Articles

The Israeli Embassy Murders as a Rorschach Test, by Alexander Reid Ross – 3 June 2025

From New Lines Magazine.

Reactions from both the left and the right to the shooting of the diplomatic staffers in Washington reveal a troubling ideological myopia

On May 21, two staffers for the Israeli Embassy in Washington were gunned down outside a Jewish museum in the American capital. Their names were Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim. They had hopes and dreams. Lischinsky was planning to propose to Milgrim and had already bought the ring. Milgrim’s LinkedIn bio reveals her interests “at the intersection of peacebuilding, religious engagement, and environmental work.” She had a certificate from the United States Institute of Peace. A 31-year-old man named Elias Rodriguez, who held left-wing views, was charged with their murder.

Lischinsky and Milgrim had attended a Young Diplomats Reception put on by the American Jewish Committee at the Capital Jewish Museum. Based on what we know so far, Rodriguez gunned them down in cold blood, shooting them in the back and then firing into their collapsed bodies. When Milgrim tried to crawl away, he followed her and unloaded more bullets into her. The gun clicked. “After a brief moment,” he reloaded, according to the court document. It remains unclear what went through his mind during this moment. Perhaps a brief hesitation. Then he shot her again, repeatedly, until the slide locked.

The shooter then jogged into the Jewish Museum, sat down and chanted “Free Palestine!” Police arrived and took him into custody. Milgrim was pronounced dead 40 minutes after the shooting.

A week and a half later, on the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, an Egyptian immigrant named Mohamed Sabry Soliman reportedly targeted a “Run for Their Lives” event in Boulder, Colorado, which bills itself as a “family-friendly” 1-kilometer walk/run to raise awareness for the hostages currently held by Hamas. Soliman shouted slogans like “Palestine is free!” and attacked the peaceful group with Molotov cocktails and a “makeshift flamethrower.” Initial reports indicated that he injured eight people before police could apprehend him, women and men aged 52 to 88, with the victim count later rising to 12.

It’s important not to dismiss or belittle the feelings of heartbreak and rage over the double murder of a Jewish couple in love and struck down in their prime or the Boulder attack, but reactions from a number of self-styled anti-imperialists have so far missed this point. Following the Jewish Museum massacre, the conspiracy theory blogger Caitlin Johnstone insisted on her website, “The real story here is how the entire western political/media class has expressed more outrage and sympathy over the killing of two Israeli Embassy staffers than tens of thousands of Palestinians in history’s first live-streamed genocide.”

Behind Johnstone’s argument is basic “whataboutism”: a tu quoque fallacy, through which one deflects accountability by insisting the other side does the same thing, only worse. It’s true that conservatives are using these incidents to escalate their rhetoric on the war in Gaza and to further intimidate its critics in the United States. But to play this game that renders murder insignificant or even unreal in light of other “real” murders is to demean the value of individual human life, including the thousands of Palestinians killed by Israel in Gaza. Respect for human life involves moral equivalences, because innocent people do not deserve to die. That means doing the opposite of accepting the deaths of some innocents based on the higher numbers of innocents killed “on the other side.” It means standing up for innocent human life.

A podcast episode released on May 23 by the progressive magazine Jewish Currents does well to reject whataboutism. But the participants in the discussion (a group of four editors and writers for the magazine) stop short of defining the Jewish Museum attack as an antisemitic incident. Instead, as historian Ben Ratskoff says, antisemitic and anti-Zionist violence remain “entangled in ways that are not clear and are not straightforward.” This is a fair point and an uncomfortable reality, particularly when considering legal categories of hate crimes and political violence. Ratskoff asks whether the left can develop an “alternative framework” for discussing antisemitism and war, “without reductively classifying the event as antisemitism.” Yet the podcast interlocutors recognize that it remains difficult to grapple with the ambiguities of the double murder: the fact that this wasn’t an embassy event; the shooter may not have known much, if anything,about his victims; and the event included groups promoting humanitarian aid to Gaza.

Things get even more complicated with the unfolding of the Boulder attack. It is true that an attack on Israelis and Israeli officials (even low-level diplomats) could be misconstrued as an attack against Jews in general, even when the attacker may not hate Jews as a people. But such an attack can also open the door to further violence, like that seen in Boulder, against people who may not even support Israel’s government but merely hope to extend support and sympathy toward Hamas’ victims.

It is far easier to sidestep these complexities by taking the “both sides” approach and asking, “What about Israel’s victims?” than it is to sit with the depravity of burning an 88-year-old civilian in the park. Of course, the world cries out for humanitarian assistance and an end to the horrific war. But refusing to also discuss the harms being done to Jews increasingly feels like a shrug at their targeting with indiscriminate militancy.

This targeting begins with the categorization of Israelis, whether military or civilians, as political subjects instead of people — humans — and it tends to drift toward the same treatment of Jews labeled “Zionist,” a category applied so broadly that it can mean anyone who does not seek Israel’s total destruction. Jews become associated with a symbolic other, dislocated from the beloved community, devalued potential targets for violence. The political scientist Stephen R. Shalom wrote in the leftist journal New Politics, “by targeting a mostly Jewish meeting organized by the American Jewish Committee held in a Jewish space without an explicitly pro-Israel agenda, Rodriguez has blurred what should be a bright line between anti-Jewish and anti-Israel actions.”

If this “blurring” or “entanglement” was not completely clear after the May 21 double murder, the incendiary attack in Boulder made it obvious. But it already existed within the Palestine solidarity movement, and it calls for greater discretion than we are seeing on the radical left.

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Alexander Reid Ross, Ph.D., is a senior fellow at the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right and senior data analyst at the Network Contagion Research Institute.

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