UNITED NATIONS – A Washington-based organization dedicated to the memory of Robert F. Kennedy is spearheading a campaign to pressure the State Department to allow an anti-Israeli Palestinian Arab activist, Raji Sourani, to enter America without going through anti-terror procedures.

According to the director of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights, Todd Howland, Israel is “a country that international law holds is illegally occupying [Palestinian Arab] territory.” Gaza residents, Mr. Howland adds in an e-mail circulated yesterday, should therefore not be expected to ask Israel to vouch for him before entering America.

The man at the center of the campaign against perceived unfair travel restrictions, Mr. Sourani, is active in a campaign to bar Israeli Defense Force officers from entering several countries, by slapping them with lawsuits that tag them as “war criminals.”

Robert Kennedy was gunned down in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968 by a Christian Arab born in Jordanian-held Jerusalem, Sirhan Sirhan. It was the Democratic presidential front runner’s support of Israel that Mr. Sirhan cited as the sole reason for the assassination.

It was during the 1967 Six Day War that Israel came to occupy the territories that the RFK Memorial now claims it occupies illegally. “I don’t see the irony,” a spokeswoman for the RFK memorial, Sushetha Gopallawa, told The New York Sun yesterday, when asked about the anti-Israeli rhetoric of an organization memorializing an American icon who was shot for being perceived by a Palestinian Arab as too pro-Israel.

An activist Gaza-based lawyer who has clashed both with Israeli and Arab authorities, Mr. Sourani first received a human rights award from the RFK Memorial in 1991. He was scheduled to visit Washington next week, but the American consulate in East Jerusalem has not yet granted him an entry visa. In yesterday’s e-mail, the organization called on “members of the media and human rights community to ask State Department officials how this could happen.”

Like all visa applicants, Mr. Sourani is being taken care of “according to U.S. law,” which includes “individual requirements,” a spokeswoman for the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs, Angela Aggeler, told the Sun. She could not specifically comment on the case, she said, since “all visa records are confidential.” But, she added, consular decisions are not influenced by political considerations.

Rare among non-governmental organizations in the territories, Mr. Tourani’s Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights “is one of the few organizations that issue condemnations of Palestinian institutions,” said the Israeli-based director of NGO Monitor, Gerald Steinberg.

But Mr. Steinberg, who specializes in detecting anti-Israeli bias among NGOs and human rights organizations, added that there is another side to Mr. Tourani. His anti-Israeli activities allow his organization to continue operating under Palestinian Arab Gaza authorities. Mr. Tourani is mostly prominent in a “campaign to harass IDF officers,” Mr. Steinberg said.

The retired southern district commander of the IDF, Doron Almog, was forced to remain aboard an El Al plane after landing at London’s Heathrow airport in September after British authorities issued an arrest warrant against him at the request of Mr. Sourani’s organization, which claimed that Mr. Almog, whose jurisdiction had included Gaza, is a war criminal. The warrant was later rescinded.

According to the RFK Memorial email, Mr. Sourani’s American visa problem stems from protests against a rule enacted after September 11, requiring Palestinian Arabs in the territories to be cleared by the Israeli authorities before traveling to America.

Citing the November 1967 Security Council Resolution 242, Mr. Howland said Israel has no legal rights in the territories. “Forcing a Palestinian to obtain a police clearance from an occupier who was instructed to withdraw over 35 years ago is absurd,” he said.