From the bibliography of a (forbidden, German) book I recently finished. One of the references jumped out at me. It's an excerpt from "Final Judgment, The missing link in the JFK assassination conspiracy" by Michael Collins Piper ,Wolfe Press, 1995 Some of what is said there might be common knowledge to Poalers, some might be news to a few. Quoted some of the relevant bits below but I recommend to check out the whole page. Link and archive: https://thirdworldtraveler.com/Assassinations_page/Chapters_Five-Eight_FJ.html https://web.archive.org/web/20231223082205/https://thirdworldtraveler.com/Assassinations_page/Chapters_Five-Eight_FJ.html The web site where I found the excerpts is an interesting find of its own. https://thirdworldtraveler.com/index.html It's good ol' HTML with no unnecessary bells and whistles. I downloaded the whole shebang with: wget -mpEk "https://thirdworldtraveler.com/" before it's memory holed. >... Obviously, to say the very least, there was no love lost between the two leaders. The U.S.-Israeli relationship was at an ever-growing and disastrous impasse, although virtually nothing was known about this to the American 4) public at the time. p49 President Kennedy's efforts to resolve the problem of the Palestinian refugees also met with fierce and bitter resistance by Ben-Gurion. The Israeli leader refused to agree to a Kennedy proposal that the Palestinians either be permitted to return to their homes in Israel or to be compensated by Israel and resettled in the Arab countries or elsewhere. Former Undersecretary of State George Ball notes in his book, The Passionate Attachment, that "In the fall of 1962, Ben-Gurion conveyed his own views in a letter to the Israeli ambassador in Washington, intended to be circulated among Jewish American leaders, in which he stated: 'Israel will regard this plan as a more serious danger to her existence than all the threats of the Arab dictators and Kings, than all the Arab armies, than all of Nasser's missiles and his Soviet MIGs... Israel will fight against this implementation down to the last man." Clearly, then, by this point, Ben-Gurion perceived the American president's policies to be a very threat to Israel's survival. p50 According to Alfred Lilienthal: "Congress continued to maintain pressures on the White House. The "Israel first" bloc in the Senate attacked the administration for failing to conclude a defense pact to protect Israel and to call an embargo on all arms shipments to the Middle East. "The legislators reechoed the Ben-Gurion contention that Israel had fallen behind in the arms race. Nasser, they claimed, was ready for a pushbutton war. Israel [was] easy to pinpoint and destroy and [could not] retaliate against four or five Arab states at once." By this time-behind the scenes-Kennedy had ordered continuing surveillance of the Israelis and their push for the nuclear bomb. It was a top priority for Kennedy, by all estimations. However, to ensure that Israel's access to intelligence regarding the American spy operation against Israel was limited, the surveillance was being conducted directly out of then-CIA Director John McCone's office. American inspectors the opportunity to come to Israel's nuclear operation at Dimona to verify that-as Israel claimed-the program was peaceful in nature. This was the president's last-ditch effort, apparently, to pacify Israel and, at the same time, find out precisely what was going on at Dimona. But Israel would not permit the inspection. By this time there was a general understanding at the highest ranks of the Kennedy administration that there was a major problem at hand. The president's inner circle had begun to realize that Israel deemed Kennedy's refusal to knuckle under to Israel's demands as a dire threat to Israel's survival. According to then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, speaking in retrospect, "I can understand why Israel wanted a nuclear bomb. There is a basic problem there. The existence of Israel has been a question mark in history, and that's the essential issue." The Israelis - and particularly Ben-Gurion - would no doubt agree. In their view, John F. Kennedy himself was emerging as a threat to Israel's very existence: JFK would simply not countenance a nuclear Israel and Israel's leaders believed that a nuclear Israel would ensure the continued survival of the Jewish State. p52 John Hadden, the former CIA station chief in Tel Aviv at the time believes that John F. Kennedy was the last American president to have really tried to stop the advent of the Israeli atomic bomb. "Kennedy really wanted to stop it," said Hadden, "and he offered them conventional weapons [for example, the Hawk missiles] as an inducement. "But the Israelis were