By Carlos Sapir
On May 21, two staffers employed by the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., were shot dead while leaving a pro-Israel professional networking event hosted by the American Jewish Committee. A suspect, Elias Rodríguez of Chicago, was arrested at the scene. Less than a week later, U.S. officials announced that they had apprehended a U.S. citizen, Joseph Neumayer, who had allegedly plotted to firebomb the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv.
How do we understand these incidents, and what is the path forward for the movement in solidarity with Palestine in these circumstances?
Jumping to predictable conclusions
The Trump administration wasted no time in denouncing the shooting in Washington as antisemitic terrorism. This claim was echoed in the big-business media—such as The New York Times. Zionist hawks went on to call for repression of pro-Palestine demonstrations. Simultaneously, they cast blame on the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) and the ANSWER coalition, left organizations that the suspect reportedly had brief contact with almost a decade ago.
The immediate impact of the assassinations is clear: it provides a basis for increased repressive measures against Palestine solidarity activists. Never mind that there is zero indication that the attack was motivated by hatred towards Jews, rather than the clearly expressed outrage against the horrific massacres committed by the Israeli state, or that the deaths of two Israeli government staffers are a rounding error compared to the tens of thousands of Palestinians already killed by Israel’s unrelenting sieges of Gaza and the West Bank and its indiscriminate bombing campaigns in Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen.
The PSL and ANSWER, which have organized countless Palestine solidarity actions, including repeated marches on Washington, now have to contend with accusations of inciting or even committing terrorism, which could obstruct their organizing efforts.
Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein, who published the suspected shooter’s manifesto, has faced direct intimidation from the FBI, and it is probable that any other individual or group with a public profile linked to the suspect will be facing similar or greater pressure from the feds.
The attacks on Israeli and U.S. embassies accelerate an already existing process of demonization and criminalization of pro-Palestinian speech and political activity. These are immediate drawbacks that have already been incurred. So what is left of the political direction charted by these vigilantes?
Reading the manifesto
The purported shooter’s manifesto is a short document. It lucidly identifies its motivation as a response to the state violence committed by Israel with the direct support of the United States. It notes that this violence has existed for decades, but that the U.S. public’s awareness of its scope and unconscionable nature has only recently shifted. But despite noting a pattern of impunity between the butchers of Gaza and those who carried out similar violence in the genocide of the Mayan people in Guatemala or during the Vietnam War, it is silent on the political framework that has played accomplice to these crimes. “Imperialism” and “empire” do not appear in the manifesto, nor does “capitalism.”
The manifesto likens its author to the would-be assassin of Robert McNamara in 1972 on a boat off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, several years after McNamara had stepped down from his role as Secretary of Defense and butcher of Vietnam. The value of this action, according to both the 1972 assailant and the 2025 shooter, was to simply show McNamara that “his history wasn’t so fine, was it?” when cornered man to man. After surviving his encounter, McNamara would proceed to spend his next nine years continuing to abet imperialism in his capacity as the president of the World Bank Group, followed by a comfortably luxurious life as a trustee of various big-name U.S. institutions before dying peacefully at home in 2009.
The shooter’s manifesto further theorizes its action to be an “armed demonstration,” a next step after “peaceful demonstration” has supposedly failed. It sees the intent of mass protest as simply a way to muster public opinion in view of politicians who then are expected to act on it, rather than a way to amass forces among the working-class public to mobilize their economic power against the war machine.
It echoes the rhetoric of the Weather Underground in its insistence that it is necessary to “bring the war home” and to “escalate,” while the state’s only goal is to stop this from happening and to convince the public that this is not an effective strategy. This, regrettably, is a fatal misunderstanding of the aims of the capitalist state, the methods it has employed for decades of “counter-terrorism” activity, and the strategies that actually help opponents to build power.
“Counter”-terrorism and the war brought home
It’s worth noting that the scattered bomb attacks perpetrated by the Weather Underground did not play a pivotal role in ending the Vietnam War. Nor did similar tactics adopted by like-minded “urban guerrilla” groups in Europe win any significant victories against imperialism despite endless rounds of “escalation” by groups that became more and more insular. Historical evidence suggests, in addition, that the forces of the state are actually on much stronger footing when dissidents resort to terrorist tactics, and in fact have spent significant resources to explicitly push left and Muslim individuals and groups toward more violent confrontations with the state in order to better isolate and repress them.
