Cycles of violence

On the shooting in Washington DC.

Ever since Israel started up its genocidal assault on Gaza — with Israelis sadistically reveling in the murder and suffering that they are inflicting with the American government and civil society fully complicit — I had wondered many times when this gruesome violence will start to blow back to people here in the US. America, awash with guns, is primed for political assassinations like no other country on Earth. And yet, targeted political killings — like the one Luigi Mangione carried out — are rare. Most of the time, people turn their violence inward — killing themselves, each other, shooting up schools, murdering coworkers.

There have been a lot of protests here against the Israeli-American genocide in Gaza. But not anything violent. Well, the only two acts of real political violence that did happen were carried out by Aaron Bushnell and Matt Nelson. They lit themselves on fire to protest Israel’s genocide and died as a result. But their political violence was against themselves. They martyred themselves, sacrificing their own lives in the hopes of shocking Americans out of apathy at what their own government is doing. It didn’t work that well. America’s civil society barely noticed what they did, and most brushed them off as crazy and even mocked their deaths.

What happened last night in DC is different. In this case, two people working for the government of Israel were killed. They were shot by a man outside an event for pro-Israel Jewish professionals hosted by the American Jewish Committee, one of the most powerful pro-Israel political groups in America. The shooter, Elias Rodriguez, was very clear about why he did what he did. He posted a manifesto on Twitter and yelled “Free, Free Palestine” after he turned himself in right after the act. His political violence was definitely not turned inward. It was turned outward.

The two young diplomats he killed had no power over anything. Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky were a young couple just starting their careers in Israeli diplomacy. One was born in Kansas, the other in Israel — in a settlement built atop a depopulated Palestinian village. They were nobodies, really. But people in power are hard to get to, and so the ones in their orbit — the ones with no protection, the peons — are the ones who usually suffer first. Bibi and Smotrich or Biden and Blinken are not easy to catch off guard.

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The outrage that a lot of Jewish Americans are feeling right now is misplaced. What do you expect to happen when you support a genocide? What do you want when your politics are indistinguishable from the Third Reich’s? You think that you’ll always be insulated from the violence you support? Do you really think that someone somewhere won’t snap? That no one will go crazy watching video after video of infants blown apart, their heads ripped open by Israel’s bombs? Do you really think that you and your children will never pay the price? That violence goes only one way? This is the height of hubris.¹

The deaths of Sarah and Yaron are tragic. But it didn’t have to be this way. There could have been a different world — a world where these two young people didn’t have to stand, happy and smiling, in front of a symbol that’s become the 21st century swastika.

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A lot of Jews have convinced themselves that Israel guarantees Jewish safety. But Israel has done the exact opposite. It puts Jews at risk like never before. Zionism — this stupid dream of a pure Jewish state — has been pumping death, suffering, and hate into the world faster and faster the last two years, and that violence and hate is refracting and coming back to us now…coming back for us all. It won’t matter if you support Israel or if you loathe the hick supremacist ideology that powers Jewish identity today. When blowback comes, it won’t distinguish the finer points of your identity.

All over the news we’re seeing this attack being called antisemitic. I read the “manifesto” that Elias Rodriguez, the man who pulled the trigger, put on Twitter before the attack. I must say that I didn’t notice any antisemitism in it. He writes about America’s complicity in the Gaza genocide as much as it talks about Israel’s. A lot of it is about America’s imperial actions, including those in Yemen. In fact, Elias doesn’t use the word “Jew” or “zionist” at all. The word he uses is Israel. And Israel is not all Jews. Israel is a state — and right now it is a state carrying out a genocide. I think that as many Jews as possible should be vocal about disassociating ourselves from Israel. We have to fight this narrative. We have to try to prevent a real antisemitic turn from coming into existence because of what Israel and America are doing.

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We’ll know a lot more about Rodriguez in the coming days. Who knows maybe they’ll dig up something we don’t yet know, beyond the fact that he went from a standard lefty millennial protesting imperialism and Amazon to assassinating people. He made a leap that I imagine not a few young people with little to lose are verging on more and more these days.

So with that I think it makes sense to repost what he wrote in full so you can decide for yourself whether his act was antisemitic or not. Though a warning: His note is well written and thoughtful. Don’t be surprised if you learn a thing or two or find yourself agreeing with pretty much everything he writes.

