They were a young couple with their whole lives ahead of them. They had been planning their wedding for a year. They had only just gotten married when they were killed. They wanted nothing to do with war, they just wanted to live their lives together. But their killer did not think twice before taking their lives. Their story, their love, did not matter. It did not matter whether they were compassionate, it did not matter that she had been a top student, it did not matter what their views on the Israel-Palestine conflict were. Their killer saw them as expendable in the service of a cause perceived to be righteous.

I am speaking of Maryam Sayed Deeb and Abdullah Abu Nahl, a young couple killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza last year along with several other civilians. Nobody is quite sure how many, because “the force of the blast was so intense that only debris and small bones remain,” and while Maryam’s father found body parts at the blast site, he couldn’t determine whether they were pieces of his daughter.

They were a young couple with their whole lives ahead of them. He was planning to propose to her during their upcoming trip to Jerusalem. They just wanted to live their lives together. But their killer did not think twice before taking their lives. Their story, their love, did not matter. It did not matter whether they were compassionate, it did not matter that she had two master’s degrees, including one from the United Nations for Peace University. It did not matter what their views on the Israel-Palestine conflict were. Their killer saw them as expendable in the service of a cause perceived to be righteous. 

Now I am speaking of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, whose names you are more likely to have heard. Their story, unlike that of Maryam and Abdullah, has been a major U.S. news story after they were gunned down by a murderer in Washington, D.C. in front of the Capital Jewish Museum. As Milgrim tried to crawl away, the killer reloaded his weapon and shot her again at close range to ensure that she was dead. 

Murdering civilians is deeply, despicably wrong. To violently take the lives of a young couple, to prevent them from living the rich, full lives they were planning, is grotesque. When it happens to anyone, it enrages and depresses me. I try to avoid words like “evil,” but I understand why, when people see a beautiful, innocent pair of young people destroyed in a second, the word “evil” springs to mind. What kind of monster does this? When I see the pictures of Lischinsky and Milgrim, and think about the injustice, the arbitrariness, of what happened to them, I’m sickened and saddened by what a cruel world this can be.

What I wonder, though, is why the outpouring of empathy for Lischinsky and Milgim does not extend to Maryam Sayed Deeb and Abdullah Abu Nahl, or to those who died alongside them. Or to Dr. Alaa al-Najjar, who just lostnine children at once in an Israeli airstrike. (“Yahya, 12, Eve, 9, Rival, 5, Sadeen, 3, Rakan, 10, Ruslan, 7, Jibran, 8, Luqman, 2, and Sedar, not yet 1 year old.” Some were found as tiny charred bodies. Sedar’s remains were never found.) Or to the family that lost 132 of its members in a single airstrike. Or to the 15 paramedics who were shot and killed by Israeli forces in Gaza and then buried in a mass grave. Or the thousands upon thousands of others, including dozens of children who have died from malnutrition in a deliberate starvation campaign, or the 100 children killed or injured per day in a few short weeks earlier this year. 

I nod in agreement when I hear all of the condemnations of Lischinsky and Milgrim’s killing. “Heinous.” “Brutal.” “Has no place in our civilization.” Correct. 100 percent. But do all of those saying it believe, on principle, that violence is wrong? Or do they believe that violence is something that America and Israel are entitled to deliver upon other civilians, but which should never be delivered upon our own? 

With some very limited exceptions, I consider myself a pacifist, and one thing that always strikes me about the manifestos of political killers is how unpersuasive they are as justifications for violence. Often, they dwell on the righteousness of their underlying grievance, rather than explaining why their chosen act is a legitimate and useful way of addressing that grievance. So, for instance, “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski wrote a long tract called Industrial Society and Its Future that contains such persuasive analysis of the damaging social effects of technology that many thousands of people, including at least one of Kaczynski’s own victims, have acknowledged it as prescient and insightful. 

