Political murders and assassinations are not an unknown element in the affairs of states and nations. From Julius Caesar to Abraham Lincoln to Leon Trotsky – not to mention the unsuccessful attempts on the life of US President Donald Trump – there is a long history of such acts. Neither are they unknown in modern Jewish history.
On May 25, 1926, Symon Petliura was walking on Rue Racine in Paris, a few streets south of Boulevard Saint-Germain. He was approached by Shalom Schwarzbard, who had been in Kyiv in the summer of 1919 when the Ukrainian and White Armies entered the city and was witness to the pogrom violence that occurred. Pillaging, rapes, and murder took place, and over a three-year period, an estimated 100,000 Jews were killed across the Ukraine.
At the time, Petliura was the supreme commander of the Ukrainian People’s Army and had led the Ukrainian People’s Republic. Fourteen members of Schwarzbard’s family died in the pogroms. After asking, “Are you Mr. Petliura?” Schwarzbard shot him seven times. When arrested, he declared, “I have killed a great assassin.”
Jabotinsky's negotiations with Petliura
Five years earlier, Ze’ev Jabotinsky had negotiated with Petliura’s representative to create an independent Jewish military unit that would serve to protect Jews if Ukrainian forces exiled from Poland tried to take back Ukraine. He saw Petliura not as an antisemite but as a victim of the “antisemitism of circumstances.” Still, in not repressing the pogromists, not punishing the guilty, and not resigning, he was, as Jabotinsky wrote in Posledniya Novosti on October 11, 1927, responsible “for every drop of Jewish blood spilled.”
In the late summer and autumn of 1938, thousands of Polish Jews were expelled from Germany and left stranded at the Polish border. Poland, at first, would not allow them in. As Sendel Grynszpan recalled his deportation during the night of October 27, 1938, the Germans “took us in police trucks to the railway station. The streets were full of people shouting, ‘Juden raus! Raus nach Palästina!’ [‘Out with the Jews! Out to Palestine!]”
The conditions were terrible. A Red Cross worker from Britain testified that she found “thousands crowded together in pigsties.” The elderly, sick, and children were in inhumane conditions. A few tried to return to Germany and were shot.
On November 7, Herschel Grynszpan, Sendel’s son, then in Paris, went to the German embassy and asked to see an embassy official. Ernst vom Rath received him and was shot five times by Grynszpan, shouting, “In the name of 12,000 persecuted Jews”. Kristallnacht then followed.
A third instance is that of two members of the Lehi underground. Walter Guinness, Lord Moyne, had been appointed the British Minister-Resident for the Middle East in January 1944. Earlier, in a speech in the House of Lords on June 9, 1942, he attacked Lord Wedgwood, who had suggested that the Jews of Palestine should be armed and that they should “never surrender those arms… either to Hitler’s Germans or the British Administration in Palestine.”
Moyne’s criticism included an oblique but malicious calumny against Zionists when he said a real comparison with the Nazis “is surely those who wish to force an imported regime upon the Arab population who are guilty of the spirit of aggression and domination,” adding that Wedgwood’s words were “incitement to Zionists to seize the land of Palestine.”
Moreover, and inexplicably, he drew on some anthropological theory he had read and declared, “It is obvious that the Armenoid features which are still found among the Sephardim have been bred out of the Ashkenazim by an admixture of Slav blood.”
England’s 1939 White Paper that kept millions of Jews out of their homeland but caged in Nazi-occupied Europe was quite alright with Moyne as he agreed with its policy that Palestine should not be “converted into a Jewish state against the will of the Arab population.”
As Moyne arrived for a lunch break at his residence in Cairo on November 6, 1944, Eliyahu Bet-Zuri and Eliyahu Hakim bicycled up to the front courtyard. Hakim shot Moyne while he was still in the car, and Bet-Zuri, who saw the driver pull his gun out, shot him in the chest. Both Britons were killed. In a subsequent trial before an Egyptian court, both were found guilty and subsequently hanged.
Murders in Washington
The murders of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, in contradistinction, were committed by Elias Rodriguez, who told police, “I did it for Palestine; I did it for Gaza.”
Rodriguez, the son of a Hispanic family, has no known direct ties to Palestine. His father is an Iraq War veteran. He has been associated with extreme Marxist politics for a decade and once was active in the radical Party for Socialism and Liberation, which has posted anti-Israel rhetoric on social media.
The shooter perpetrated a murder by intersectionality. He wasn’t himself affected, in any way, by the events of Gaza. He was personally uninvolved but was persuaded by a false ideology of Jewish “settler-colonialism” and a belief that Jews were on the wrong side of “interlocking oppressions.” He was convinced that support for Zionism and Israel could not coexist with his various struggles for social justice. His victims were targeted by the twisted logic of a neo-Marxist cultural revolution.
For example, Guy Christensen, a pro-Palestinian TikTok influencer, posted that Rodriguez “isn’t a terrorist. He’s a resistance fighter. I do not condemn the elimination of the Zionist officials.”
The American Jewish establishment was warned of the dangers from the Left years ago but dismissed it until recently. The accusation of Israel pursuing a Gaza “genocide” was adopted, too, by the anti-Zionist T’ruah, Jewish Voice for Peace, and IfNotNow organizations.
Anti-Israel political violence on the Left is real. Organizations championing either an anti-Zionist position or an anti-Likud government one have been facilitating the growing irrational hatred of Israel and the spilling of Jewish blood.
We’re at a tipping point. Either more Jewish blood will be shed in the name of a “pro-Palestine”-engineered “global intifada,” or we will take back the narrative and practice proactive defense.
The writer is a researcher, analyst, and commentator on political, cultural, and media issues.