Here was another chance – at least as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saw it – of threading one set of events with another. It’s all part of the Israeli security state’s playbook: any killing of Jews or its citizens, wherever they might be, will have a causal link to rabid, drooling antisemitism. To protest ethnic cleansing against Palestinians, dispossession, starvation as a tool of war, and the conscious infliction of humanitarian catastrophe on a population is equivalent to believing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. These accusations and charges are seen as blood libels on the Jewish people, rather than rebukes and condemnation of the Israeli State and its policies.
The killing of Israeli embassy staffers Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky as they were leaving an event at the Capital Jewish Museum located in downtown Washington, D.C. was such a chance. According to Yechiel Leitner, the Israeli ambassador to the US, the couple were to be engaged.
The suspect gunman, Elias Rodriguez, was arrested at the scene and taken away shouting: “Free Palestine!” In court documents submitted by the FBI, the suspect, in handing himself to the officers, stated his rationale for the shootings: “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza, I am unarmed.” He also professed admiration for US Air Force member Aaron Bushnell, who immolated himself outside the Israeli embassy in February 2024 declaring that he would “no longer be complicit in genocide.” Rodriguez has been charged by the US attorney’s office in Washington with two counts of first-degree murder.
A grave, reflective response might have been in order. But the Netanyahu government has always been on the hunt for the political justification, and the political expedient. Given Netanyahu’s own political travails, be they corruption charges and his own unpopularity, this quest has become habitual. So it came to pass that Milgrim and Lischinsky could become a convenient platform to attack countries allied to Israel yet taking issue with the levelling and starving of Gaza.
The mood was set during a press conference given by Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar on May 21. The slaying of Milgrim and Lischinsky was “the direct result of toxic antisemitic incitement against Israel and Jews around the world that has been going on since the October 7 massacre.” Israel’s missions and representatives across the globe had become “targets of antisemitic terrorism that has crossed all red lines.”
In suggesting “a direct line connecting antisemitic and anti-Israeli incitement to this murder,” Sa’ar accused “leaders and officials of many countries and international organizations, especially from Europe,” for being central instigators. They had resorted to “modern blood libels” in accusing Israel of “genocide, crimes against humanity and murdering babies.”
While not expressly mentioning them, the Foreign Minister was clearly referring to France, Britain and Canada and their joint statement of May 19 warning about the murderous implications of Operation Gideon’s Chariots. The statement affirmed the trio’s opposition to “the expansion of Israel’s military operations in Gaza.” Israel’s permission of “a basic quantity of food into Gaza” was condemned as wholly inadequate, while denying essential humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian population in the Strip was “unacceptable and risks breaching International Humanitarian Law.” The three countries further condemned “the abhorrent language used recently by members of the Israeli Government, threatening that, in their despair at the destruction of Gaza, civilians will start to relocate.”
The statement went on to warn that, were Israel not to cease pursuing such “egregious actions”, cease the ongoing military operation, and lift restrictions on humanitarian aid, “we will take further concrete actions in response.”
On May 20, in his address to the House of Commons, UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy noted the “abominable”situation of threatened “starvation hanging over hundreds of thousands of civilians.” He grimly noted the words of Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who had spoken of “cleansing Gaza” and “destroying what’s left,” with the intention of relocating Palestinians to third countries. Such measures, for Lammy, were “morally unjustifiable, wholly disproportionate and utterly counter-productive.”
In light of such developments, negotiations with Israel over a new free trade agreement were to be suspended. A further three individuals and four entities involved in Israel’s illegal settler program in the West Bank were also to be sanctioned.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry was dismissive of the British position, calling the sanctions “regrettable”. “If, due to anti-Israel obsession and domestic political considerations, the British government is willing to harm the British economy – that is its own prerogative.”
It was Netanyahu, however, who pulled out all the stops. In a video address, he noted the words uttered by Rodriquez as he was taken away: “Free Palestine.” Finding such a statement obscene, he recalled that it was “the same chant we heard on October 7 [2023]”, when “thousands of terrorists stormed into Israel from Gaza,” proceeding to behead men, rape women and burn babies. To take “Free Palestine” as a serious proposition was “today’s version of ‘Heil Hitler’.” It was a “simple truth” that had evaded “the leaders of France, Britain, Canada and others.” In their proposals for establishing a Palestinian state, they were rewarding “these murderers with the ultimate price.”
French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney were roundly condemned for being on “the wrong side of justice,” “humanity” and “history.” They had been praised by “mass murderers, rapists, baby killers and kidnappers.” The PM’s objective was simple: avoiding the establishment of any Palestinian state, as it was bound to be vulnerable to seizure by “radicals.” It was axiomatic that such an entity would wish for the destruction of the Jewish state. The picture becomes complete: Israel’s operations, totally justified on national security grounds; critics, abominated as hateful antisemites; the Palestinians, radicals current or in embryo needing to be rubbed out.
No one doubts that the reserves of antisemitism run deep, clouded by miasmic, millennial hatreds. Few can also doubt that a dislike of policies driven by ethnoreligious fanaticism contemptuous of human rights is a valid ground of protest. That this should end up in killings of individuals attending an event about humanitarian aid that would have otherwise appalled Netanyahu, Ben Gvir et al, is another, disturbing irony. Fanaticism diminishes the horizon, leaving human beings bare, and hollow, and naked. And that baring is currently underway with remorseless intensity in Gaza.