But nowhere in the manifesto does Kaczynski even attempt to explain why sending bombs through the mail makes sense as a reaction to the civilizational ills he describes. Yet that would appear to be the most crucial point to address! I mean, if you’re a guy most known for sending bombs to people through the mail, and you write a long document explaining your motives, I’d rather like you to explain to me why you’re sending bombs through the mail, not why technology has alienated us and wrecked the environment and so forth. As my colleague Alex Skopic documents in a profile of the Unambomber, it’s striking that Kaczynski, a deeply logical man, didn’t seem to have much of a theory of political strategy. How were his actions supposed to help? Why would you kill random people associated somehow with computers or technology? Not only did it not make sense, but Kaczynski didn’t seem to even try to make it make sense.

Or take the anarchist Alexander Berkman. In 1892, Berkman famously tried (and failed) to assassinate Henry Clay Frick, a robber baron who was brutally suppressing a labor uprising at Pennsylvania’s Homestead Steel Works. In his Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, Berkman explains what he was thinking at the time: 

I must form a definite plan of action. My purpose is quite clear to me. A tremendous struggle is taking place at Homestead: the People are manifesting the right spirit in resisting tyranny and invasion. My heart exults. This is, at last, what I have always hoped for from the American workingman: once aroused, he will brook no interference; he will fight all obstacles, and conquer even more than his original demands. It is the spirit of the heroic past reincarnated in the steel-workers of Homestead, Pennsylvania. What supreme joy to aid in this work! That is my natural mission. I feel the strength of a great undertaking. No shadow of doubt crosses my mind. The People—the toilers of the world, the producers—comprise, to me, the universe. They alone count. The rest are parasites, who have no right to exist.

But to the People belongs the earth—by right, if not in fact. To make it so in fact, all means are justifiable; nay, advisable, even to the point of taking life. The question of moral right in such matters often agitated the revolutionary circles I used to frequent. I had always taken the extreme view. The more radical the treatment, I held, the quicker the cure. Society is a patient; sick constitutionally and functionally. Surgical treatment is often imperative. The removal of a tyrant is not merely justifiable; it is the highest duty of every true revolutionist. Human life is, indeed, sacred and inviolate. But the killing of a tyrant, of an enemy of the People, is in no way to be considered as the taking of a life. A revolutionist would rather perish a thousand times than be guilty of what is ordinarily called murder. In truth, murder and Attentat’ are to me opposite terms. To remove a tyrant is an act of liberation, the giving of life and opportunity to an oppressed people.

Berkman says that while he respects human life and would never commit murder, a tyrant (like Frick) has forfeited his “right to exist” (a phrase with some resonance). A “revolutionist” is justified in removing a tyrant through violence in order to help the oppressed. Notice what is absent from Berkman’s justification, though: an explanation of how the killing he is planning will actually provide “opportunity to an oppressed people.” He has explained why he thinks tyrants/parasites don’t have a right to live, but he hasn’t given any strategic explanation of why the killing of a single industrialist actually is a kind of “surgical treatment” for a sick society. In fact, because political and economic systems do not tend to depend on single individuals for their continued operation, assassinations of political figures don’t tend to change much. There are some exceptions (the assassination of Abraham Lincoln probably contributed to the failure of Reconstruction, because he was replaced by Andrew Johnson, who was far more sympathetic to the Confederacy). But Berkman was either delusional about the likely consequences of his act, or he didn’t really care about the consequences, and was doing something that felt like striking a satisfying blow against the “parasites” regardless of its effects.

The manifesto attributed to alleged UnitedHealth shooter Luigi Mangione uses some similar language: “these parasites simply had it coming.” The manifesto, published by independent journalist Ken Klippenstein, explains that “the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy.” Everyone knows this, the manifesto says, and “it is not an issue of awareness at this point.” But the “parasites” who run the healthcare system have “simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has [allowed] them to get away with it.” The writer says that “evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”

The manifesto is correct about the healthcare system, of course. But where’s the explanation for why shooting an executive is going to help? It’s the same in Osama bin Laden’s Letter to America, which lays out compelling criticisms of U.S. foreign policy (alongside antisemitic raving), but then gives a thin justification for targeting civilians. (Bin Laden says that in a democracy the citizenry is responsible for the actions of the government, but he should have known full well that in the U.S. our government sets most foreign policy without any meaningful input from the population). 

