Debunking Antisemitism: The JFK/Israel Conspiracy

In recent years, social media has become a breeding ground for conspiracy theories, including the disturbing claim that Israel was behind the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

This theory has gained some traction online primarily through selective interpretations of recently declassified documents. Let’s break down the theory, show why it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, and explain why it spread specifically now.

The theory claims that Israel wanted revenge for JFK’s pushing for inspections of Israel’s Dimona nuclear facility, as a part of his nuclear non-proliferation policy. Israel then used its connections with various people in the US to orchestrate his murder.

This so-called “motive” that antisemites claim Israel had is weak. JFK’s nuclear policy was not unique to Israel. Kennedy advocated for nuclear inspections for nuclear-capable countries globally, including allies like France or India. Kennedy was also a staunch supporter of Israel. He was the first U.S. president to approve arms sales to the country in 1962, including Hawk anti-aircraft missiles. The idea that Israel would want to assassinate a friendly President simply because of policy disagreement is ridiculous.

Beyond the question of motivation, what are the pieces of evidence that the proponents of this theory claim point to Israel?

When the JFK files were finally released in March, 2025, many antisemities searched them for any mention of Jews or Israel being involved in Kennedy’s assassination. One file noted a conversation between an Egyptian and a Saudi who guessed Israel was behind it. This was shared on social media as “proof,” but it was just rumors from a biased source in the Middle East.

This is a form of “information laundering,” where people will claim an unverified rumor has a source, but the earlier report was itself an unverified rumor.

Another couple files released in the 2025 batch were memos from 1954 about James Angleton, a CIA officer and head of the CIA’s Israel desk. The file discusses the practices of giving over intelligence information. The text of the file shows Israel would clear with Angelton first, before revealing intelligence outside the CIA. There is nothing connecting this memo, written almost a decade before the assassination, to JFK.

Antisemites jumped on these pages since the CIA bracketed the words “Israel” and “Israeli Intelligence” as words they objected to releasing. However, these brackets also appear on many different names, codes, and information in the files. There’s no information at all that shows Israel had a hand in JFKs death.

A JFK file released in 2018, sometimes implied to have been newly released in 2025, contains a quote from a Cuban anti-Castro arms dealer named Homer S. Echevarria speaking to government informant Thomas Mosley. Echevarria claimed to him, “We now have plenty of money—our new backers are Jews—as soon as ‘we’ (or ‘they’) take care of Kennedy,” the day before the Kennedy assassination, which caught the attention of the Secret Service and FBI. Upon their investigation, they found no connection between Echevarria or his words to the assassination. One Secret Service Agent, Joseph Noonan, even expressed doubts about Mosley’s report, believing Echevarria was just being a braggart.

The same pattern occurs over and over again. There is no evidence, no list of names, no smoking gun. To the conspiracy theorist, there doesn’t need to be; the culprit has already been found. They only need to find the evidence after the fact. And when the evidence isn’t found, they create it instead with documents taken out of context.

The existence of this theory is strange in and of itself. Most JFK conspiracies have been out there for decades. The culprits in these conspiracy theories are the CIA or the mafia or anti-Castro Cubans or Lyndon Johnson. All of these theories were proposed in the 1960s, soon after he was murdered. The emergence of this new JFK theory in the social media age suggests it is rooted in the way social media works.

Social media’s role in amplifying such lies echoes Hitler’s “Big Lie” tactic. The Big Lie is the tactic of spreading falsehoods so outrageous that people believe no one would actually say it unless it was the truth. And modern social media rewards engagement: The amount of people who view your post or video is the barometer for success according to social media platforms circa 2025.

Combatting the rapid spread of lies and propaganda on social media remains a work in progress and education is our most powerful tool. Understanding JFK’s documented support for Israel, alongside a careful review of the 2025 JFK files equips us to reject antisemitic conspiracies that falsely implicate Jews or Israel in his assassination.

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