Hello and welcome back to On the Nose, the Jewish Currents podcast. I'm Arielle Angel, editor in chief of Jewish Currents, and I'll be your host for today. Today we are meeting to do a special episode about the shooting last night in Washington DC. Two Israeli embassy aides, 30-year-old Yaron Lischinsky and 26-year-old Sarah Milgrim, who happened to be a couple, were shot and killed outside the Capitol Jewish Museum, where the American Jewish Committee was hosting an event for young diplomats. The suspect was named as 30-year-old Chicago resident Elias Rodriguez, and he was immediately arrested. Upon being taken into custody, video shows that he chanted “Free Palestine.” He had participated in pro-Palestinian activism, and his apartment reportedly had signs about Palestinians. We also know from a manifesto that he put out that this attack was specifically connected to the genocide in Gaza.

Today with me, I have senior reporter Alex Kane, associate editor Mari Cohen, and contributing editor Ben Ratskoff. Ben is also an assistant professor in the Department of Critical Theory and Social Justice at Occidental College. He specializes in histories and theories of antisemitism, race and fascism, and Holocaust and genocide studies. So today, we're just going to be sorting out the various responses to this act of violence and trying to think a little bit about what's going to happen next. It's only been, at this point, a number of hours since the attacks. This is a quick response to this, and we'll be following it more in the coming weeks.

Before we start, I wanted to give a little note about condemnation. Jewish Currents, in the past, has gotten a lot of flack for not condemning the October 7th attacks outright. And I imagine there are also people who are listening today who are listening specifically for a condemnation against this violence. And I just want to reiterate, as I did after October 7th, that Jewish Currents is not a government agency. We are not politicians; we're not an advocacy organization. We're a magazine, and it's our job both to report and to analyze. These questions about condemnation have often become shibboleths in these discussions and have been the ticket for entry into the discussion at all. But condemnation itself is a blunt and rudimentary instrument, and we really aim to go a little bit deeper in terms of nuance. In the interest of transparency, I will mention that the only time that Jewish Currents has issued a condemnation was regarding the killing of hundreds of journalists in Gaza by Israel—targeted killings—because of the way that that touched specifically on our vocation as journalists. This is the only time that JC takes any action that could be considered advocacy—when there is something relating to the field of journalism, and issues of journalistic integrity, and the rights of journalists around the world. So, I hope that that clarifies for people when we speak in advocacy or politician language, and when we do not. So, with that, I just want to start with some general reactions. Alex, maybe I'll start with you since I know that you came in hot this morning in our pitch meeting. I think you have a sense of what you're chewing on.

Yeah. I and some others in the Jewish establishment space agree, in that this was inevitable. The Jewish establishment would say: Well, it's inevitable because of the rhetoric of the pro-Palestine movement. I would say it's inevitable because of the genocide. Obviously, nothing truly is inevitable. We can't predict the future. We can't say: This will happen. But it's not a surprise, after nearly two years in which nothing stopped the US political machine from arming Israel, nothing stopped the Israeli war machine from continuing its policy of starvation and exterminating Palestinians, that someone would take it upon themselves to commit an extreme act of political violence. And so, the person who pulled the trigger is primarily responsible. But there is a context, and too often, people are scared of contextualizing violence. But I think we can't be scared of that because it's deeply important to understanding it. The second thing is that I don't think this does anything to free Palestine. In the manifesto, that was the stated justification—that this is in response to the genocide—but Israeli embassy aides are not the initiators of policy. They have no power over the policy. It actually does nothing to stop Israel's genocide. In fact, it will invite more repression in the US context, aimed at people who may have nothing to do with this violent act but are carrying out political activity that is trying to stop US support for this.

Yeah, Alex, thanks for that. I think it's a useful place to start. There are a couple of interesting things about the way you frame this in contrast with, I think, how the mainstream narrative around this shooting is unfolding. One is that you call this an act of political violence. And obviously, that's not the term that most people are using to describe this act. It's being commonly called, by politicians, advocates, organizations across the board, an act of antisemitic violence, specifically because the event these victims were attending was an event hosted by the American Jewish Committee at the Capitol Jewish Museum in Washington, DC. For what it's worth, I think that if this was an event at the Israeli Embassy, that would be a very different conversation that we would be having. Instead, it was an event for Jewish professionals, and it's not clear if the gunman knew that the people that he was targeting were Israeli Embassy officials or if it was just supposed to be anyone attending this event. And I think that, in order to even analyze our sense of the politics going on here, it's hard with some of that information missing.

