The Motives of a Shooter and Failings of Journalism
We must not abandon asking the question “why?”
The moment news broke about the shooting of two Israeli embassy staffers in D.C., it was immediately apparent what the media narrative would be.
“Slaying Outside D.C. Jewish Museum Is Part of Global Surge in Antisemitism” read one New York Times headline. “The D.C. Jewish Museum Shooting was Inevitable. The Time to Act on Antisemitism is Now” said Time Magazine. Fox News ran with: “From campus protests to deadly violence: Israeli Embassy staff murdered in DC.” Politicians across the political spectrum, from Donald Trump to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, quickly joined the barrage describing the shooting as ‘Jewish hate.’
That Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim were anything other than peace-loving and solutions-seeking diplomats was absent, as was the possibility that the accused shooter, Elias Rodriguez, might be motivated by anything other antisemitic malice. Newsrooms around the country made deliberate choices about what information to include and exclude from their stories. Understanding these choices is at the crux of an ongoing journalistic crisis.
From Rodriguez’s manifesto, titled: “Escalate for Gaza, bring the war home,” it seems that he viewed the shooting as a justified escalation of resistance and “the only sane thing to do” in the midst of a genocide. At the time of writing, the latest death toll in Gaza is 62,614. Meanwhile, Israel has waged a forced starvation campaign on Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip. On-the-ground reporting in Gaza has documented the catastrophic extent of food insecurity, including at least 57 children who have died from malnutrition.
In response, we have witnessed the formation of the largest ever pro-Palestine movement in U.S. history. And yet, the genocide rages on. If public opinion alone is not enough to shape policy–which Rodriguez points out in his manifesto–then what is to be done?
Rodriguez poses one answer to this question. His answer was shooting two individuals outside an event for young diplomats hosted by the American Jewish Committee (a Zionist Jewish institution that has reiterated support for Israel’s offensive in Gaza).
Those individuals were a couple named Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim. Lischinsky was born to a Jewish father and Christian mother in Germany (he was a practicing Christian), where he was raised until he left for Israel to enlist in the IDF between 2013-2016. He would eventually move to D.C. to work as a research assistant in the political department at the Israeli Embassy. Lischinsky held far-right political views–he wrote a Times of Israel opinion piece in 2020 praising Trump’s Israel policy; he consistently re-posted the IDF on his LinkedIn account; his final retweet lambasted the UN for claiming that Gazans faced imminent starvation.
Milgrim was a Jewish American who grew up in the suburbs of Kansas City and was less than two years into her diplomacy career, which focused on organizing U.S. missions to Israel. Before her job at the embassy, she worked for a non-profit called Tech2Peace based in Tel Aviv, where she lived for a summer. She had a less prominent digital footprint than Lischinsky, although she did post a photo of her standing next to Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who recently called the ICJ genocide case against Israel a “blood libel.”
It should be no surprise that Milgrim and Lischinsky supported the genocide in Gaza–they worked for the Israeli government, albeit on the lower rungs of power.
I share this information not because I believe that pro-genocide politics or low-level state power justifies their death, but because it was largely absent from the reporting in mainstream media. Two things can be true: their deaths can be tragic and their professional lives can be complicit in genocide. To acknowledge the tragedy of their loss, we need not whitewash the work that Milgrim and Lischinsky participated in.
Similarly, asking why the deaths of two Israeli embassy staffers has prompted so much outrage from politicians and news outlets silent on (or loudly cheering) the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, does not negate the right to grieve.
After being detained, Rodriguez yelled “Free, Free Palestine,” signaling that his motivation was a response to Israel’s genocide. Yet, in all the articles written about the shooting, and there were many, the vast majority honed in on the narrative of an “antisemitic motivated attack,” de-contextualizing it from violence in Gaza.
At the same time, it is important to understand that a manifesto is by no means fact. Just because Rodriguez wrote down that his intention was an armed act of political violence in response to the genocide in Gaza, not an anti-Jewish hate crime, does not preclude the possibility of antisemitism. I for one am curious if he knew the identities of his targets beforehand. It is a sobering reality that anti-Zionism can turn to antisemitism when all Jews regardless of relationship to Israel are held collectively responsible for the state’s violent actions. (Studies show that violence against diaspora Jews consistently correlates with upticks in Israeli violence against Palestinians, thus Zionist military aggression can be understood as a factor of ‘anti-Zionist antisemitism’).
Perhaps antisemitism was a factor and he just happened to shoot two employees of the Israeli government. We should not take Rodriguez’s manifesto at face value, nor should we ignore his stated intentions.
