Above photo: Police tape cordons off the Capital Jewish Museum after shooting deaths of two Israeli embassy employees following an event there on Wednesday night. Sdkb /Wikimedia Commons.
The barbarism of the live-streamed genocide in Gaza has inflicted moral injury on a scale untold.
This is how Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation and this abhorrent double murder should be understood.
Days after the deed, we can only but wonder what are the thoughts now occupying the mind of 30-year-old Elias Rodriguez of Chicago.
As he languishes in his jail cell contemplating life and fate, is he still satisfied that he did the right thing? Or has he awoken to the totality of what he now faces in consequence, up to and including a possible death sentence?
With the murder of Israeli embassy staff members Yaron Lischinksy and Sarah Milgrim as they emerged from an event at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, what Rodriguez has done in truth is hand Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his supporters across America and beyond a most prized gift.
They are rinsing every last morsel out of this assassination/murder in a determined attempt to occupy a moral high ground in the midst of the ongoing holocaust in Gaza, one they most certainly have zero right to occupy and never have.
In the process of being detained at the scene, Rodriguez made a point of calling out “Free Palestine!” multiple times. In response, Netanyahu, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity in Gaza, wasted no time in declaring that the chant “Free Palestine,” is today’s equivalent of “Heil Hitler.”
What has Elias Rodriguez really achieved with the shooting dead of these diplomats? This is the question. Apart from extinguishing their lives, and also by extension his own, it is an act of individual terror which does nothing — nothing — to advance the righteous cause of anti-Zionism and Palestinian liberation.
But then, was Rodriguez’s motivation really political at all? Or was his deed driven by a momentary lapse into insanity over an ongoing live-streamed genocide that the world has proved powerless to stop?
The moral injury inflicted on all of us in consequence has been untold. How could it not when as in a never-ending procession, we have been showered with the images and footage of the unrelenting slaughter that has and continues to be visited on a poor indigenous people? Said slaughter and carnage has been undertaken in the name not of security or self-defence, as tirelessly claimed, but in the name of ethno-fascism. This is the fine point of it.
Reduced To Bearing Witness
Throughout, we have been reduced to the role of bearing witness, which is where the self-immolation of Aaron Bushnell and now the double murder committed by Rodriguez should be understood. For both men, bearing witness gave way to a bursting desire to “do something” — to place themselves in the gears in a futile attempt to somehow stop this Israeli machine of mass murder from grinding on and on.
In the aftermath of Rodriguez’s act, much has been made of his link to the U.S. Marxist-Leninist Party of Socialism and Liberation (PSL). At this writing, you can guarantee that the F.B.I. and other branches of U.S. law enforcement will be poring over the organization’s website, emails and the speeches made by its leading lights at various conferences and demonstrations with anti-terrorism legislation in mind.
It can also likely look forward to having its offices raided in a chilling echo of the war that was waged against the Black Panther Party by U.S. law enforcement in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
In some quarters, the claim that Rodriguez’s killing of this couple belongs in the category of a false flag is being argued. Such claims should be summarily dismissed. The denial of agency to “regular people” and the assumption that “power” is behind every single event has sown dragon’s teeth when it comes to making sense of a world that to large extent has lost its mind.
The Shaping Of Human Affairs
Throughout history, acts of individual terror and assassinations have shaped human affairs. In pre-Bolshevik Russia, the anarchist belief in the “propaganda of the deed” informed the assassination of leading members of the Russian ruling elite, up to and including Tsar Alexander II in 1881.
The most impactful of such deeds was, of course, committed by Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princep in 1914. Princep’s assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, in Sarajevo led directly to the carnage of the First World War.
Back to today, political violence is as American as apple pie. It also underpinned the establishment of the State of Israel and has driven its existence since. Both states were literally born in violence, with the ensuing development of both shaped by same.
This should be borne in mind when we hear the siren voices of authority declaiming against Rodriguez’s act as being un-American and anti-Semitic. It was not. It was instead entirely in keeping with the DNA of a society in which the Second Amendment, and the right it confers on the people “to keep and bear arms,” is venerated and worshipped — and always has been. It is also entirely in keeping with that of Israel, where the gun has done far more than the ballot box to shape the country’s national identity.
Gaza is in ruins, thousands of Palestinian infants and children are dead — with thousands more maimed — and famine looms. Under such grim and barbaric circumstances in the year 2025 not 1425, some people may find it difficult to muster a surplus of sympathy over the deaths of two supporters of the state and government responsible.
But sympathy is not the issue here. The issue, or at least the primary issue, is the extent to which it has moved the dial forward or not when it comes to opposing this monstrous crime committed against a civilian population.
One thinker who seriously grappled with the issue of acts of individual terror in his time was Leon Trotsky. He wrote a long article on the subject in 1911 — “Why Marxists Oppose Individual Terrorism.”
Trotsky:
In our eyes, individual terror is inadmissible precisely because it belittles the role of the masses in their own consciousness, reconciles them to their powerlessness, and turns their eyes and hopes towards a great avenger and liberator.
Elias Rodriguez, this otherwise ordinary young man from Chicago living an otherwise ordinary existence, has with one act of murderous violence crashed his way into the consciousness of a world corrupted by genocide in our time. Believing that he was engaged in an act of exemplary solidarity with its countless victims, he produced a handgun and extinguished the lives of a young couple.
There comes a point, surely, when the hegemonic penchant for death has to be superseded by the penchant for life.
John Wight, author of Gaza Weeps, 2021, writes on politics, culture, sport and whatever else. Please consider making a donation in order to help fund his efforts. You can do so here. You can also grab a copy of his book, This Boxing Game: A Journey in Beautiful Brutality, from all major booksellers, and his novel Gaza: This Bleeding Land from same. Please consider taking out a subscription at his Medium site.