Robert Kennedy's Assassination 40 Years Ago Was in Fact an Eminently Political Act

Decades must often pass before shattering historic events can be truly understood. So it is with the assassination of senator Robert Kennedy, which stunned the world 40 years ago this month.

The killer, Sirhan Sirhan, seemed at the time to fit the pattern of the wild-eyed lunatic that is often associated with political assassins. James Reston, the eminent New York Times columnist, called the murder "a wholly irrational act". Most Americans saw it that way.

Only now is it clear how wrong this view was. Far from being a "maniacally absurd" crime, as Newsweek concluded, the Robert Kennedy assassination was in fact an eminently political act. It was the first "blowback" attack the United States suffered as a result of its Middle East policies.

Sirhan was the first in a line of Arab terrorists that would later produce the bombers of the US Marine barracks in Beirut, American embassies in East Africa, the USS Cole and the World Trade Center in New York.

"I can explain!" Sirhan cried out as he was arrested. "I did it for my country!" At the time, that seemed to be no more than the raving of what one American newspaper called "a mad man". Now that the word understands much more about the upheaval that produced Sirhan, it sounds quite different.

Sirhan was not simply a "Jordanian citizen", as he was called at the time. He was an embittered Palestinian who had been born in 1944 to a Christian family in Jerusalem. During the war that broke out when he was four years old, Jewish insurgents seized his house, and his family was forced to flee. He was nearly killed in an Irgun bombing at the Damascus Gate, and witnessed other violent attacks that deeply traumatised him.

As a young refugee, Sirhan attended a school where teachers exhorted students to struggle for Palestinian rights. Later his family moved to California, and he was there when Israel seized East Jerusalem and other Arab territories in the Six-Day War of 1967. He told at a friend that he believed Fatah was justified in using terror to oppose Israeli rule.

During the 1968 presidential campaign, Sirhan came to identify Robert Kennedy, who he had originally supported, as a friend of Israel. Three weeks before committing his crime, he watched a documentary about Kennedy's involvement with Israel on CBS television. Soon afterward he heard a radio tape of Kennedy telling an audience at a Los Angeles synagogue that he would maintain "clear and compelling" support for Israel. After hearing it, a relative later testified, Sirhan ran from the room with "his hands on his ears, and almost weeping".

Sirhan timed his attack on Kennedy to coincide with the first anniversary of the opening of the Six-Day War. At his trial, he sought several times to place his crime in the Palestinian context. "When you move a whole country, a whole people, bodily from their own homes, from their land, from their business," he said, "that is completely wrong … . That burned the hell out of me." Few Americans had any idea what he was talking about.

"The source of his rage, bitterness, and anger at 'Jews' was not explained in most news stories," Mel Ayton, one of the few analysts who has fully grasped the crime's Middle East connection, wrote in his 2007 book The Forgotten Terrorist: Sirhan Sirhan and the Assassination of Robert F Kennedy. "In those days most Americans had no idea what a 'Palestinian' was and even fewer understood their grievances."

When news of Sirhan's background was flashed back to the Arab world after he killed Kennedy, many people there instinctively understood what had happened. They recognised the crime as a horrific expression of the violent frustration that young Palestinians were beginning to feel. Almost no one in the rest of the world, however, understood this.

Foreign interventions and entanglements often produce unpredictable, even unimaginable long-term consequences. The murder of Robert Kennedy is one example. If Israel had never come into existence, or if the United States had not supported it, or if Kennedy had not reaffirmed that support, Sirhan would probably never have pulled his trigger.

[Via Guardian]