US Democratic Party Presidential candidate, Robert F. Kennedy Jr recently sat down with celebrity rabbi Shmuley Boteach at an event in New York to perform a pre-prepared set of pro-Israel talking points. This came after the politician stated that Covid-19 didn’t affect Jewish and Asian people as much as White and Black Americans, drawing complaints of anti-Semitism from aspiring statesman.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s support of Israel, showcased in a recent event in New York, has been broadly interpreted to have been set up in order to run damage control over claims of anti-Semitism against the Democratic Party contender. RFK’s pandering to Israel tipped over into conflations between Jewish people and the Israeli regime, with the Presidential hopeful going on to deny that Palestinians lived under a racist Apartheid regime. Kennedy shared that,

“a major piece of my campaign will be explaining to Americans why that is wrong and making the case for Israel.”

RFK, despite pegging himself as the anti-establishment figure running within the Democratic party, takes an even more extreme pro-Zionist view than the sitting US President, Joe Biden, as he slammed his own party’s acknowledgment that Israel occupy’s Palestinian territory. In terms of his pro-Israel stance, there is little that seems to separate Kennedy and former US President Donald Trump, with RFK demonstrating a much more robust understanding of Israeli history and pro-Israel talking points.

Debunking RFK’s Pro-Israel Talking Points

During the course of the dialogue between Rabbi Shumely Boteach and RFK, the Presidential candidate made a large number of factually incorrect statements and spread provably false accusations about Iran, the Palestinians, the Arab world, and the Israeli government itself. To address each point in extensive detail would be too lengthy, however, the following claims are in need of rebuttal.

Claim 1: Israel is the only nation in the Middle East with freedom of expression

False: To begin with, Israel was ranked 97 in the world for press freedom, by Reporters Without Borders, in 2023. On the leading NGO’s website, it is stated that “Palestinian journalists are systematically subjected to violence as a result of their coverage of events in the West Bank, and Israeli reporters are barred from entering the Gaza Strip.” The 2022 assassination of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh by Israeli security forces remains unpunished, despite strong pressure from the international community and the Israeli authorities’ admission, as well as video evidence, witness testimony, and forensic evidence all finding that this was a targeted killing by the IDF. The climate of impunity has only increased violence against Palestinian journalists in Israel, as well as in the West Bank and Gaza.” Reporters Without Borders also understates the number of Palestinian journalists currently held under Israeli detention and has not factored in the countless shootings carried out by the Israeli military, against Palestinians journalists, so far this year. The Committee to Protect Journalists has also protested that Israel’s murder of 20 renowned Palestinians journalists over 22 years, without anyone being held accountable, endangers reporters further.

While the Middle East may have a very low standard for protection of journalists, no other nation has a two tier system of racial segregation, with separate sets of laws to target a specific ethnicity. The Israeli police have even barred the display of Palestinian flags in public, attacking and injuring those who have displayed it. The Israeli Knesset is currently in the process of advancing a bill that will make it a criminal offense to display the flag of Palestine. The current Israeli border authorities also frequently detain, interrogate, and deport people for the very reason that they are interpreted to hold anti-Israel beliefs, whether or not they do, based largely on their ethnicity. In the US, this is called racial profiling and is considered by most as racist and unacceptable, yet those same people often turn a blind eye in the case of Israel.

Claim 2: Israel is the only place in the Middle East where women have rights

False: Bobby Kennedy claimed that Israel is the only place in the Middle East where women have rights, he then went on to say that women in Iran “are being jailed for wearing habibs, uh, for not wearing habibs”. To begin with, the word he is trying to say is hijab, which is the term for an Islamic headscarf. The mere fact that he repeatedly said the word habib, which means “darling” in Arabic, demonstrates his lack of knowledge on the subject. However, getting past that semantic point, the Israeli system is again a two-tiered one, where Palestinian women are afforded no rights at all in the occupied territories. One cannot claim that because Jewish Israeli women have a set of rights that in many ways replicate those that are afforded to women across the collective West, that Israel in its totality is a State that performs well on women’s rights.

Furthermore, there are decency laws in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Morality police (that are small units) that will sometimes appear in public spaces to either tell women to put on their headscarfs, and in the worse cases arrest women for not doing as such, and there is a small possibility of arrest for not wearing one. It is important to note that the harassment faced by women inside Iran for this is indeed a real thing and there are cases of abuse for not wearing the hijab. Yet to say this type of dynamic does not exist in the West is simply not true. One obvious example of such a dynamic is the recent vaccination craze, wherein people are still being pressured to adhere to a government required action, and demonized and attacked if they do not. What is often ignored in this discussion about hijabs is that many women in Iran choose to wear these, both for religious adherence as well as an act of rebellion against the previous illegal US occupation, while other do because they feel they must for varying reasons. The Western media has clearly exploited the situation in order to demonize their enemy, which has brought with it much exaggeration.

In addition to this, the point that RFK is making was concocted to stereotype Middle Eastern men as being backwards and oppressive towards women. While in various Middle Eastern nations, there are a number of laws that restrict female freedom of movement, dress and expression, by no means are all Middle Eastern nations the same. For instance, in Turkey or even Lebanon, anyone who goes on holiday there will see with their own eyes how women are free to dress, work, and behave in a similar manner to their Western female counterparts. In the region, societal pressures and cultural norms will create certain restrictions for women in different contexts, which is made apparent when you visit different parts of Middle Eastern countries. If you are to travel to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan for instance, you will see that women who live in the city of Amman are going to be treated completely different than if you were to travel to a more isolated village community. Similarly, Jewish Israeli women who live in Tel Aviv are treated starkly different to Jewish Israeli women who are living in Ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods located in Jerusalem; where women are often isolated to remaining indoors and even kept from attaining literacy in some instances.

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