By Ron Unz and Mike Whitney
March 29, 2025
Question 1: Did Israel Kill JFK?
Was Israel involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy? (Is there any hard evidence or is it mostly conjecture?). And if Israel was involved, then what was the alleged motive?
Ron Unz-Although there exists no smoking gun proof implicating Israel and its Mossad in the JFK Assassination, there is an enormous mass of circumstantial evidence that they played a central role in the conspiracy, and they certainly stood very high with regard to means, motive, and opportunity.
Moreover, no other organization has such a remarkably long and bold record of very high-profile political assassinations, with many of the targets having been important Western leaders, even including American presidents.
Yet as I emphasized in one of my earliest 2018 articles on the subject, for more than thirty years after JFK's death almost no one had ever suggested any possible Israeli involvement.
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 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 notes that Stephen Green's 1984 book Taking Sides 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 noted 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.
These new disclosures about the bitter, hidden political struggle between the Kennedy Administration and the Israeli government over the latter's secret nuclear weapons development program caught the attention of Michael Collins Piper, a longtime journalist at The Spotlight, and he soon began exploring the possible connection to the Kennedy's subsequent assassination.
Pursuing that lead, Piper quickly amassed a great deal of circumstantial evidence suggesting that the Israeli Mossad together with its American collaborators had probably played a central role in the 1963 killing in Dallas, evidence that previous assassination researchers had missed or perhaps deliberately ignored. For example, Green's very mainstream 1984 book had noted:
Perhaps the most significant development of 1963 for the Israeli nuclear weapons program, however, occurred on November 22 on a plane flying from Dallas to Washington, D.C., as Lyndon Baines Johnson was sworn in as the 36th President of the United States, following the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Within a few months Piper had produced the manuscript for the first edition of Final Judgment, his seminal work presenting and documenting the Piper Hypothesis, by far the most controversial and explosive analysis of one of the most infamous world events of the twentieth century.
As I began reading some of the most popular and important books in the Kennedy assassination genre by leading researchers such as David Talbot, James W. Douglass, and Roger Stone, I noticed that they carefully excluded any mention of Piper's work, apparently regarding it as just too radioactive to even acknowledge. Similarly, Piper's close friendship with attorney Mark Lane, the founding father of JFK assassination conspiracy studies, may have severely clouded the latter's treatment in the movement that he himself had done so much to create.
Final Judgment went through a number of a reprintings following its original 1994 appearance, and by the sixth edition released in 2004, had grown to over 650 pages, including numerous long appendices and over 1100 footnotes, the overwhelming majority of these referencing fully mainstream sources. The body of the text was merely serviceable in organization and polish, reflecting the total boycott by all publishers, mainstream or alternative, but I found the contents themselves remarkable and generally quite compelling. Despite the most extreme blackout by all media outlets, the book sold more than 40,000 copies over the years, making it something of an underground bestseller, and surely bringing it to the attention of everyone in the JFK assassination research community, though apparently almost none of them were willing to mention its existence. I suspect these other writers realized that even any mere acknowledgement of the existence of the book, if only to ridicule or dismiss it, might prove fatal to their media and publishing career. Piper himself died in 2015, aged 54, suffering from the health problems and heavy-drinking often associated with grim poverty, and other journalists may have been reluctant to risk that same dismal fate.
As an example of this strange situation, the bibliography of Talbot's 2007 book contains almost 140 entries, some rather obscure, but has no space for Final Judgment, nor does his very comprehensive index include any entry for "Jews" or "Israel." Indeed, at one point he very delicately characterizes Sen. Robert Kennedy's entirely Jewish senior staff by stating "There was not a Catholic among them." His 2015 sequel is equally circumspect, and although the index does contain numerous entries pertaining to Jews, all these references are in regards to World War II and the Nazis, including his discussion of the alleged Nazi ties of Allen Dulles, his principal bête noire. Stone's book, while fearlessly convicting President Lyndon Johnson of the JFK assassination, also strangely excludes "Jews" and "Israel" from the long index and Final Judgment from the bibliography, and Douglass's book follows this same pattern.