The killer of Lischinsky and Milgrim also allegedly wrote a manifesto, obtained once again by Klippenstein, and it follows this general trend: a coherent explanation of the underlying political grievance, with no persuasive case whatsoever for why murder is an acceptable or helpful response. The manifesto begins by lamenting the “proportion of mangled and burned and exploded human beings whom were children” in Gaza and explaining why the author believes the death toll in Gaza is much higher than officially reported. The author favorably mentions the pro-Palestine protests, noting that “never before had so many tens of thousands joined the Palestinians in the streets across the West.” 

But, the author writes, the protests have been ineffective, and “the Israelis themselves boast about their own shock at the free hand the Americans have given them to exterminate the Palestinians.” While “public opinion has shifted against the genocidal apartheid state” “the American government has simply shrugged” and ignored public opinion. (True.) The author then shifts to explaining the act: “The impunity that representatives of our government feel at abetting this slaughter should be revealed as an illusion.” The author cites the example of a man who once tried (and failed) to throw Robert McNamara off the Martha’s Vineyard ferry to punish him for the Vietnam war. The author seems to believe this was a good idea, because it showed that those responsible for atrocities were not immune from consequences. Promising “a word about the morality of armed demonstration,” the author rejects the idea that just because the architect of an atrocity is a human, and has a family, they should not be a target. “Humanity doesn’t exempt one from accountability.” The author concludes that their action is “the only sane thing to do.” Apparently after shooting Lischinsky and Milgrim, the killer shouted “Free Palestine!”

Once again, we see some major missing pieces. First, Lischinsky and Milgrim were not Robert McNamara. They were minor Israeli embassy officials. But even if the killer had targeted someone like McNamara who bore real responsibility for a war, there still remains the question: how is this going to help? As with Berkman and Kaczynski, the killer seems to have carried out their act as an emotional response to an injustice, rather than out of any concern for strategic efficacy. 

But if you don’t care about strategic efficacy, then you don’t really care about the cause you say you care about. What if, by conducting a heinous act, you actually invite further repression of the Palestinian protest movement? What if your act sours public opinion on the movement, which it associates with your act of indefensible violence? Did the killer think about these questions? There is no evidence from the manifesto that they did. Elias Rodriguez, the accused killer, is not Palestinian. He does not appear to have consulted with any Palestinians or been part of any group. He unilaterally claimed the right not only to play God with people’s lives, but to take an action that he should have known could have dire repercussions for the people on whose behalf he was supposedly acting, by inflaming public sentiment against them. (It is not entirely dissimilar to the way that Benjamin Netanyahu, by claiming to be a “representative of the entire Jewish people,” commits horrific crimes that then worsen antisemitism, because people take him at his word, just as people wrongly take the DC killer at his word when he claims to be acting on behalf of the Palestinian freedom struggle.) 

Violence against innocent civilians is deeply immoral. I don’t think that’s a particularly controversial thing to say. Or at least it doesn’t seem like a particularly controversial thing to say. But if you actually try to apply that principle, it turns out that it’s highly contentious, because there are plenty who justify violence against innocent civilians. They just have explanations for why their favored violence is necessary and therefore not immoral. Consider the bombing of Hiroshima. It was one one of the worst single attacks on civilians in human history. A whole city was blown to pieces in an instant. If we believe that violence against innocent civilians is deeply immoral, then the bombing of Hiroshima was deeply immoral. But there are plenty who argue that this attack on civilians was not just not a crime against humanity, but was an objectively right and moral thing to do. In fact, around half of Americans still hold the view that this gruesome deliberate attack on civilians was justified, down from 85 percent approval soon after it happened.

