29 January 2025: The return of displaced Palestinians from the south to the northern Gaza Strip. Photo: Jaber Jehad Badwan

In grappling with the issues arising from this murder, it’s with some qualms that the editors of Against the Current are devoting an amount of editorial space to this event while Israel’s U.S.-abetted mass slaughter and starvation of Palestinians, in progress before and after, continues without a pause.

On the same day as 31-year-old Elias Rodriguez pulled his trigger, between 50 and 100 people in Gaza had their lives snuffed out by Israeli forces. Probably hundreds more were killed during that week, and Israel’s use of food as a weapon of war has placed the entire Gaza population on the verge of famine.

Among those killed by the Israeli military are many who deserve special attention along with Lischinsky and Milgrim. For example, nine of the ten children of Alaa-al Najjar, a family-pediatric nurse — those children burned to death together from a Israeli bombing in Southern Gaza. And 11-year-old Yaqeen Hammad, whose body was torn apart at practically the same time after a series of heavy Israeli airstrikes hit the house where she lived with her family, in Al-Baraka area of Deir al-Bala, in central Gaza.

None of these people, in Gaza or Washington, deserved to die — and none would have died but for the Israeli state’s genocide in Gaza, fully backed by the U.S. administrations of Donald Trump and Joe Biden before him.

That doesn’t mean that any act allegedly done in the name of opposing or avenging the Gaza atrocity is somehow justified.

 Weaponized “Proof” of Antisemitism

We do have to talk about Lischinsky and Milgrim, and Elias Rodriguez, for at least two reasons: First, this crime is being weaponized as supposed proof that the slogans of the pro-Palestine movement, “Free Palestine” and “Globalize the Intifada,” are antisemitic calls to murder Jews and effectively incited the killing.

Second, Rodriguez himself makes statements in his delusional but widely read “manifesto” that are dangerously misleading for those who want to build a mass movement to halt this genocide and achieve a situation where Palestinians can determine their own future.

To be sure, on the Left only some fringe and disoriented elements fail to recognize that Rodriguez’s murderous action creates an obstacle to reaching any progressive goal and is likely to go down in history as a major setback to the Palestine solidarity movement. But is it enough to simply reiterate that fact, along with familiar lessons from our revolutionary heritage, including Lenin and Trotsky, about the futility of acts of individual terrorism?

Of course, information is still coming in, but here is our assessment so far. No evidence has surfaced indicating that Elias Rodriguez had a history of antisemitism or was motivated by Jew-hatred, including what is available through his text messages and posts. (To be sure, if something new is revealed in the future, we would have to change our evaluation.)

In addition, it appears that Rodriguez had only a brief connection with any radical organizations. In this case, the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) stated that it had no contact with him for the past seven years. PSL is a group that we do not politically support, but is clearly not antisemitic and should be defended if attacked.

 Not a Way Forward to End Genocide

The best explanation we have for Rodrguez’s behavior is that he was politically unorganized, and probably emotionally unhinged by the horror of the genocide — which is not unlike a number of people in the 1960s who were driven over the edge by the barbarity of the U.S. war on Vietnam, domestic racism, and so on.

Those of us who were active in those years well remember that there was a targeted assassination by the Symbiose Liberation Army, the killing of innocent security guards by a fragment of the Black Liberation Army, the exploding of a building in Madison that killed a worker, and the Weatherman group blowing up its own members while trying to build a bomb.

Judging from Rodriguez’s now widely circulated manifesto that apparently explains his motives, this distress led to an all too familiar illusion that his action (so-called “armed demonstration”) would find popular support now; he speculates that a few years earlier it would have been judged to be insane, but today this “action will be highly legible and, in some funny way, the only sane thing to do.”

It also led to a belief, he says, that “abettors” of Israel have “forfeited their humanity,” which would seem to make them legitimate targets of armed violence.

Let’s be absolutely clear: These are two positions that the movement must reject. The consciousness of the U.S. population is nowhere near embracing such an action as “sane.” Any notion that such a crime would be sympathetically received is “ultraleftism” or worse.

Most ordinary people will be revolted by such an act and start believing the worst about the Palestine solidarity movement. Moreover, ethically and politically, the judgment of “abettors” of Israeli genocide is not for Rodriguez to determine. For example, one could certainly regard those who supported Kamala Harris for president as “abettors” of the Israeli state genocide for wanting to put back into power someone totally committed to military support of Zionism and who falsely denounced the anti-genocide protests.

Are there very different kinds of “abettors”? Who should draw the line? Are all those connected with a settler colonial state — regardless of how they got there or the degree to which they even understand about their situation — to “forfeit their humanity” when their state leaders carry out genocide? Have citizens of the United States forfeited their humanity if they haven’t acted to stop our own state from enabling and committing genocide?

And what did Rodriguez really know about the people he gunned down? They worked for the Israeli Embassy, but how did he know that? The people coming out of the building included those attending from other embassies, employees of the museum, and partners of people invited. And if one had an Israeli embassy job, does that mean they had any power over policy?

And it’s far from unknown for individuals working for a state that is committing atrocities to turn against it in revulsion. What if someone had assassinated Daniel Ellsberg during the years he functioned in the state apparatus as an objective war criminal? There would have been no Pentagon Papers.

All the facts aren’t in, but it is possible that Rodriguez killed these two simply because he believed their presence at the Jewish Museum event hosted by the American Jewish Committee meant they were “abettors” who “forfeited their humanity.” This seems dangerously close to falling for Zionist propaganda that anyone Jewish is most certainly Zionist.

Some radicals have reached for a comparison of Rodriguez with Herschel Feibel Grynszpan, a Polish-Jewish expatriate born and raised in Weimar Germany who shot and killed the German diplomat Ernst von Rath on 7 November 1938 in Paris. This was just after Grynszpan got the news of the deportation of his parents. The Nazis used this assassination as a pretext to launch Kristallnacht.

The comparison certainly works on one level, in the way the Nazis were able to exploit the assassination to commit further atrocities. But the act itself, killing a Nazi diplomat — a known member of German nobility, Nazi party official and member of the its paramilitary unit from 1933 on — in an official building is hardly the same as shooting, at the Jewish Museum, two unarmed young persons with at most peripheral responsibility for the functioning of the Israeli Embassy.

Someone can commit an antisemitic act even if their subjective intentions (like those of Rodriguez) may not have been antisemitic.

 Defend and Build the Movement!

While there is nothing to defend about Elias Rodriguez’s act, it is critically urgent to defend the Palestine solidarity movement with commitment and unity. Much of the press has opted to exploit these horrific deaths by labeling them simply as an “antisemitic act” and characteristic of the movement.

Indeed, as with October 7, one is deemed a “terrorist” unless one follows the playbook of calling all violence aimed at the Israeli state “antisemitic,” which is a way of decontextualizing an event so as to obscure root causes and actual solutions.

The overriding fact before and after the murders at the Jewish Museum is that the daily slaughter and starvation in Gaza continues — and the campaign to smear the Palestine solidarity movement is indeed an “abettor” of the genocide.

Against the Current Editorial Board

1 comment

Eric G. PoulosJune 2, 2025 at 7:50 pm

I am glad the authors distinguish this incident from Grynszpan. Similar on the surface but totally different.

Also, while this is not a crucial point, nevertheless it bears mentioning that this was an act against Israel. As far as I’ve read it was not an attack on Jews as Jews i.e. an anti-Semitic attack but rather on Israelis. In fact one of the victims was not Jewish. It has been widely stated by many that this was an anti-Semitic attack. It wasn’t. Possibly not a major point but one that needs to be made for clarification purposes.