How anti-Israel rhetoric led to the killing of two in Washington, D.C.
The suspected murderer marinated in violent, hateful slogans
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, in the early hours of May 22, 2025. Two Israeli embassy staffers were shot dead late Wednesday, May 21, outside a Jewish museum in Washington by a gunman who shouted “free Palestine,” authorities said, with US officials and Israeli diplomats expressing shock and outrage over the killings. (Photo by Alex WROBLEWSKI / AFP) (Photo by ALEX WROBLEWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
Senior Columnist Rob Eshman May 22, 2025
If there was ever a time for reckoning in the anti-Israel movement, this is it.
The cold-blooded murder of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim in Washington, D.C., last night should mark the beginning of the end — preferably the end of the end — of the zombie belief that the only path to a “Free Palestine” is to abolish Israel.
Now we see where that eliminationist ideology can lead: to murder.
The legitimate struggle for Palestinian rights, the necessary opposition to the current Israeli government’s callous and self-defeating policies, the crucial work of forging coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians — all that has been hijacked by an international movement poisoned by violence and hatred.
No, not everyone who marches for a ceasefire, or in solidarity with suffering Gazans, is calling for the end of Israel.
But chants of “Intifada! Revolution” and “By Any Means Necessary” implicitly condone violence. The street and campus protesters and the social media warriors think nothing of claiming Israel has no right to exist — a specious idea whose logical extension is that, therefore, no Israeli has the right to exist.
That idea has been hiding in plain sight in much, though of course not all, of the pro-Palestine movement. The alleged murderer, who turned himself into police at the scene as he shouted, “Free Palestine” and “I did it for Gaza,” is 30-year-old Elias Rodriguez of Chicago.
His name and a photo of him, or someone who looks an awful lot like him, appears in a 2017 article in the online news site, Liberation, put out by the Party for Socialism and Liberation. It was a leader of the PSL, Eugene Puryear, who at a Times Square rally on Oct. 8, 2023, mocked Hamas’s massacre of some 270 attendees of the Nova music festival the day before.
“The resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters,” he said.
Note: The rally and Puryear’s statement were well before Israel’s extended entry into Gaza. The idea that the only way to free Palestine is to kill Jews has been baked into much of the anti-Israel movement for decades.
This is the bile Rodriguez drank and given how long it’s been spewed — how absolutely Israel and Israelis are demonized by people at both ends of the political spectrum — it was only a matter of time before some delusional freedom fighter decided to take those “intifada” chants as actual marching orders.
So he walked to a Jewish museum that was hosting a young leadership meeting of the American Jewish Committee, and he opened fire.
“How can the people of Gaza or Palestine possibly benefit from such a heinous random act of violence?” Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a Gaza-born fellow at the Atlantic Council, wrote on X following the shooting.
The answer is they can’t, and they won’t. If violence was the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem, it would have been solved a century ago.
The irony is that while more and more of the Arab world has come to understand this, the Palestinians’ self-appointed saviors in the West still dream of Israel’s eradication.
While the kaffiyeh-clad crowd are chanting “globalize the intifada!,” more and more Palestinians — in Gaza — are marching against Hamas. Hundreds took to the streets of Khan Yunis over three days this week, chanting, “Out! Out! Out! All of Hamas out!”
Those who have borne the brunt of Israel’s attack are pointing the finger at the group that caused it — Hamas. But instead of marching in solidarity with these Palestinians, too many American protesters have become leading Hamas apologists, mimicking their rhetoric and justifying their murderousness.
And in Washington, D.C., one sick soul decided to follow their lead to its logical, tragic conclusion.
The anti-Israel movement’s response to this tragedy will be telling. Will its leaders rationalize and justify the killing, and continue to demonize Israelis? Or will they bury their support for violence, and the mindless rhetoric that encourages it? Will they choose, instead, to support those Palestinians and Israelis who are working together for a peaceful and just solution and coexistence? At this tragic, terrible moment, it’s time for a reckoning.
This is a developing story and has been updated since publication.