There are arguments for killing civilians, then. One argument is that it can be acceptable as a means toward an important end, such as overthrowing the Nazi regime or imperial Japan. Another argument is that intention matters a great deal, that it is less morally objectionable if you kill civilians as “collateral damage” while you are trying to hit military targets than it is if you are deliberately hitting civilian targets.

But each of these arguments presumes that violence is actually an effective means toward the desired end. Not only that, but even if you showed that violence was an effective means, you would have to show that nonviolent means would not be effective, because killing civilians is grotesque. Even if we could come up with proof that by killing civilians we can achieve a legitimate and just objective, we haven’t justified it. For example, even if the Unabomber showed that by sending bombs to people through the mail, he could bring about a more just world, because his means were so immoral and horrifying, he would need to show that the same outcome was impossible through any other means.

That’s precisely what the advocates of violence rarely try to prove. And in the case of social movements, we have good evidence that violence is actually less effective than nonviolence. This is for a few reasons. First, violence tends to be conducted by able-bodied military-age men. This inherently limits the participants who can join a movement (older people are not effective practitioners of violence), and thereby makes it harder for movements to mobilize a sufficient percentage of the population to achieve their demands. Some research suggests that governments find it difficult to resist any popular demand that has actively mobilized more than 3.5 percent of the population. It is easier to reach this threshold with mass street demonstrations, strikes, and boycotts than building guerrilla armies.

Public support tends to drop when movements turn violent, because people are repulsed, and neutral parties become frightened. In Spain, for instance, a single riot caused public support for the anti-austerity May 15 Movement to drop by 12 points. I think we can already see that the killing of Lischinsky and Milgrim will only hurt the pro-Palestine movement by emboldening Israel’s defenders to insist that “Free Palestine” is a call for terrorist violence. Historically, acts of terror have not helped Palestine. The 1972 Munich massacre did not help the Palestinians. The assassination of Robert F. Kennedy did not help the Palestinians. The First Intifada, on the other hand, a mostly nonviolent civil disobedience campaign, did help the Palestinians, and is credited with shifting global public opinion toward Palestine and forcing Israel to the negotiating table. 

It is often argued that nonviolence requires the enemy to have a conscience. It is hard to imagine a nonviolent civil disobedience campaign having worked against Nazi Germany, for instance. But in many situations, this idea confuses who the target of a nonviolent campaign is. A social movement is not trying to get the state to be sympathetic. It’s trying to win public support. The civil rights movement used nonviolent tactics to appeal to the conscience of the public, not politicians. 

Violence creates trauma, hatred, and a desire for vengeance among the surviving victims. When a gruesome murder is committed, the survivors can go almost crazy with their desire for vengeance. This is what happened after 9/11. It is also what the Oct. 7 attacks did in Israel, transforming a population that was bigoted against Palestinians into a population that largely wanted to see Palestinians ethnically cleansed or evenkilled en masse. “For every innocent you kill, you create 10 new enemies,” said U.S. general Stanley McChrystal, talking about the effects of U.S. drone strikes. One reason the overwhelming use of firepower by the United States has not achieved its objectives, whether it’s in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, or Yemen, is that violence can worsen the very problem it’s being deployed to solve, by creating horrors that make people want to fight back. According to Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken early this year, even though Israel had killed nearly 50,000 Palestinians in Gaza, “Hamas has recruited almost as many new militants as it has lost.” 

There are counterarguments here. It is pointed out that violence has achieved its objective before, with the Nazi case usually cited. The attack on Nazi Germany did not create endless new Nazi recruits and worsen the problem it tried to solve. My aim here is not to show that violence never achieves its objective, or that it can never be justified, but rather that in many cases violence backfires, in part because it is immoral, horrifying, and alienating. And that people are too quick to justify violence, thinking they are being rational ends/means calculators, when they themselves may be motivated by a desire for catharsis or revenge. They also often underestimate the power of nonviolence, which seems lame, weak, cowardly. (In fact it is nothing but. Facing down a militarized police force with only one’s body takes far more physical courage than facing them down with a semiautomatic weapon.) Of course, there are plenty of instances too where nonviolence does not work. The Palestinian Great March of Return in 2018 and 2019 is often cited as an example here. Palestinians tried a form of nonviolent civil disobedience, they were massacred in huge numbers, and the world did not care. 