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A dissertation on the Gaza Strip and its historical significance would be helpful, at this point in time. Don’t you think?
It is regrettable that in reporting the unnecessary and counterproductive killings of the two young Zjeeidh people. Most of the media (from what I have observed) have neglected to sheet the incident home to Netanyahu, his government and the IDF and continue to promulgate the claim that Hamas (alone) killed hundreds on October 7. As we now know many of the deaths are down to the Zidda and the so-called Hanibsl Dirdctive, it now seems certain that few if any of the remaining hostages will remain alive after the IDF ‘rescues’ them by levelling Gaza and starving everyone.
Aaron Bushnell, a true Us patriot, made the ultimate sacrifice for justice in Gaza, unlike the treasonous warmongering, bought and paid for, Zionist toading US political class.The US has no credibility and has ceased to be a morally respected independent country and is now, as, indeed, it has been for many years already, a wholly-owned subordinate puppet of the Zionist rogue pariah State of Israel, with shared values which are rightfully rejected by the overwhelming majority of mankind. Americans witnessed the most pathetically craven and humiliating hour in which Netanyahu dictated to virtually all the attending political prostitutes infesting the U.S. Congress with his arrogant speech where congressmen/women came to grovel and pay homage to their puppet-master, Netanyahu. By their venality, cowardice, moral bankruptcy and near-treason, the American political class is flushing a once great country down history’s toilet, and the Global West, if it does not soon liberate itself from domination by the ever pervasive evil of the Zionist Israeli-American Empire, risks a similar fate.
The Godless Zionist inspired project, Israel, is a failed unjust and racist experiment. Zionist Israel has for many decades proven to be a uncontrollable nuclear armed rogue pariah state.
The horrific atrocoties and unlawful collective punishment in Gaza are the perfect embodiment of ‘Western Values’ and the double standards and hypocrisy of the Wests “global rules based order” lie.
How is Israel’s apartheid acceptable and South Africa’s was not? How is Israel’s “ethnic cleansing” acceptable and Nazi Germany’s “ethnic cleansing” was not?
Not only have heartless Zionists stolen Palestinian land but the Zionists stole the Jewish religion to do it. Soulless Zionism is a political ideology, not a religious or ethnic identity. The egregious, false equivalence between it and Judaism is the only way Israel and the West can justify genocide. Zionists have forever shamed the Jewish religion.The Zionists cruel genocidal war on Palestinians is not just a war on Palestinians. It is a despicable orchestrated Zionist war on truth, justice, humanity, basic Christian values of peace love and respect , international law, the Geneva Convention, common decency, freedom and the Jewish religion itself. While these are evil and despicable acts that undermine civilisation as we know it, Zionists have now made antisemitism their weapon of choice that relies on the collective amnesia of those charged with the job of calling out injustice.
How does the collective Westl find antisemitism far more egregious and morally reprehensible then the systemic genocidal apartheid, collective punishment, orchestrated targeting of children and murderous war crimes in Gaza?
The manufactured and concocted outrage by Zionist useful idiot apologists and their use of anti sematism to censor debate is the last refuge of lying, conniving scoundrels. The cynical, contrivedl and contemptuous use of antisemitism by the Zionist propagandist demeans and devalues the outrageous real pain and suffering experienced by those of the Jewish faith at the hands of German Nazis. How is it the responsibility and bizarrely the burden of the Palestinian people to right the wrongs of the atrocities caused by Nazi Germans upon the Jewish people???
What reasonable thinking person could have ever imagined that “never again” IS happening again. The macabre reality is it is being perpetrated by those who should know better and, are to their own detriment, repeating history that will forever now be the most shameful of a very shameful history. Documented factual history will harshly judge the Zionist experiment, Israel, as nothing more then a cynically cruel hoax with the singular purpose of strategically protecting US interests in the Middle East.
As long as it survives, Zionist Israel will never get away from its inbred racism, callous inhumanity and barbaric cruelty. The mask has been forever torn off. The mutiated dead children of Gaza will haunt it until the end of time. “God’s chosen people” will forever be remembered for creating hell on Earth. Hell is empty as all the devils are alive and well living on stolen Palestinian land.
ajogrady, beautifully put.
The horrific atrocities and unlawful collective punishment in Gaza are the perfect embodiment of ‘Western Values’
Exactly.
Those horrific Western values are the ones we will be fighting for when we get dragged into the next US-designed conflict.
Not to take away anything that ajogrady has said, but I think many would take pause at his observation of “the once great country…”. Maybe I’m wrong, but my limited sense of American history furnishes myriad examples of horrific cruelties, both domestically and abroad.
Like… the genocidal annihilation of the Native American tribes. The committing of war crimes in many of their aggressions against other countries as a quantifiable element of the relentless militarism, often in order to aid and abet expansion of corporate interests. The appalling heartlessness of the social structures; low wages, violence against unions, unaffordable health care, poor housing, education, continued violence against non-white citizens.
We’re all sadly familiar with the many wrongs of that country; its social, political and financial segregations, a country of extraordinary haves & have-nots. I don’t see how one can juxtapose these aspects against a framing of America as a ‘great country.’