neither superpower had a strategic interest in Israel.”[14] What was urgently needed was to transform Egypt into a ground for confrontation rather than rapprochement.

Astucia published his book in 2002, and lacked hindsight on 9/11 to draw the parallel that can now be drawn between President Kennedy’s assassination and the false flag attacks of September 11^th, 2001. The parallel should be clear to those who now understand that 9/11 was both a massive psychological operation and a foreign policy coup aimed at drawing the U.S. on the side of Israel against its Arab enemies (see my previous Unz Review article). As I wrote for the film 9/11 and Israel’s Great Game: “In 2001, Israel’s reputation had fallen to its lowest level in international public opinion. Condemnations were voiced from all sides against its apartheid and colonization policies, and its systematic war against Palestinian leadership structures. The attacks of 9/11 instantly reversed this trend. Americans experienced the attacks as an act of hatred on the part of the Arab world, and thus felt immediate sympathy for Israel. … Overnight, after the 9/11 attacks, Western opinion had amalgamated the Arab world and the Palestinian resistance with Islamic terrorism.”