On Wednesday evening, two Israeli embassy staffers were shot to death outside the Washington, D.C. Jewish Museum, where a “young diplomats reception” was being held. The suspected shooter, Elias Rodriguez, who reportedly had a Keffiyeh and shouted “Free free Palestine,” and “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza,” was almost immediately arrested without further incident.
Although it seems highly likely, even to the State Department, that Rodriguez acted entirely alone and on his own initiative, this hasn’t stopped the mainstream media, the Trump administration, or the Israeli government from attempting to use the shooting to silence its critics, sanctify and romanticize the lives of the victims (a privilege denied to the more than 60,000 people murdered by Israel in Gaza), and to actively propagate the lie that the movement for Palestine is a violent and antisemitic threat to domestic peace.
The New York Times, for instance, has repeatedly stated, without evidence, that the shooting was an act of antisemitism, despite the fact that both of the victims were employed by the Israeli state, and that reports suggest Rodriguez chose his targets deliberately. Furthermore, as his manifesto makes plain, his actions were clearly driven by his outrage at the ongoing genocide in Gaza and had nothing to do with hatred of any ethnic or racial group. Such knee-jerk conflations of anti-zionism and antisemitism have by now become standard practice for most of the U.S. media.
More concerning, however, is the way that outlets like the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post have enthusiastically and grossly overplayed the shooter’s supposed affiliation with the Left and his 2017 connections to the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), which has organized several rallies and demonstrations against the occupation and genocide. Rather than stating the obvious fact that Rodriguez was acting on his own convictions, the mainstream press has claimed instead that he was “radicalized by [the] far left” and that his actions somehow reveal their violent and antisemitic politics. As the ultra-reactionary Wall Street Journal put it, painting with a rather broad brush: “the rise of Soviet-style anti-Zionism, including enthusiasm for the total destruction of Israel and efforts to ostracize its domestic supporters, is corrosive to America and is stirring up old dangers for Jews.” Such obvious red-baiting clearly has nothing to do with protecting Jewish people or stopping real antisemitism of the kind promoted by people like Elon Musk and the Far Right. Instead it is designed to encourage more repression and violence against those who support the movement for Palestine and the entire Left.
But Rodriguez’s actions do not represent nor are they influenced by the politics of the socialist movement or the movement for Palestine. On the contrary, like so many political assassins throughout history, Rodriguez was operating on his own initiative and was driven to take action by a sense of outrage and anger. If we are to believe his manifesto, that outrage seems to have clearly been directed at the perpetrators and enablers of the horrendous genocide still being carried out against the people of Gaza. Indeed, on the day of the shooting, Al Jazeera reported that 82 people in Gaza had been killed by Israeli troops. More than 500 had been killed in just the last week, and the entire population is on the brink of famine thanks to Israel’s cruel and illegal use of blockades as a weapon of war.
While the killing of these two Israeli diplomats will do nothing to stop the genocide — and while collective punishment of this sort is almost always unjustified — it pales in comparison to the systematic collective punishment and mass slaughter of innocents (whose only crime is living in Gaza) that’s being carried out by Israel on a daily basis, and which the U.S. and European Imperialist states have openly supported and allowed to continue for more than 18 months.
Political Assassination is a Product of Revolutionary Pessimism
Rodriguez’s clear desire to “do something,” to “do anything!” to put a stop to the genocide, no doubt reflects a sense of frustration shared by millions of ordinary people who feel utterly helpless in the face of the massacre that they have been forced to watch unfold in real time. However, the strategy of political assassination that such desperation feeds is not only self-destructive — Rodriguez, after all, is of little use to the movement in jail or dead — but is fundamentally backward and defeatist. It perpetuates a political outlook rooted in a kind of revolutionary pessimism and distrust of the working class that rejects the difficult tasks of collective organization for the easy satisfactions and catharsis of immediate and violent individual action.
And such revolutionary pessimism is by design. In fact, Rodriguez’s radical actions cannot be fully understood without looking at the larger political disillusionment, anger, pessimism, and desperation that are the product of the fierce repression of the movement for Palestine. While popular support for Israel has declined dramatically across the world since the start of the genocide in 2023, and while there is increasing outrage among the masses over the slaughter taking place in Gaza (and a growing desire to put an end to it), that has not translated into mass action on the scale or of the kind needed to win. The campus occupations, which were brutally crushed by the police, were an extraordinarily progressive step forward, and the integral state, including the administrations of the universities, used every weapon at their disposal to isolate and disrupt that movement, including politically targeted expulsions and detentions of its leaders such as Mahmoud Khalil.
That repression and isolation has, in turn, made it harder to expand the struggle into the streets and to build the kind of united front of labor and students, and all the oppressed needed to win. But the fight is far from over and there is still plenty to be optimistic about. The fight against Trump and the Far Right, for instance, has brought hundreds of thousands into the streets. Meanwhile students everywhere are turning their graduations into protests against the genocide. Our task now, as it has been all along, is to take every opportunity we can in this moment to unite our struggles, the fight for Palestine, and the struggle against the repression of the movement with the larger struggle against Trump and the U.S. state that supports Israel. This means bringing students, faculty, and unions together, such as we saw at Brooklyn College earlier this month but on a massive scale. It also means building the kinds of class independent self- organization needed to bring the power of the entire working class to bear in the form of mass strikes, walkouts, and demonstrations.
Such forms of organization will not be built by assassins, but requires leaders and committed activists who are daily driven by the revolutionary knowledge that the working class can accomplish anything when it is united.
