Before one writes critically about the murders of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim in Washington by 31-year-old pro-Palestinian Chicago resident Elias Rodriguez, one must first offer a few obvious though necessary qualifications. First, the killing of these two Israeli Embassy employees was an act of terrorism and therefore a moral abomination, regardless of whatever injustice may have inspired it. Second, Rodriguez could not possibly have known anything about the two people at whom he randomly shot, save the fact that they were attending a Jewish charity event at a D.C. Jewish museum. He could not have known where they worked, nor their nationalities, nor even their views on Israel/Palestine.
Their murder is therefore unarguably an antisemitic hate crime. Third, while Rodriguez allegedly told police, “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza,” what he actually “did” was set back the Palestinian cause immeasurably in the United States and likely further Palestinians’ immiseration almost everywhere, nowhere more so than in Gaza.
But then comes the harder part; the part that asks us, metaphorically speaking, to walk and chew gum at the same time. There’s a line in Proverbs that “death and life are in the hands of the tongue,” as Rabbi Jill Jacobs of the rabbinical human rights and democracy organization T’ruah told the readers of Time. But, as she added in conversation with me, “You can say that language that dehumanizes Jews and Israelis can lead to violence. But that doesn’t mean it should be used as an excuse for criminalizing speech.”
Criminalizing speech in defense of the Palestinians—most particularly those now faced with starvation, homelessness, and likely epidemiologic disaster in Gaza following Israel’s killing of more than 50,000 of its residents in the wake of the October 7 terrorist attack—is, however, exactly how some pundits, politicians, and public figures are presently seeking to exploit Rodriguez’s heinous act. Listen to Florida Republican Representative Randy Fine, who told Fox News after the shooting, “The fact of the matter is, the Palestinian cause is an evil one.” He then tweeted, “There is nothing peaceful about this movement, and … these demons must be put down by any means necessary.” (“Means,” in which he included, believe it or not, the use of a nuclear weapon.)
His incendiary rhetoric was not the outlier one would expect. For instance, Pat Fallon, a Texas Republican, insisted that “the ‘Free Palestine’ movement is fundamentally intertwined with support for barbaric terrorism,” before adding, “The U.S. should not tolerate these pro-Hamas agitators, whether on college campuses, on our streets, or in our government.”
To be fair, these positions and the violent rhetoric that so often accompanies them can be fairly viewed as simply echoes of that emanating from Israel’s extremist right-wing government and its desire to support the quashing of all criticism of Israel on American campuses and elsewhere. Israeli Ambassador to the United States Yechiel Leiter jumped on the news of the killings with a press conference where he blamed U.S. college campuses as places where “we have useful idiots running around in support of the destruction of Israel.”
Israel’s deeply unpopular prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who is also on trial for corruption and is seeking, like Donald Trump, to destroy the foundations of free speech and democratic dissent in his own country, used Rodriguez’s chant of “Free Palestine” during his arrest to suggest that to be pro-Palestinian is to seek the death of all Jews: “For these neo-Nazis, ‘Free Palestine’ is just today’s version of ‘Heil Hitler.’”
Ironically, those lamenting the connection between incitement and violence were rarely interested in the actual neo-Nazis who make up an increasingly significant part of the MAGA movement, particularly its most violent constituencies like violent demonstrators in Charlottesville whom Trump called “very fine people.” Some Democrats also could not resist joining in the effort to use the murders to suppress pro-Palestinian speech.
Representative Josh Gottheimer, for instance, who is running for governor of New Jersey, promised to sign legislation in New Jersey that would adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s restrictive definition of antisemitic speech, which even its principal author, Kenneth Stern, has called “an attack on academic freedom and free speech” that “harm[s] not only pro-Palestinian advocates, but also Jewish students and faculty, and the academy itself.”
Meanwhile, legacy Jewish organizations also added fuel to this anti–free speech fire. William Daroff, the CEO of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, which consists of 54 of the wealthiest and most influential Jewish organizations in America, wrote on X, “There is a direct line between demonizing Israel, tolerating antisemitic hate speech in the public square, and violent action.”
The Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt relied on that group’s ideologically defined, and therefore inflated, statistics to claim, in an essay in Time, that “last year was the worst for antisemitic incidents since ADL began tracking over four decades ago.” The guilty parties, according to Greenblatt: the “people who excuse antisemitism as merely ‘anti-Zionism,’ who dismiss our outrage as an attempt to serve another agenda, and contort themselves into pretzels as they claim a right to free speech.”
Jonathan Jacoby, whose Nexus Project promotes a far less politically charged and incendiary notion of what constitutes antisemitic speech, responded to Greenblatt in a phone call with me: “This is not a time for sensationalism. This is a time to build a coalition against antisemitism and all forms of hate.”
Some pro-Palestinian organizations appeared ready to do just that. The Council on American-Islamic Relations, the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, called the violence “completely unacceptable” and said that it does not represent the millions of Americans peacefully supporting an end to U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza.” Jewish Voice for Peace, an intensely anti-Zionist group that often organizes protests on campus, also condemned the killings.
I should note that not all pro-Palestinian groups have done so. As of this writing, Students for Justice in Palestine, among the most disruptive of those organizations causing chaos on certain U.S. campuses, had issued no statement whatsoever on the killings. They also had nothing but praise for the October 7 attacks.
The ADL published an article titled “Swaths of Anti-Zionist Movement Legitimize Killings of Israeli Embassy Staff at D.C. Jewish Museum,” but to be honest, the groups mentioned are not ones that your author has ever even heard of, much less concerned myself with their positions. These positions, while morally repugnant, are unlikely to enjoy any influence whatsoever outside the microscopic precincts of their miscreant followers.
Ditto the groups with which Rodriguez is supposedly affiliated: the People’s Congress of Resistance and the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Both are splinter groups so marginal that even most leftists and those dedicated to the Palestinian cause have likely never heard of them. The latter is also closely tied to the ANSWER coalition, whose Chicago branch meetings and demonstrations Rodriquez also apparently attended.
ANSWER’s main contribution to the history of protest since the American invasion of Iraq has been to scoop up protest permits faster than anyone else, forcing liberals and other democratic leftists to choose between joining in demonstrations sponsored by people with whom they disagree or staying home.
Most recently, just one day after the Hamas October 7 terrorist attack, a PSL member speaking at an ANSWER rally in Times Square, thrilled to the fact that “there was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time, until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took out at least several dozen hipsters.” ANSWER’s website, however, does not contain calls to “globalize the intifada” or other statements that could be reasonably interpreted to be incitements to violence of any kind.
Perhaps the best way to prevent the “dehumanization” of the victims of the antisemitic attack that killed them is to consider their own individual humanity. Yaron Lischinsky was a photographer, a soccer enthusiast, and a “Messianic Jew,” or what in my youth we called a “Jew for Jesus,” with beliefs at odds from almost all Christians and Jews, who wished to dedicate his life to diplomacy.
His girlfriend, Sarah Milgrim, daughter of a Christian mother and Jewish father, had worked with a joint Israeli-Palestinian NGO called “Tech2Peace,” designed to provide Palestinians access to tech opportunities. In the past, she participated in the group’s trip with 12 Israelis and Palestinians at the planned Jewish-Palestinian village Neve Shalom-Wahat al-Salam. More recently she dedicated herself to the cause of the Israeli women who were the victims of sexual assault during the attacks of October 7.
I’m sure the memories of both of these young people are a blessing to those who knew them. Their murder, alas, will undoubtedly prove a curse to all who seek peace and justice, but especially for the Palestinians, whose need for both is as great as almost any group anywhere on earth, and whose suffering will now be increased as their voices are further silenced.
As Republicans and conservative Jewish legacy leaders seek to exploit their tragedy to silence legitimate concern about Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and attack Americans’ right to speak up against Israel’s horrific war in Gaza, the memories of these two innocents will continue to be tarnished by those who profess to honor them.