Explication

May 20, 2025

Halintar is a word that means something like thunder or lightning. In the wake of an act people look for a text to fix its meaning, so here's an attempt. The atrocities committed by Israelis against Palestine defy description and defy quantification. Instead of reading descriptions mostly we watch them unfold on video, sometimes live. After a few months of rapidly mounting death tolls Israel had obliterated the capacity to even continue counting the dead, which has served its genocide well. At time of writing the Gaza health ministry records 53,000 killed by traumatic force, at least ten thousand lie under rubble, and who knows how many thousands more dead of preventable disease, hunger, with tens of thousands now at risk of imminent famine due to Israeli blockade, all enabled by Western and Arab government complicity. The Gaza information office includes the ten thousand under the rubble with the dead in their own count. In news reports there have been those "ten thousand" under the rubble for months now, despite the continual making of more rubble and repeated bombing of rubble again and again and the bombing of tents amid the rubble. Like the Yemen death toll which had been frozen at some few thousand for years under Saudi-UK-US bombardment before being belatedly revealed to stand at 500k dead, all of these figures are almost surely a criminal undercount. I have no trouble believing the estimates that put the toll at 100,000 or more. More have been murdered since March of this year than in "Protective Edge" and "Cast Lead" put together. What more at this point can one say about the proportion of mangled and burned and exploded human beings whom were children. We who let this happen will never deserve the Palestinians' forgiveness. They've let us know as much.

An armed action is not necessarily a military action. It usually is not. Usually it is theater and spectacle, a quality it shares with many unarmed actions. Nonviolent protest in the opening weeks of the genocide seemed to signal some sort of turning point. Never before had so many tens of thousands joined the Palestinians in the streets across the West. Never before had so many American politicians been forced to concede that, rhetorically at least, the Palestinians were human beings, too. But thus far the rhetoric has not amounted to much. The Israelis themselves boast about their own shock at the free hand the Americans have given them to exterminate the Palestinians. Public opinion has shifted against the genocidal apartheid state, and the American government has simply shrugged, they'll do without public opinion then, criminalize it where they can, suffocate it with bland reassurances that they're doing all they can to restrain Israel where it cannot criminalize protest outright. Aaron Bushnell and others sacrificed themselves in the hopes of stopping the massacre and the state works to make us feel their sacrifice was made in vain, that there is no hope in escalating for Gaza and no point in bringing the war home. We can't let them succeed. Their sacrifices were not made in vain.

The impunity that representatives of our government feel at abetting this slaughter should be revealed as an illusion, then. The impunity we see is the worst for those of us in immediate proximity to the genocidaires. A surgeon who treated victims of the Mayan genocide by the Guatemalan state recounts an instance in which he was operating on a patient who'd been critically injured during a massacre when, suddenly, armed gunmen entered the room and shot the patient to death on his operating table, laughing as they killed him. The physician said the worst part was seeing the killers, well known to him, openly swagger down local streets in the years after.

Elsewhere a man of conscience once attempted to throw Robert McNamara off a Martha's Vineyard-bound ferry into the sea, incensed at the same impunity and arrogance he saw in that butcher of Vietnam as he sat in the ferry's lounge laughing with friends. The man took issue with McNamara's "very posture, telling you, 'My history is fine, and I can be slumped over a bar like this with my good friend Ralph here and you'll have to lump it.'" The man did not succeed in heaving McNamara off a catwalk into the water, the former secretary of state managed to cling to the railing and clamber back to his feet, but the assailant explicated the value of the attempt by saying "Well, I got him outside, just the two of us, and suddenly his history wasn't so fine, was it?"

A word about the morality of armed demonstration. Those of us against the genocide take satisfaction in arguing that the perpetrators and abettors have forfeited their humanity. I sympathize with this viewpoint and understand its value in soothing the psyche which cannot bear to accept the atrocities it witnesses, even mediated through the screen. But inhumanity has long since shown itself to be shockingly common, mundane, prosaically human. A perpetrator may then be a loving parent, a filial child, a generous and charitable friend, an amiable stranger, capable of moral strength at times when it suits him and sometimes even when it does not, and yet be a monster all the same. Humanity doesn't exempt one from accountability. The action would have been morally justified taken 11 years ago during Protective Edge, around the time I personally became acutely aware of our brutal conduct in Palestine. But I think to most Americans such an action would have been illegible, would seem insane. I am glad that today at least there are many Americans for which the action will be highly legible and, in some funny way, the only sane thing to do.

I love you Mom, Dad, baby sis, the rest of my familia, including you, O*****

Free Palestine

-Elias Rodriguez

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Want to know more?

Thoughts on lobbies and atavistic violence

Zionists tried to use God. But God used them.

The unbearable uselessness of liberal anti-zionism

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1. I can’t help here but think of Alexander Dugin’s daughter, who was accidentally assassinated in her father’s place because of the ideas that her father put out into the world.