Yeah, thank you for that, Mari. And I really agree. Although even if the victims were not Israeli Embassy aides, I would not change my language. Even if they were young Jews that worked for the US Embassy, I would still say it's not an antisemitic act of violence because I think the primary motivation, which is very clear, is that this is an action aimed at the State of Israel. The guy shouted “Free Palestine” when he was being arrested.

Well, and not only is it an action aimed at the State of Israel, it's an action taken at an event for diplomats hosted by an organization that is a Zionist organization. And the targets themselves were embassy workers. They were not high-level embassy workers, but they were embassy workers.

Even if theoretically, they were non-diplomats, non-embassy workers, non-political people who happen to be going to the event out of interest, and they happen to be Jewish, I still wouldn't say this is antisemitic because antisemitism means something. It means targeting Jews for being Jews. But this was not that. This was about Israel. And I'm really frustrated by the fact that there is no space—outside of this podcast (and, obviously, some other spaces analogous to ours)—to say that. Even the most left-wing politicians can't say that. They all reflexively go to “This is antisemitism,” because I guess, in their heads, saying that this was antisemitism is the easiest way to exhibit condemnation that they think will be accepted by voters that they're appealing to.

Ben, I really want to bring you in here, obviously because I know that you have a lot of knowledge, particularly around the history of antisemitism, how it's functioned in similar cases. One thing that I will say before we bring you in is that saying that it is or is not antisemitism is not the same as condoning or condemning the violence. That's a different question. I mean, you can believe that political violence is never justified. You can affirm the sanctity of every human life. I mean, all of these things are not incompatible with the idea that it was political violence. So, it's also unclear to me why it has to be antisemitism in order for it to be wrong, or in order for us to have really principled conversations, or very clear-eyed conversations, about whether or not it's effective or whether or not the response to it is going to be justified. One of the things that is frustrating about this discussion is that it almost doesn't matter in the public discourse at all whether there's a difference between political violence or antisemitism. They're the same thing. Or I'm asking if they are being treated as the same thing.

So, I think that it's absolutely true, in a very straightforward and banal sense, that antisemitism and political violence are not in any way a contradiction. So much antisemitic violence, historically, has been political violence. And so, I mean, I wouldn't say I'm startled by this. I think that it's not surprising at all. But I've just been a bit struck by noticing how we really don't have much of a public language to adequately frame and understand political violence. And I think that separating that from the moral condemnation is really important. I mean, as you mentioned, people can have all kinds of debates about the efficacy, the strategic value, and the morality of political violence or nonviolence. I mean, that's just a whole separate debate. But I think that, to understand something, it requires slowing down a bit. We know so little at this point, as Mari mentioned. And trying to disentangle, I think, the actual event and then the subsequent way that it's being used to justify whatever it's being used to justify.

I wonder if you could, as a scholar, take us through the way that you would look at an event like this.

Well, I think that, instinctively, where my head goes in terms of what I study and what I teach, the most obvious and surface-level comparison that I would make immediately is to the actions of Herschel Grynszpan when he assassinated a Nazi diplomat in Paris in November of 1938. He was 17 years old, and that act served as a pretext for the subsequent violence across Germany that has come to be known as Kristallnacht. Now, I don't want to suggest that that's a perfect historical comparison, but it's just where my head goes to when I think about political violence against diplomats. Interestingly, in that context, I would just add Herschel Grynszpan’s attack was carried out in direct response to the deportation of his family to the Polish border in the Poland Aktion. He himself was, in effect, stateless, due to the cancellation of his Polish passport, and he was hiding in Paris. And then, of course, interestingly, after, there was a whole campaign led by, I think, Dorothy Thompson, a US journalist, to defend him. But I think in that case, again, I don't think it's a perfect comparison for many, many reasons. But I think what you do see is how there is an act of almost spontaneous individualized political violence, on the one hand, and then there is a whole apparatus of retaliation that is using that as a pretext. And I would say, learning from that history, I think it's worth trying to distinguish those things.