But we have to evaluate every act by whether it makes sense in the situation. I do not begrudge Palestinians who exercise their legal right to defend themselves against an occupying force with violence (although I condemn absolutely the choice to illegally attack civilian targets instead of just military ones). But I am in the United States, and the question here is whether violence here can be justified given our own conditions and objectives. I think it is very hard to argue that any violent act here, now, can be justified in the service of the Palestinian cause, or any other cause. Violence is very likely to hurt innocent people, invite backlash and repression, and undermine public support. If someone thinks otherwise, they need to make a case far more persuasive than that made in the manifestos of recent killers. Because, first and foremost, violence against innocents is morally wrong, there should be a very high burden of proof on anyone who wants to claim it is necessary. 

Let us be consistent, though. I have been discussing violence as a tactic of social movements, and why there is no justification for it in the service of a righteous cause. But what about in the service of an abhorrent cause, such as ethnic cleansing? And what about violence on a far greater scale than the killing of the two young people in D.C.? What about violence thousands of times worse? If we are, as we should be, repulsed by the killings of Lischinsky and Milgrim, if we do, as we should, see that the arguments made in favor of killing civilians fall apart under scrutiny, what do we then conclude about Gaza, where couples are being blown apart daily? As of this writing, more than a dozen children were killed in Gaza in the last 24 hours, including Gaza’s youngest online influencer, Yaqeen Hammad. Others are starving to death. The whole Gaza Strip is being systematically destroyed by a regime that admits it is targeting civilians. “We are not just focusing on the military infrastructure,” said Israeli minister Bezalel Smotrich. “We are eliminating ministers, officials, money changers, and elements of the economic and governmental system.” Smotrich has vowed that Gaza will be “totally destroyed.” He explained:

We are disassembling Gaza, and leaving it as piles of rubble, with total destruction [which has] no precedent globally. And the world isn't stopping us.

The depravity here is many times worse than that of the D.C. killer. Smotrich is not just talking about a single calculated assassination. He’s talking about the wiping out of a whole people. Genocide. The worst crime imaginable. 

And what is the reaction? Well, on a recent visit, Smotrich was a “welcome guest in Washington,” where he was embraced by the Trump administration. 

Why is Elias Rodriguez, the accused D.C. killer, facing life imprisonment, while Bezalel Smotrich is a welcome guest? It’s not because he killed civilians. It’s because he killed the wrong civilians, in the wrong place.

Noam Chomsky has long pointed out how inconsistent judgments on the morality of violence are. In U.S. political discourse, acts are casually excused when done by our government (and its allies) that would be treated as heinous atrocities if they were ever done to us: 

If you take a poll among US intellectuals, support for bombing Afghanistan is just overwhelming. But how many of them think that you should bomb Washington, because of the US war against Nicaragua, let’s say. Or Cuba. Or Turkey. Or anywhere else. If anyone were to suggest this, they’d be considered insane. But why? If one is right, why is the other wrong? When you try to get someone to talk about this question—well, try. They can’t comprehend what your question is. They can’t comprehend that we should apply to ourselves the standards we apply to others. That is incomprehensible.

But as Chomsky points out, applying consistent standards should be elementary. It’s easy. If terrorism is wrong when it’s done to us, it’s wrong when we do it to others. 

Let us condemn violence, then, but let us be consistent. When we are outraged by the D.C. killings, we must be even more outraged by the endless murder of children happening every day in Gaza. When we discuss how violence solves nothing, how it creates new hatreds and traumas, how it corrodes the soul and undermines just causes, let us apply that analysis to the destruction of Palestine as well. When we do, we will see that the Palestine protest movement is not nearly as in need of soul-searching about violence as the United States government is.