We now know that during the Cold War, the state forces of the U.S. and Britain adopted a “strategy of tension” in Italy, forming neofascist terrorist cells while also clandestinely encouraging terrorism by left-wing cells in order to discredit the Italian Communist Party and Italian Socialist Party and prevent them from entering government. While there were also sincere leftists who advocated armed actions during this period, it is significant that the forces of imperialism did not see left-wing terrorism as a threat, but rather as an opportunity. The result is today remembered as the “Years of Lead” (“Anni di Piombo,” late 1960s to early 1980s) in Italy, which experienced a contraction of popular political organization and an overall weakening of the left.
Meanwhile, stateside, it was FBI informants like Richard Aoki who encouraged the Black Panther Party to adopt a posture of armed confrontations with the police, ultimately leading to the arrest of its leadership and the destruction of the organization.
While the 21st century archives of the FBI and CIA have yet to be revealed, it is evident that the FBI adopted a similar strategy as part of the so-called “War on Terror.” The partial records already obtained by researchers and activists suggest that state agencies have engaged in a campaign of infiltration and entrapment of would-be radicals, steering them toward ill-planned terror plots that end with the duped perpetrator’s arrest.
No evidence has appeared at this time demonstrating government involvement in these recent attacks. Nevertheless, it has consistently been the case that the state apparatus sees dissident violence as an opportunity to benefit from. The circumstances of the attacks, meanwhile, further underline that they did not include much consideration for even the immediate and obvious consequences of their actions.
Media reports suggest that the D.C. shooting suspect effectively turned himself in following the shooting, telling staffers at the nearby Jewish Museum to call the police. In Tel Aviv, the would-be bomber inexplicably spat on a guard at the embassy before sprinting away, leaving behind a backpack full of Molotov cocktails—seemingly the only evidence at the time that would have tied him to any more serious criminal activity—before returning to his hotel, where he was soon apprehended by Israeli police. This erratic behavior does not suggest that these individuals arrived with a clear plan and strategy, but rather that, in the face of the immense suffering inflicted by Israeli forces against Palestine, with U.S. support, they fell prey to the idea of committing half-baked felonies with little thought of what would happen afterward (or in the Tel Aviv case, even before it).
Escalator ahead, exit left
As we face a government that openly fantasizes about the prospect of deploying the military to quell domestic protests, that in fact says that the country is already actively experiencing an “invasion” by immigrants and thereby justifies the use of wartime laws and the removal of all civil liberties, it should be abundantly clear that the state wishes for nothing more than “to bring the war home,” and to use the said “war” as an excuse for more and more heavy-handed repression. While it is true that the just desserts of war have on several occasions led to successful revolutions, these transformations did not occur thanks to a handful of terrorists “bringing the war home” by bombing state or civilian infrastructure: Whether we look at the Russian Revolution, the Carnation Revolution in Portugal, the defeat of the Argentine dictatorship in 1983, or elsewhere, we see not the actions of a few arsonists and assassins but rather the role of mass mobilizations of a broad populace dissatisfied with war, occupation, and its results.
The impulse to “escalate” is understandable in the face of a genocide and the intransigence of the U.S. government despite people’s outrage. After having marched and called your congressperson to no avail, what else is there left to do? The mistake in the logic of escalation is to see resistance as a fundamentally individualist task: I marched and I called my congressperson and nothing happened; therefore I must now pick up the gun because that’s the only way I get to weigh in on who lives and who dies. Even if that “I” of one were to be replaced with a group of a few dozen, or even hundreds of dedicated activists, it falls far short of the masses that can and must be won over to win political change. It misses the understanding that political work for popular struggles is a question of mass mobilization and collective action: the marches in the past few years have been large and impressive mobilizations that have only just begun the task of setting people into motion.
We carry the legacies of successful struggles that were fought and won in part because they recognized that individualist terrorism and assassinations are a dead end. We cannot allow ourselves to look at a crowd of 10,000 or even 100,000 and say, “this is the extent of people who are willing to stand up for Palestine.” These rallies are but stepping stones to mobilizations of millions, which include the full weight of labor unions as well as yet unorganized workers who bring these political questions into their workplaces, and in doing so wield real political power, and not just the barrel of one gun.
Drawing: The accused shooter, Elias Rodríguez (seated at left), at his arraignment in court. (Reuters)