So that's one thing I think about. The other thing I think about, historically, when I think about antisemitism and political violence, of course, is that we have just not figured out a way to talk about the intersection or entanglement between antisemitic and anti-Israeli violence, or anti-Israel violence. We come out of this moment of a definitional frenzy, which seeks to establish these sorts of regulatory frameworks where we can just clearly classify something—it is or it isn't antisemitic, right? And I think it's a lot messier than that, unfortunately. Obviously, these things are entangled in ways that are not clear and not straightforward, and I think we need to try to find a way to address that entanglement.

Yeah, I think my instinct to say, “This isn’t antisemitic, this is political violence,” is obviously born out of a desire to separate Jews and Jewish people from the State of Israel. And obviously, I believe in that project, and they are not the same. That said, obviously, as we at Jewish Currents cover, as many scholars like yourself, Ben, know, the State of Israel is so thoroughly entangled in American Jewish life and American Jewish institutions that it becomes extremely difficult to try to separate them out.

I also just want to say: I don't want to get so down the rabbit hole of nuance that we lose track of the context that we are in right now. We are in a situation where antisemitism is very clearly weaponized as a tool. The point of talking about Grynszpan—and I also thought immediately about Grynszpan. I mean, I've been waiting since Trump was elected. I've been like, “What is our Herschel Grynszpan moment?” In the sense of there is going to be political violence; the Trump administration is probably waiting for that violence to be able to attack left-wing formations. The fact that this person was associated with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, a fringy left anti-war movement—which by the way, PSL has distanced themselves and said that the shooter was not really active with them, hasn't been active for seven years except with like a single branch at one time—is a pretext for going after left anti-war movements. The fact that the shooter chanted something about Intifada Revolution, which is the kind of chants that the Trump administration has been trying to use to prove that the students are providing material support for terrorism, is actually hugely damaging.

And so, on some level, I hear what you're saying, Ben, about like the need to recognize, first of all, that there aren't necessarily clear distinctions between political violence and violence motivated by hatred, on the one hand, and the fact that right now, the entire political system that we operate under is moving according to the question of whether something is antisemitic or not. And this is really difficult, too. I mean, as Mari knows from reporting on hate crimes, and when you're trying to ask whether the motivation is hatred, it's hard to look inside someone's heart and see that. This guy—so far, it doesn't seem like anything is motivated by hatred. He seems to hate the genocide, and he seems to have chosen a target—again, not to say anything about whether this is justified or correct or whether it's right or how terrible it is that people were killed. But he's chosen a target that is a complicit target and a political target, a very clear-cut political target. The AJC and workers at an embassy, which I don't know if he knew that, but it was for young diplomats.

I'll just say too, I think that we are going to get a hate crime proceeding here. I mean, I would be shocked if we didn't get, probably, a DOJ federal hate crime proceeding. And these questions are actually going to become very central legal questions, so we are probably going to get like a lot of court evidence and back and forth around these real matters of motivation, and nuance, and context in a way that is interesting. Because this is what's been happening in some of these hate crime cases since October 7th that I'm writing about in a forthcoming piece in the next issue. And many of the examples I'm writing about are more clear-cut anti-Israel than this one, that we're still waiting for a lot of information. But you get a lot of prosecutors and judges who really don't have any familiarity with any of these issues of this history. So, it becomes very difficult, sometimes, to do these things in court. And then, also, what you have right now is a Trump DOJ that is really invested in boasting about going after antisemitism, and their antisemitism task force and hate crime proceedings as a part of that strategy. They said that they were going to target all these campus activists; they actually haven't produced hate crime indictments for any so far, but I'm sure they're going to do that here, and this is going to become a flagship political prosecution.

Yeah. And it's very hard to imagine that they're going to be able to stave off hate crime charges, especially because you even have AOC, who's like the farthest-left politician, or Zohran Mamdani, can only talk about this in terms of antisemitism. So, it's very hard to imagine that they're going to be able to fight the charge that this is an antisemitic crime because there isn't room for that discussion, frankly.

No. Although, what I do think is interesting is that it can be hard to convince a jury that something is a hate crime because you have to really convince them that this is motivated only by the person's ethnicity. And for what it's worth, actually, national origin is typically protected in hate crime laws, at least federally. I don't know about DC-specific ordinance; I'd have to look at that. So anti-Israeli would count as a hate crime, even if they can't prove that it's antisemitic, but you’d have to convince the jury that that is the reason that they targeted. But, yeah, I don't have a lot of hope for the nuance in the coverage and discussion of this.