Furthermore, the extreme concerns that the Piper Hypothesis seems to have provoked among JFK assassination researchers may explain a strange anomaly. Although Mark Lane was himself of Jewish origins and left-wing roots, after his victory for Liberty Lobby in the Hunt libel trial, he spent many years associated with that organization in a legal capacity, and apparently became quite friendly with Piper, one of its leading writers. According to Piper, Lane told him that Final Judgment made "a solid case" for a major Mossad role in the assassination, and he viewed the theory as fully complementary to his own focus on CIA involvement. I suspect that concerns about these associations may explain why Lane was almost completely airbrushed out of the Douglass and 2007 Talbot books, and discussed in the second Talbot book only when his work was absolutely essential to Talbot's own analysis. By contrast, New York Times staff writers are hardly likely to be as well versed in the lesser-known aspects of the JFK assassination research community, and being ignorant of this hidden controversy, they gave Lane the long and glowing obituary that his career fully warranted.
When weighing the possible suspects for a given crime, carefully considering their past patterns of behavior is often a helpful approach. As discussed above, I can think of no historical example in which organized crime initiated a serious assassination attempt against any American political figure even moderately prominent on the national stage. And despite a few suspicions here and there, the same applies to the CIA.
By contrast, the Israeli Mossad and the Zionist groups that preceded the establishment of the Jewish state seem to have had a very long track record of assassinations, including those of high-ranking political figures who might normally be regarded as inviolate. Lord Moyne, the British Minister of State for the Middle East, was assassinated in 1944 and Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN Peace Negotiator sent to help resolve the first Arab-Israel war, suffered the same fate in September 1948. Not even an American president was entirely free of such risks, and Piper notes that the memoirs of Harry Truman's daughter Margaret reveal that Zionist militants had tried to assassinate her father using a letter laced with toxic chemicals in 1947 when they believed he was dragging his heels in supporting Israel, although that failed attempt was never made public. The Zionist faction responsible for all of these incidents was led by Yitzhak Shamir, who later became a leader of Mossad and director of its assassination program during the 1960s, before eventually becoming Prime Minister of Israel in 1986.
If the claims in the 1990s tell-all bestsellers of Mossad defector Victor Ostrovsky can be credited, Israel even considered the assassination of President George H.W. Bush in 1992 for his threats to cut off financial aid to Israel during a conflict over West Bank settlement policies, and I have been informed that the Bush Administration took those reports quite seriously at the time. And although I have not yet read it, the recent, widely-praised book Rise and Kill First by journalist Ronen Bergman suggests that no other country in the world may have so regularly employed assassination as a standard tool of official state policy.
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.
- American Pravda
- Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 25, 2018 • 8,000 Words
For those interested in reading Piper's very lengthy analysis, the 2005 edition of his seminal work is available on this website in convenient HTML format.
- Final Judgment
- The Missing Link in the JFK Assassination Conspiracy
- Michael Collins Piper • 2005 • 310,000 Words
This edition actually incorporates several much shorter works, originally published separately. One of these, consisting of an extended Q&A, describes the genesis of the idea and answers numerous questions surrounding it, and for some readers might represent a better starting point.
- Default Judgment
- Questions, Answers & Reflections About the Crime of the Century
- Michael Collins Piper • 2005 • 48,000 Words
One of the tiny handful of later writers willing to embrace and promote the Piper Hypothesis has been Laurent Guyénot, a leading French conspiracy-researcher. Although I might not necessarily endorse every particular element, I would strongly recommend his 2019 book The Unspoken Kennedy Truth as the best single exposition of the Israel/Mossad case for the JFK Assassination. This paperback summarizes all the important information and is short enough that it can easily be read in just a day or two. His 2018 article on the same subject covers the same information in much more abbreviated form:
- Did Israel Kill the Kennedys?
- Laurent Guyénot • The Unz Review • June 3, 2018 • 9,900 Words
Guyénot also presented this same controversial material in the form of a 2022 documentary available on YouTube. Although perhaps too hagiographic, Israel & The Assassinations of the Kennedy Brothers: A Documentary By Laurent Guyénot likewise constitutes the best video introduction to that subject.
Israel & The Assassinations of the Kennedy Brothers: A Documentary By Laurent Guyénot
Despite being somewhat disorganized, I would also recommend Ryan Dawson's complementary 2023 documentary NUMEC, which focuses very heavily upon Israel's nuclear weapons development program.
rumble.comCandace Owens wraps up the entire story in 3 minutes:
At this stage, if you don't fully agree that Israel Mossad was the main culprit behind JFK assassination, then you're either blackmailed, reetarded, bribed, and/or jewish. pic.twitter.com/ZNwXepIdd6- Machiavelli (@TheRISEofROD) 𝕏 March 21, 2025