A man draped in the Israeli flag, bearing a cross and the name “Jesus” at its center, gestures as Metropolitan Police officers secure the area outside the Capital Jewish Museum following a shooting that left two people dead in Washington, DC. Photo by ALEX WROBLEWSKI/AFP via Getty Images
By Mira Fox
May 22, 2025
It would seem likely, at first glance, that Elias Rodriguez, the 30-year-old man from Chicago who allegedly shot two people outside the Capitol Jewish Museum in D.C., targeted the American Jewish Committee event taking place in the museum as retribution for Israel’s actions in Gaza. When arrested, the man, Elias Rodriguez, shouted “Free, free Palestine,” and a manifesto attributed to him argues for “armed action” to address “atrocities committed by Israelis against Palestine.”
Online, however, doubt percolated almost immediately. Specifically, theories began to amass that the shooting was a false flag operation.
The argument goes roughly like this: Israel has lost its moral standing thanks to its bombardment of Gaza. Israel needed to divert attention from starving Palestinians, and to paint pro-Palestinian activism as an antisemitic, terrorist movement. Killing two Israeli embassy aides outside a Jewish event establishes antisemitism as a clear, tangible threat, and the killer shouting “Free Palestine” while doing so ties it clearly to the pro-Palestinian movement. It’s too clean and obvious to be real, say the conspiracists.
Given the manifesto and Rodriguez’s statements on the scene, this seems like a stretch. But false flag operations — acts done with the goal of pinning responsibility on a different group — are not always the stuff of conspiracy theories.
The term comes from the practice of naval boats or pirates flying the flag of a different country or organization than they actually represented, to deceive an enemy ship into allowing them to get close enough to attack.
On dry land, false flag attacks have been used to start wars for centuries. In the late 1700s, a group of Swedes dressed up in Russian military uniforms and attacked a Swedish outpost on the Russian border, causing national outrage and instigating the Russo-Swedish War of 1788.
More famously, Nazi Germany also used false flag attacks. Hitler blamed communists for the Reichstag fire, an arson attack on the German parliament building, justifying his seizure of power. And, in Operation Himmler, SS leaders Reinhard Heydrich and Heinrich Müller organized several staged attacks on German buildings to create motivation for a Polish invasion. In the most notable attack, known as the Gleiwitz Incident, officers dressed in Polish uniforms forcibly entered a radio station and broadcast an anti-German message; to burnish the illusion, they killed a Polish sympathizer and left his body in the radio station, along with the bodies of several prisoners from Dachau.
The U.S. is no stranger to false flag operations either. Declassified documents show plans for false flag operations attacking American military and civilian targets to justify a war with Cuba, which were not carried out. And during the Iranian revolution, the U.S. payed demonstrators to help foment discontent with Iranian premier Mohammad Mossaddegh, among other operations undertaken to strengthen the Shah and protect U.S. oil interests in the region. Russia has used false flag operations in Georgia and Ukraine to provoke war.
And in the failed Lavon Affair, Israel recruited a group of Egyptian Jews to plant bombs in various establishments such as cinemas and libraries. The plan was to blame the attacks on the Muslim Brotherhood and other local nationalist groups in order to sour the relationship between Egypt and the U.S. The spies were caught, however, admitting their relationship to Israel, and tried in Egypt. They were found guilty: Two were hanged, one died by suicide in his cell, and six received prison sentences ranging from seven years to life. (Those sentenced to prison mysteriously returned to Israel around the time of the Six-Day War.)
Given the Trump administration’s recent crackdown on pro-Palestinian protesters, some of whom have been arrested and put into deportation proceedings, there’s reason to believe the U.S. government would want to portray a Palestinian activist as dangerous and violent to justify its actions.
However, there are plenty of false conspiracy theories about false flag operations that appear entirely false. After the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, some conspiracists insisted — and continue to insist — that the attack was committed by antifa or by undercover government agents. They believe the attack was a staged attempt to portray Trump supporters as violent or dangerous, even though many of the attackers were in fact well-known figures on the alt-right, including online streamers who had made their name for years endorsing antisemitic tropes or conspiracy theories such as QAnon.
Similarly, some people believe that the attempted assassination of Donald Trump at a campaign rally was a false flag attack — though what it was trying to achieve depends on who you ask. Either the shot was from a government agent attempting to eliminate Trump from the presidential race, or from a Trump supporter setting the stage for the president to appear heroic and for his enemies to seem immoral.
Rodriguez, whose online footprint appears linked to the Party for Socialism and Liberalism, does not seem as though he is a Mossad or CIA plant; years of evidence suggest that he believes what he said on the scene.
His actions are, however, likely to cause increased policing of the Palestinian activists, and bolster existing criticisms that pro-Palestinian activism is terrorism — exactly what a false flag operation would be trying to cause.