Yeah, I agree. I mean, I just look back to, for example, the footballer riots or whatever you want to call them in Amsterdam, and the way that that runaway media train really overwhelmed perception and created a narrative framework (and we might even say moral panic) through the use of terminology like pogrom.

Just for our listeners who may not remember: This was a situation in which Israeli soccer hooligans were taunting Dutch soccer hooligans, and they were beaten up, and then that was considered, basically, an act of antisemitism on the European stage.

Yes. And I would add that there were acts of violence against Jews in Amsterdam that night. I mean, it was a complicated night, to say the least. Not discounting how the actual let's say, incitement to violence by the Maccabi Tel Aviv fans played a crucial role. But I think that's precisely maybe my point, which is that regardless of how accusations of antisemitism have been clearly weaponized, I don't think that it actually serves us to try to draw some clear line here. Because I think it is remarkable that the manifesto, for example, doesn't have any explicit or implicit references to Jews, Jewishness, even Zionists or Zionism. And at the same time, when I look at what this event was—obviously, we know who AJC is, and what they stand for, and the kinds of statements that they have been putting out and continue to put out. But a young diplomats’ reception, bringing together young Jewish professionals in DC with a diplomatic community—I don't think it makes it easy for us to just say: Well, we can distinguish this now, and we don't want to feed into the fueling of the instrumentalization, right? No, I think that we have a responsibility to intervene into this conversation and provide an alternative framework for understanding this.

But what's that alternative framework?

I think part of the alternative frame—this is why I wanted to talk about the internal Israeli political discourse, because I think it is illuminating, and there are things that are said by politicians there that almost feel unsayable here. I mean, Yair Golan responded. He tweeted: It is Netanyahu's government that is fueling antisemitism and hatred of Israel, and the result is political isolation and danger to Jews globally.

Which we know to be true through various studies. I mean, Peter Beinart is very fond of citing a lot of these studies by Ayal Feinberg that have analyzed violence and show that there is a very sizable uptick of violence against Jews that corresponds with how many Palestinians the Israeli government kills, across locations in the US, in Europe, in Australia.

But I think that he goes even further—meaning, you can make that argument with the data and still say, “Nonetheless, people cannot act this way,” or “This is their responsibility,” or “It's still antisemitism,” or what have you. I think what's incredible is that he's clearly naming Netanyahu's government as fueling antisemitism. And I think that that statement is the alternative framework. The alternative framework is understanding that antisemitism and war are related, right? When we think of antisemitism as a hate crime, we take it down to this entirely interpersonal level of hatred, and he must have been motivated by, to quote the IHRA, “a certain perception of Jews.” But when you resist that, and you say we can actually talk about antisemitism, and war, and their relationship—without just reductively classifying this entire event as just antisemitism, condemn it, move on, but that there's actually a relationship between war, foreign policy, and the reproduction of violence against Jews, Jewish institutions, or those perceived to be Jews and Jewish institutions is, I think, really important. And I say that with the caveat that we don't even know that that was going on. We don't know how this shooter chose who to target, and what to target, and what event. And so, I don't even want to necessarily say that, but I think that that's an alternative framework that needs to be on the table because this is part of what an anti-war movement should be about.

Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned the Israeli response. You have a bunch of right-wing ministers, since this attack, blaming the attack on Yair Golan, saying that, “He said that the IDF is killing babies as a hobby in Gaza,” and they're basically saying that Yair Golan has done a blood libel, and therefore, these attacks are happening. I mean, it's also interesting that the man who was killed, Yaron Lischinsky, his last tweet was basically about how this UN accusation of 14,000 babies going to die of starvation in the next 48 hours—that this is a blood libel. And I have no doubt that this is going to be picked up, considering it was the deceased's last tweet. It's very interesting to think about how much this act shifts the conversation away from what was previously the conversation, even in liberal circles, which is the starvation of Gaza and the fact that I read yesterday that 350 people died of malnutrition, and I'm sure that there's going to be much more today. It's been more than two months since any food entered Gaza at all. I think we've been seeing, as evidenced by Yair Golan's comment about the violence and the war crimes of the IDF in Gaza, that even liberals and even liberal Zionists have begun to think about or engage with the framework of genocide. And now, this event has effectively shifted the conversation completely. And I think we see this over and over again, and we see this around campus stuff, and I wonder if anyone has any thoughts about that in particular, in the ways that it seems very difficult for liberals to keep these things in mind at the same time or to weigh them on a certain level.