way ahead of us. They saw that if we were going to offer them arms to go easy on the bomb, once they had it, we were going send them a lot more, for fear that they would use it." p55 By spring of 1963, Kennedy and Ben-Gurion were at loggerheads, more seriously than ever before. What's more, Ben-Gurion was suffering a deep personal crisis (part of which, we now see, stemmed from his unhappy relationship with John F. Kennedy). According to the Israeli prime minister's biographer, Dan Kurzman: "Lonely and depressed, Ben-Gurion felt strangely helpless. Leadership of Israel was slipping from his withered hands... Ben-Gurion began to show signs of paranoia. Enemies were closing in on him from all sides. A mere declaration by Egypt, Syria and Iraq in April 1963 that they would unite and demolish the "Zionist threat" threw him into near-panic." ... All of this, of course, contributed immensely to the problems between Kennedy and Ben-Gurion. Seymour Hersh writes: "Kennedy's relationship with Ben-Gurion remained al an impasse over Dimona, and the correspondence between the two became increasingly sour. None of those letters has been made public." ... Like much of the secret government files on the JFK assassination, the Kennedy exchanges with Ben-Gurion also have not been released - not even to U.S. government officials with full security clearances who have attempted to write classified histories of the period. "It was not a friendly exchange," according to Ben-Gurion's writer, Yuval Neeman. "Kennedy was writing like a bully. It was brutal." Ben-Gurion's response was not passive either. All of this exacerbated tensions-fierce tensions-between the American President and the Israeli leader. Kennedy's impatience was building. Relations between the United States and Israel were unlike they had ever been before. According to Hersh, "The resident made sure that the Israeli prime minister paid for his defiance." When Ben-Gurion once again sought the opportunity for a formal, ballyhooed state visit to Washington, Kennedy rebuffed him. ... It was then that Ben-Gurion made his position all too clear. He was convinced that what he perceived to be Kennedy's intransigence was an all-out threat to the continued survival of the Jewish State. JFK was perceived as an enemy of the Jewish people. In one of his final communications with Kennedy, Ben-Gurion wrote: "Mr. President, my people have the right to exist.. . and this existence is in danger." It was at this time that Ben-Gurion demanded that Kennedy sign a security treaty with Israel. Kennedy refused. On June 16, 1963 Ben-Gurion abruptly resigned as prime minister and defense minister. Thus, the "prophet of fire" ended his fifteen year career as grand old man of Israel. At the time, the Israeli press-and indeed the world press-told the world that Ben-Gurion's sudden resignation was a result of his dissatisfaction with domestic political scandals and turmoil that were rocking Israel. However, the primary reason behind Ben-Gurion's departure was the Israeli leader's inability to pressure JFK into accepting Israel's demands. According to Hersh: "There was no way for the Israeli public... to suspect that there was yet another factor in Ben-Gurion's demise: is increasingly bitter impasse with Kennedy over a nuclear-armed Israel." ... In Ben-Gurion's eyes, John F. Kennedy was an enemy of the Jewish people and of his beloved state of Israel. It is the thesis of this volume that Ben-Gurion, in his final days as Prime Minister, ordered Israel's Mossad to orchestrate the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Based upon additional evidence uncovered, we believe that the Mossad took the necessary steps and achieved that goal. A MOSSAD HIT SQUAD ... Israel's respected Haaretz newspaper reported on July 3, 1992 that it was former Jewish underground terrorist-turned-Mossad operative Yitzhak Shamir (later Israeli Prime Minister) who headed a special Mossad hit squad during his service in the Mossad. The Israeli newspaper reported that Shamir headed the assassination unit from 1955 until 1964 - the year after JFK's assassination. "The unit carried out attacks on perceived enemies and suspected Nazi War criminals," according to an account of the newspaper's report. ... With Israel's intimate ties to not only the American CIA but also the Meyer Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate-(which we will examine in much further detail-)-the Israeli prime minister and his Mossad operatives had in place a network of allies with whom they could easily collaborate in orchestrating the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Each of these powerful forces had good reason to take drastic action to put an end to the threat posed by JFK. ...