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When Hamas stormed across the Gaza border on October 7, it knew exactly what it was doing. The group had detailed maps of nearby Israeli military bases and forces, and quickly overran them. But the terrorist group did not stop there. Instead, Hamas advanced into civilian communities, butchering and burning whole families, shooting children in front of their parents, and parents in front of their children. Gunmen executed a grandmother in her home and uploaded the video to her Facebook page for friends and family to see. After discovering a music festival in the vicinity, the group diverted its paragliding fighters to massacre and kidnap the attendees. “I killed 10 Jews with my own hands,” one Hamas member ecstatically told his parents over the phone.
As it turned out, the Israeli military was not the primary target of Hamas. It was just in the way of the real target: any and all Jewish people in the land of Israel. The terrorist group’s anti-Zionism turned out to be a flimsy cover for its anti-Semitism.
Last night, another assailant used the Palestinian struggle as a pretext to harm Jews. In Washington, D.C., a man named Elias Rodriguez allegedly shot and killed two people as they were exiting an event at the Capital Jewish Museum. There is much we still don’t know about this terrible tragedy, but we do know that Rodriguez is in custody and reportedly due to appear in federal court later today, and that witnesses say he confessed to the crime, declaring, “I did it for Gaza.”
The victims of this atrocity happened to be staff members at the Israeli embassy. But the gathering they attended was not an Israeli-embassy event, and it was not held in the Israeli embassy: It was a gathering of Jews at a Jewish institution. Rodriguez went to an American Jewish Committee event for young professionals and allegedly executed two people leaving the venue. “Police believe the shooter targeted the event but had not singled out any individual before arriving,” The Washington Post reported. It seems to have been mere happenstance that left the Israeli-embassy staffers dead and not someone else.
One of the victims, Sarah Milgrim, was actually American. The other victim, Yaron Lischinsky, was born to a Jewish father and a Christian mother, and the family lived for a time in Nuremberg, Germany, a place with a dark legacy of anti-Semitism, before returning to Israel when Yaron was 16.
Like Hamas, the perpetrator wrapped his anti-Semitic animus in the disguise of the Palestinian struggle, reportedly pulling out a keffiyeh and shouting, “Free Palestine!” But his depraved actions, like theirs, expose the lie of his lofty words. Neither Palestine nor Israel will ever truly be free until their societies are liberated from megalomaniacal men who perpetrate demonic acts in their name.
The event Rodriguez targeted reportedly featured speakers discussing “humanitarian diplomacy” for crises “throughout the Middle East and North Africa.” Despite his protestations to the contrary, Rodriguez did nothing last night for Palestinians. His alleged decision to murder guests at an AJC event suggests that what he wanted was simply to hurt Jews.
Like other forms of bigotry, the problem of anti-Jewish prejudice will not be resolved by its targets. Anti-Semitism will not be expunged by the 0.2 percent of the world that is Jewish, but by the 99.8 percent that is not. The FBI and Metropolitan Police Department are investigating the shooting as a potential hate crime. But the larger question today is: Will our society provide excuses and justifications that fuel further anti-Jewish violence, or will it choose to stand against those who use such pretexts to brutalize Jews the way they’ve been brutalized for centuries?
The post A Dangerous Disguise for anti-Semitism appeared first on The Atlantic.