Yeah, I mean, it makes it all the more difficult that there's an incredibly powerful apparatus—and I'm talking about Fox News, the New York Times, liberal institutions—that are all going to be giving this act of violence intense coverage. Now, it deserves intense coverage, but it's going to drown out, in the US discourse, the fact that Israel has been starving Gaza and continues an insane campaign of genocide in Gaza. And so, it would be no surprise to me that there is some retrenchment among liberals, just as we saw after October 7th. J Street, which one year was calling for, effectively, conditioning aid, now support what they saw as a just war of self-defense. And I'm worried that that will happen.

Yeah. One part of this narrative that I think ties into all of this that I am finding fascinating and quite honestly disturbing is this idea that the victims were peace activists. And so, the fact that they were killed is just extremely, terribly ironic because actually, this person wanted to free Palestine, and the people that he killed also wanted to free Palestine because they were peace activists. And this is something that has really taken hold. I mean, there's a few different pieces of evidence that people are using to make that claim. One of them is that these two young people who were killed, Sarah and Yaron—Sarah had previously worked at a place called Tech2Peace, where she researched peacebuilding theory and implemented a study on the role of friendships in the Israeli/Palestinian peacebuilding process. And I think the idea is that both of them worked on projects within the embassy that involved some level of coexistence, and dialogue, and things like that. And also, the event that they were going to at AJC did have a focus where they were bringing in organizations that helped provide aid to Gaza. And that's interesting. Like, I do think it is interesting that at this moment, organizations like the AJC, that are still very staunchly pro-Israel and pro-Israeli military, are having some type of focus on aid for Gaza. One of the organizations they were featuring is called IsraAID. It's an Israeli aid organization that has been providing some aid to Gaza, and then also, Multifaith Peace Alliance, which is an interfaith aid organization but was actually founded by a Jewish woman, and some of its background was providing aid to Syria and Syrian refugees, but then partly, also trying to build better relationships between Syria and Israel. So, there's a lot of complicated mixing here between genuine humanitarian aid work for people who are in need, and they have provided this aid, and then also real political, strategic work about support for Israel and the Israeli government as part of that aid provision. And we do have Yaron Lischinsky's Twitter, and you can see that some of the previous tweets that he was retweeting, where the IDF was proudly announcing the restarting of the campaign in Gaza. And then also obviously they're working for the embassy of the country.

Well, also, he is a Christian German who made aliyah, who moved to Israel and joined the IDF. I mean, this is someone who opted into becoming a military agent of Israel.

And I believe that—so he's Christian, identifies as Christian. I believe he has a Jewish father, which is why he was able to immigrate to Israel and join the IDF. And obviously, a lot of that that this gets into is really different definitions of what peace means, and that's a whole other conversation in the Israeli context. There's a very pro-Israel political peacebuilding thing, and then obviously what we might say in the US around peace—if we're talking about an anti-war movement, anti-genocide—is very different than that. And specifically, I think that at this moment, when it's difficult to deny all the starvation in Gaza, talking about humanitarian aid is actually something that these people at the AJC are now doing without condemning any of the Israeli military action or government action that leads to that need for aid. I mean, it's crazy. It's like, “Oh my gosh, people are starving, they need the food, we're going to get them the food as soon as we can,” but nothing about why they're starving, why people need aid, or whether they can—

Continue to be bombed while they're eating.

Exactly. And so that's, I think, the context here. And obviously, I just find the framing of this as peace activists really frustrating, because you can talk about your reaction to a murder and who was targeted—you can have that whole conversation without recasting these two people who worked for the embassy of a country as actual peace activists. I find it an especially frustrating aspect of the discourse to try to get a handle around.

I mean, I think in some ways, it's the most obvious liberal response, right? To be horrified by political violence, this “extremism on both sides” narrative and the somewhat self-serving desire to distance oneself from it. I mean, that's what the condemnation serves, right? It's to expel that from oneself. The other point that I just wanted to mention though—when we talk about the Israeli context is that if we really want to talk about violence against diplomats, we should also talk about the Israeli army firing on the diplomatic delegation in the West Bank, which did draw widespread condemnation amongst EU governments. I think multiple governments recalled their ambassadors.

