A photograph of Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky is displayed outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., May 29. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
David N. Myers
May 30, 2025
We still do not have definitive proof why the Capital Jewish Museum suspect, Elias Rodriguez, targeted the two Israeli embassy employees, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, at an event for Jewish diplomatic professionals. Regardless of his motives, Rodriguez’s act was a cold-blooded murder that should be condemned by all.
But the current moment calls out for more than just condemnation; it also requires a serious measure of self-reckoning by both pro-Palestine and pro-Israeli groups. In the perverse moral logic of the Israel-Palestine conflict, advocates for either side tend to see only the virtue of their own position—and conversely, the perfidy of the other side.
This kind of zero-sum thinking is dangerous and corrosive, often yielding an intoxicated ethical triumphalism that one group lords over the other. The deaths of the murdered couple now demand deeper introspection from both groups. Such reflection has the potential to lead to a recognition of greater commonality between the two groups and perhaps even a new coalition to defend shared interests in the face of a hostile state regime.
This is a moment at which the pro-Palestine movement must clarify its attitude toward violence. Over the past year or so, there has been an increase among pro-Palestinian activists in discussions of armed struggle as a legitimate means of resistance to Israel’s occupation.
There are important moral and legal questions about armed struggle, which has a recognized status under international law; these include the question of who is a legitimate target of armed attack—for example, a uniformed soldier or an unarmed civilian.
“The pro-Palestine movement should make clear that violence of the sort exhibited in D.C. is morally indefensible.”
One would have to hold to a wildly expansive definition of armed struggle to justify the murders of Lischinsky and Milgrim, the latter of whom was not an Israeli citizen and had never served in the Israel Defense Force.
The pro-Palestine movement should make clear that violence of the sort exhibited in D.C. is morally indefensible, unhelpful to the cause and an illegitimate form of armed struggle. The fact that Rodriguez shouted “free, free Palestine” as he was being arrested does not mean that all who use that slogan in campus protests are accomplices to murder. It could, and most often is, understood as a call to lift the yoke of oppression from Palestinians rather than an injunction to commit physical harm against Jews or Israelis.
His invocation of a call for Palestinian liberation also does not make Rodriguez’s crime acceptable. For pro-Palestine groups, the D.C. shooting should be easy to denounce — the tragically misguided and violent actions of an individual who appropriated the language of their cause.
Denouncing the murders should not deter anyone from demanding an immediate end to the ongoing Israel assault on Gaza, where every day scores and scores of people are killed in the brutal and devastating Israeli attacks. Both events, though vastly different in scale, can and must be condemned. The death toll in Gaza does not give a free pass to hunting young embassy employees.
Just as pro-Palestinian activists must look closely at their own behavior and expression, so too must important elements of the pro-Israel Jewish community. A common response to the Capital Jewish Museum shooting, both here and in Israel, has been to allege that Jewish critics of Israel’s devastating campaign in Gaza are guilty of incitement to murder.
The most renowned example may well be former IDF deputy chief of staff and current leader of the opposition party, Yair Golan, who fiercely criticized Israel’s devastation in Gaza in an interview with Israeli media the day before the D.C. shooting. Golan accused the Israeli army of “killing babies as a hobby” (a statement which he later walked back).
In response to Golan’s original formulation, some of the far-right ministers in the current Netanyahu government not only have excoriated Golan but held him personally responsible for the D.C. murders. Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Eliyahu declared: “Yair, the blood of the embassy employees is on your hands and on those of your friends.”
I also have experienced this trope personally, as I’ve been told on social media that my support for the cause of Palestinian freedom and justice has lent succor to the suspected murderer in Washington.
This kind of assertion reflects the degree of blindness and distortion that Oct. 7 has induced. Many Jews, in Israel and abroad, are unable or unwilling to recognize the depths of suffering in Gaza.
Rather than confront the profound moral failings of a brutal campaign that former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert recently called “a war of extermination,” they engage in acts of deflection, fastening attention on antisemitism (whose real existence they highlight to the exclusion of other factors), as well as on critics of Israeli policy whom they accuse of being among its leading fomenters. Not only is it often wrong-headed to make such claims; it is irresponsible and potentially dangerous as a source of incitement.
The uncomfortable fact is that Israel’s relentless assault is an ethical disaster. It is an accelerator of global antisemitism, and, in the eyes of many sober observers, a genocidal campaign “to destroy, in whole or in part,” as articulated by the United Nations’ Convention against genocide, the Palestinian population in Gaza. The appropriate response for Jews at this moment is not to accuse critics of the war of complicity but rather to do all within their power to bring it to an immediate end.
Simultaneously, Palestinian activists should not only take the logical and humane step of condemning the murders of Milgrim and Lischinsky, but also address the question of where political violence fits in their vision of ending the war and advancing the cause of Palestinian freedom.
If people on both sides of the divide are prepared to engage in deep and fair-minded introspection, there could be an opening to acknowledge and embrace shared interests. It would be most welcome given that the Trump administration seeks to weaponize antisemitism and criminalize pro-Palestinian sentiment in order to achieve its own authoritarian goals.
The current moment augurs toward a new alliance of people who oppose the violence of Gaza and D.C., with all their differences of scale, and will not stand idly by as they are instrumentalized in the name of an anti-democratic vision of the United States.
