When the National Archives and Records Administration released previously unseen documents relating to the assassination of John F. Kennedy last week, the world learned something interesting. It was not anything new about who killed the president, but rather how long it takes anti-Semites to pretend to read some 63,000 pages about his murder before going back to saying that the Jews did it. The answer: less than 24 hours.
Last Tuesday, following an executive order from President Donald Trump, the documents became publicly available. By Wednesday, anti-establishment influencers had figured out who did the deed. “So who killed JFK?” asked one user on X. “The jews,” retorted Stew Peters, a far-right extremist and Holocaust denier with 808,000 followers, who has claimed that Jews sank the Titanic and that “the Constitution is being replaced with the Talmud.” (He has also hosted now–FBI Director Kash Patel six times on his online show.) 
More savvy sorts avoided explicitly impugning Jews for Kennedy’s killing and instead attempted to pin his death on the Jewish state. “It’s PROVEN there was Israeli involvement,” declared the manosphere podcaster Myron Gaines, who subsequently did a six-hour stream for his hundreds of thousands of followers in which he blamed Jewish people and Israel for multiple American catastrophes, including the 9/11 attacks. “We’ve definitely seen enough in the documents to indicate that Israel was involved in some way,” the pro-Trump conspiracy theorist Ian Carroll told his 1.2 million followers on X, just a day after the files were released.
James Li, a correspondent on the popular anti-establishment podcast Breaking Points, winkingly claimed that the truly incriminating material was still being concealed “in Tel Aviv.” Other second-tier talkers attempted to ride this viral trend to greater notoriety, paying Elon Musk’s platform to promote their anti-Jewish fulminations to more users. “Why did Israel kill JFK? Why do they control America? Why do they want world domination? Why do they worship Satan?” read one representative promoted post.
In reality, the newly declassified documents have little to say about Israel at all, let alone Israeli complicity in the assassination. There is a very straightforward reason for this: Israel was not complicit. We know this not just from American investigations, but from previously private Israeli records.
In November 2013, Israel’s national archives released a trove of documents to mark the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination, including the candid reactions of Israel’s leaders to the event. The Hebrew minutes from an Israeli cabinet meeting at the time reveal that the country’s decision makers did not know who killed the American president—and that they had their own conspiracy theories about who did.
“In my opinion, there are some dark corners that I doubt will ever be cleared,” mused the foreign minister and future prime minister Golda Meir, just eight days after Kennedy’s murder. She suggested to her colleagues that Lee Harvey Oswald might have been a communist agent of the Cuban leader Fidel Castro. “If there’s a clandestine group of Castro sympathizers that murdered the president, and it’s organized in a way that they silence the murderer,” she said, “I would say this is as severe as Kennedy’s murder.” (Lyndon B. Johnson shared Meir’s suspicions, though he revealed this only years later.)
So where did the notion that Israel killed JFK come from? Declassified cables trace the allegation to the country’s adversaries in the Middle East. In 1963, the National Security Agency intercepted a diplomatic message sent by a Palestinian source to unknown recipients three days after the assassination, asking supporters of the Palestinian cause to “reveal the conspiracy to the supreme judgment of the world.” The plot in question? “The late President was likelу to win the coming Presidency elections without supplicating the Zionist sympathy or seeking the Jews [sic] votes,” the message claimed. “Aware of the fact that their influence and power in the United States are based upon the Jews [sic] votes, the Zionists murdered the courageous President who was about to destroy that legend of theirs.”
Whether due to outside urging or their own initiative, Israel’s enemies took up this call. “The Syrian regime, always in search of new anti-Zionist arguments, has found, in the murder of President Kennedy, material for a rather unorthodox interpretation of the lamentable event,” reads a declassified cable from seven days after the assassination. “According to the Ba’thist organ, the murder [of Kennedy] must be attributed to Zionism, which is really responsible and trying to cover up the misdeed.”
To anyone remotely familiar with the history, none of this makes any sense. Kennedy was a Zionist and a steadfast supporter of the Jewish state. “We are in this country the youngest of people,” he told the Zionist Organization of America in a 1960 address. “But we are the oldest of republics. Now is our chance in this country to extend the hand of friendship to the oldest of People and the youngest of republics.” Although Kennedy periodically disagreed with Israel on policy, he also sold Israel its first major American weapons system, HAWK anti-aircraft batteries—kicking off a U.S.-Israel partnership in aerial defense that would produce today’s Iron Dome.
Like numerous American politicians before and since, and like the majority of Americans, Kennedy and his brother Robert F. Kennedy were pro-Israel not because of some international Jewish conspiracy, but for entirely non-Jewish, largely geopolitical and religious reasons. Indeed, the sympathies of the Kennedy brothers were so well known that Robert was later assassinated by a Palestinian nationalist during his 1968 presidential campaign. Perhaps all of this is why Oliver Stone, the gadfly movie director and longtime Israel critic, never mentioned the Jewish state in his award-winning conspiratorial film JFK.
Given its implausibility, the “Jews killed JFK” theory was for decades relegated to the rantings of neo-Nazis and Iranian state television. The formerly fringe falsehood didn’t find its way to sudden celebrity because it became more convincing. Rather, the online conduits through which people get their information have supercharged this sort of material.
Today, many Americans turn to TikTok, X, YouTube, and podcasts to get their news and make sense of the world. These platforms have enabled talented creators to reach wide audiences. But without quality control or standards of practice, they also tend to privilege virality over accuracy and conspiracy theorists over more careful content creators. After all, novel content is cheapest and easiest to produce if you just make it up. And that includes anti-Jewish content.
Anti-Semitism is a social prejudice like any other, directed against individual members of a group for their perceived difference—but it also functions as a conspiracy theory. In fact, it is one of the world’s oldest conspiracy theories, furnishing an all-encompassing explanation for how the world works by blaming the world’s political, economic, and social problems on a clandestine cabal of string-pulling Jews.
A discourse dominated by conspiracy theories, then, is one that will be inevitably dominated by anti-Semitism. Once a person becomes convinced that an invisible hand is responsible for the world’s ills, they are just a few Google searches away from centuries of propaganda informing them that the hand belongs to an invisible Jew. The Kennedy assassination is perhaps the most salient subject for such theories in American culture—and this, combined with an online ecosystem optimized for conspiracy theories, practically guarantees the anti-Semitic agitprop we now see.
That agitprop has little to teach us about who actually killed Kennedy. But the prevalence of such unhinged ideas does tell us something disquieting about ourselves and the incentives of the digital discourse we now inhabit—revealing a threat to our republic far greater than any assassin’s bullet.