Yeah, Spain, Italy.

Right. And so, I think that it's really important if we're going to talk about political violence and violence against diplomats in the context of this war, I think that we need to have a full frame of where violence against diplomats is coming from and how it's being generated if we're going to adequately do it justice.

The other thing I just want to add to all of this is that I think one thing that the conflation of Jewish identity in Israeli politics and pro-Israelism does is that Israeli politics have been so depoliticized among American Jews that it's actually impossible to understand a Jewish person working for the Israeli embassy as a political actor doing pro-Israel politics. Instead, this person has to be understood as a young Jewish person killed for being Jewish—which, again, we don't know what the targeting was—but it's like they can't be understood as a political actor. It's just: This was a Jewish person who was just doing what Jewish people do, which is loving Israel.

I mean, they can't even understand Israeli soldiers as political actors or as political targets. I mean, obviously, it would be a lot simpler if Hamas had only targeted soldiers and bases in their October 7th attack, but would it have made a difference to the Jewish world or to Israel? It's not actually clear.

Well, no, we know that given how many people say “1,200 innocent Israeli civilians were murdered on October 7th,” when, in fact, about 350 were soldiers or police officers active in the maintenance of a brutal occupation and blockade.

Well, and also because of the way that there's no distinction in talking about hostages. They're all discussed as if they're civilian hostages. So it's no question why it would be difficult for us to make those distinctions. Now, of course, again, making those distinctions does not negate the humanity of soldiers, and it doesn't mean that they deserve to die. Just to be very, very clear here. But again, these distinctions do matter. And especially, if we're trying to argue that there's a distinction on some level between militants, and combatants, and civilians in any circumstance of war, these kinds of questions do matter.

I think that that is really maybe the essential point here—once the October 7th attacks were reductively framed as just purely an antisemitic hate crime or even a pogrom, drawing on these frameworks, it actually just made it somewhat impossible, then, to actually think about politically. And I think that part of the problem of using antisemitism as a frame is precisely that it just liquefies and melts everything down right into this amorphous substance. My students, when they write papers in my class, they're not allowed to use the term antisemitism. And that's precisely an exercise that forces them to actually use language to describe what they're describing. Are we talking about a discriminatory law? Are we talking about spontaneous violence on the street? Are we talking about harassment through language? Is this a feeling? Or, in the terms of the IHRA, of perception—something totally interior. These are all vastly different things and vastly different scales, which, on a federal legal level, gets funneled into hatred or hate crimes. But that's maybe—I think my broader point here is that this isn't to deny that there is something related to antisemitism involved. Antisemitism is a part of this conversation, but the idea that antisemitism is some kind of motor, a motor of violence, after which we can stop trying to understand or analyze or critique—it conceals so, so much.

I think the other thing about that that's relevant is that when everything gets homogenized into just one amorphous inchoate antisemitism that just lives in people's hearts that we have to root out, there's only really one answer for how to combat it, which is: This is an irrational, terrible force that's being grown within people, and we just have to criminalize them, and condemn it, and we can't do anything else about it. And instead, you look at things like this and it's—this conversation is hard to have because obviously, there's respectability politics, or victim blaming, and obviously, those are things that we generally would be opposed to. But if you do have this close connection between a community and a state committing genocide, then causing people to target the community with more violence—are we allowed to say it would be a good response for the state to stop committing genocide or for these institutions to disentangle themselves from the state? And if we understand this particular incident as different from other types of antisemitism that might have other causes, then it becomes easier for us to specifically talk about how you combat that and whether changing that relationship to a state committing genocide is actually helpful. And obviously, again, lots of considerations that come up there, but it's like, we can't even have the conversation if we don't identify the individual, specific nature of this.

I think that's right. Before we close, I want to talk about what this means on the left right now. I mentioned earlier the fact that the alleged perpetrator used the chant—which one was it? Was it “Globalized Intifada?”

According to an eyewitness, who was interviewed on TV, he also used the chant, “There is only one solution: Intifada, Revolution,” which is a very common chant at pro-Palestine demos, at least in New York City.

I just was in Berlin at the Nakba Day protest there, and it was used there too. So, it's certainly international.

