A policy advisor to presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says his boss is wrong to defend Israel as it wages its war against Hamas. The advisor, Charles Eisenstein, accuses Israel of committing crimes against Palestinians similar to those perpetrated by Hamas against Israelis on October 7. 

On October 13, Mr. Eisenstein wrote on his Substack blog that he had “been deeply disappointed by [Mr. Kennedy’s] recent statements on Israel.” The Kennedy campaign confirmed to the Sun that Mr. Eisenstein is still working as an advisor to the candidate. 

Mr. Eisenstein condemned “the horrific savagery of the Hamas attack on Israel” and the looming “prospect of a retributive slaughter of the people of Gaza.” He writes: “My disappointment in RFK Jr. is not because I think he has taken the wrong side. It is that he has taken a side. We need leadership that recognizes the tragic and inevitable failure of conquest as a formula for a better world.” 

He says Mr. Kennedy neglecting “to include the travails of the Palestinians in his statements is a symptom of sides-taking. A desperate population like that of Gaza, subject to two generations of violence and humiliation, is a tinderbox of fury waiting to ignite.”

In the wake of October 7, Mr. Kennedy emerged as an especially staunch supporter of Israel. During an interview with the Hill’s Krystal Ball on December 15, Mr. Kennedy said that “the Palestininans have not only rejected [a two-state solution], but Hamas — its whole purpose was … its opposition to any negotiations with Israel.”

A close friend of Mr. Kennedy and the president of the Zionist Organization of America, Mort Klein, tells the Sun that the candidate is a man of “integrity,” adding that he does not doubt Mr. Kennedy’s commitment to Israel. 

“I know Bobby Kennedy very well,” Mr. Klein said in an interview. “I can simply tell you that Bobby Kennedy is as strong a supporter of Israel as anyone I’ve ever known. I know he’s been pressured. … Many Democrats are very angry at him for supporting” Israel. 

The Kennedy scion also accused the Palestinians of being “the most pampered people by international aid organizations in the history of the world.” He says Gaza “should be a paradise” with its “white sand beaches,” but will not be because of Hamas’s actions. 

Just two weeks after Mr. Kennedy’s interview with Ms. Ball, Mr. Eisenstein wrote again on his Substack a piece titled “Friends Don’t Let Friends Destroy Themselves.”

Israel has “squandered all of that sympathy” it received in the wake of the October 7 attack, Mr. Eisenstein argues. “Not only has Israel destroyed whatever remained of its international standing after decades of land grabs and persecution of the Palestinians, but it has also ruined any chance of friendly relations with its neighbors, fulfilling instead the narratives of their worst hardliners.”

In 2023, during an event with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, Mr. Kennedy said it was wrong to call Israel an apartheid state. “A major piece of my campaign will be explaining to Americans why that is wrong and making the case for Israel,” he said of the apartheid characterization. 

He has also accused Israel’s critics of holding the Jewish state to a different set of standards than they do Palestinians. Of the apartheid characterization, he said in November that it is “such an absurd twist and perverted twist, and ultimately if you’re applying a double standard, it reflects a bias, and you’d have to call that bias antisemitism.”