Yeah, obviously, not everybody means the same thing when they say these words. What responsibility do Palestine groups and leftist groups in the United States have right now to start to deal with the risk to them? Because I totally hear the anti-respectability politics argument here, and also, that we shouldn't be preemptively responding to repression by self-censoring. And also, support for anti-colonial armed resistance in Palestine is different than saying, “We're going to do that violence ourselves” or supporting the idea of violence in places where that violence makes no political sense. But that distinction isn't going to be made, and I don't think that Palestine groups in the United States have been as careful as they need to be about clarifying their relationship to violence. And it has struck me from the beginning as unstrategic to pretend that we have a responsibility to talk about violence in the same way, or to relate to violence in the same way, as people who are on the ground facing extermination.

There's a really interesting statement from the Columbia Palestine Solidarity Committee that was, I think, put out last fall, in response, actually, to a split with another group on campus, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, that had very different rhetoric about this, in which they make that distinction, actually, between outside of the context of resistance to genocide and violence in that context, very clearly. I think it was really interesting. So maybe we can put that in the notes.

Yeah, definitely will. Yeah. These were Palestinian students who were specifically saying: We support the right of occupied peoples to resist, but we are a divestment organization, and that is the only thing that we care about, and we are not talking about violence outside of that context.

Yeah, I mean, that gets to the point that I wanted to make. As we've discussed on the podcast before, and certainly in private conversations, the Palestine solidarity movement is not at all united on these questions or has the same discursive response to these questions. And many organizations that are part of the, for lack of a better term, militant, anti-colonial, anti-liberal wing, which sees no use in the use of American liberal institutions to try to stop the genocide—I don't think they have an interest in saying: We don't mean armed resistance in the United States—we actually just mean armed resistance in the context of the occupation in Gaza and the West Bank. I don't think groups like that have an interest in parsing this out, and that is their politics. I think it's self-marginalizing. But that easily becomes a way to paint the entire Palestine solidarity movement as one enthralled of violence, both in the United States and in Palestine, rather than making that distinction.

I agree with that. I really just think, because this is a left podcast—what do we do now? It’s a question that we have to ask ourselves. Like, what do we do knowing that this repression is coming? And I think it's really a tough question. And this is why I think about Grynszpan, because obviously, Kristallnacht didn't happen because Grynszpan killed the German embassy worker. It happened because it was going to happen anyway—because they wanted to do that and that is what we're facing right now. But the question is how we navigate that. Like, we can't just say that we have no agency in how we navigate it. And I think that there's also a question about the ways that people think about and talk about political violence in the United States. I mean, right now, we have these two acts—Luigi Mangione killing the United Healthcare executive and Elias Rodriguez killing these two embassy workers—that are not connected to mass forms of struggle. I mean, they're not acts that are tied into organizing or, like, strategic anything. They're spontaneous acts of violence. And how we integrate those into an idea of what armed struggle is in this broader context is also important on the left. Like, how we see these acts and how we integrate them.

Yeah, I mean, I think that it's a foregone conclusion that this is going to have large repressive effects at multiple levels. That is for sure, and Palestine solidarity movements are going to be facing a new situation that they're going to have to navigate. At the same time, one of the things that I was looking into when I woke up to the news this morning was just the previous history of assassinations of Israeli diplomats, and I would say much higher-level Israeli diplomats. And quite interestingly, one of the examples that I found was this assassination attempt on the Israeli ambassador to the UK, Shlomo Argov, in 1982 by a splinter group that was hostile to the PLO, and it led to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. It was a pretext to repress Palestinian militants and guerrilla groups there. And what I found so remarkable, and this is quoted in the Telegraph, but this ambassador, I think he was in a coma for a few months, but when he woke up or sometime later, he really spoke out against the using of this assassination attempt to justify more war. The exact quote in the Telegraph is, “If those who planned the war had also foreseen the scope of the adventure, they would have spared the lives of hundreds of our best sons. They brought no salvation. Israel should go to war only when there is no alternative. Our soldiers should never go to war unless it is vital for survival. We are tired of wars. The nation wants peace.” Okay, so that was in 1983, but I just think it's instructive because if this Israeli ambassador to the UK, who was himself the victim of this assassination attempt, could himself identify how this act of political violence against him was being used and manipulated to justify invasion, I don't really think the onus is on the Palestine solidarity movements. I think that we should all be able to say at least that.

Well, this has been another episode of On the Nose. If you liked it, share it and subscribe to Jewish Currents, JewishCurrents.org. Hang in there, everyone.