Good journalism covering the shooting would present the facts supporting possible motives—individualized political violence targeting government officials of a state committing genocide, or an antisemitic hate crime (or both)—with proper context to allow readers to draw informed conclusions. Good journalism would make a serious attempt to understand “the why.”
Instead, we got:
CNN guest and former Biden diplomat Deborah Lipstadt, answering a question about what “Free Palestine” means: “It has become a call for violence, and not violence against Israelis which is also wrong, but violence against Jews… This was antisemitism pure and simple.”
ABC news quoting Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar verbatim, including: “This is the direct result of toxic anti-Semitic incitement against Israel and Jews around the world that has been going on since the October 7th massacre.”
Time Magazine publishing ADL CEO Jonathan Greeblatt, who wrote: “This wasn't random violence. This was targeted antisemitism. This was an attack, not just against the D.C. Jewish community, but against all Jewish Americans—and indeed all Americans.”
The Atlantic running an article titled “A Dangerous Disguise for Antisemitism”: “His alleged decision to murder guests at an AJC event suggests that what he wanted was simply to hurt Jews.”
A Washington Post opinion piece leading with: “Like other evildoers who have targeted Jews over millennia because of their faith, he ignored their humanity and sought to extinguish the light they brought into the world.”
And these are supposed to be the “reasonable liberal counterbalance” to the rabid far-right.
Taking the ideas of a killer seriously is taboo, but asking the question ‘why’ is not a justification for ‘the what.’ Returning to: “If public opinion alone is not enough to shape policy, then what is to be done,” I do believe this question demands our consideration. However, individualized assassinations of low-level Israeli state officials inside the United States, which Elias Rodriguez advocates for, is divorced from any semblance of strategy.
This is not just my personal assessment. In a November 2024 interview with Jewish Currents, Palestinian writer, Abdaljawad Omar, shared:
“Among Palestinians across different political parties, there is generally a shared consensus on the importance of boycott, divestment, and sanctions as our primary call to the world. We’re not asking people in the Global North to join us on the ground in combat; rather, we’re asking them to exert pressure on their governments, institutions, media, and civil society to ensure that Israel faces consequences for its practices of occupation and apartheid. Only then can we cultivate a strategy with the potential to yield tangible results.”
The Palestine solidarity movement does indeed have an imperative to escalate and meet the gravity of the moment. Other existing escalation pathways include hunger strikes on college campuses; actions targeting weapons manufacturers’ infrastructure; the Gaza Freedom Flotilla attempting to break the siege; divestment campaigns aligned with the Palestine BDS Committee’s guidelines; and the Palestinian Youth Movement’s Mask Off Maersk campaign.
Alternatively, Rodriguez’s act will more than likely increase the intensity of repression against the movement and negatively impact these other strategies, while simultaneously bolstering the distorted idea that “to support Palestine is to support violence against all Jews.” This distortion is precisely the intention of the media barrage following the shooting, and at the nucleus of the journalistic crisis. So much journalism does not seek to pose questions and encourage critical thought, but to provide cover for atrocities through narratives that both dehumanize enemies of the U.S. Empire and disempower the movements seeking to dismantle it.
We are seeing the impacts of this in real time. Israeli officials have seized the moment as moral cover for their most recent escalation in Gaza: “Operation Gideon’s Chariots,” which has been likened to Israel’s Final Solution for Palestinians.
The slew of genocidal statements from Israeli officials responding to the shooting included: “Let us be absolutely clear: ‘Free Palestine’ is not a cry for liberty — it is a cry for murder. That was proven in blood today.” (Diaspora Minister Amichai Chikli); “Blood libels against Israel have a cost in blood.” (Netanyahu); “When irresponsible and disgraceful politicians slander Israel with false accusations of genocide and war crimes, it’s no wonder antisemitism rises and Palestinian terrorists feel emboldened to carry out attacks.” (Culture and Sports Minister Miki Zohar).
Establishment Jewish Zionist institutions in the U.S. are also capitalizing on the media narrative. The Jewish Community Relations Council—a pro-Israel Jewish political advocacy, media and education institution—sent out a newsletter, reading: “Many have long warned that the threat from the anti-Zionist far-left is no less deadly than that from the far-right. Perhaps, now the doubters, including within our own community, will finally listen and act accordingly.”
We do not have to guess what “act accordingly” means. The Heritage Foundation (authors of Project 2025) published Project Esther, the playbook for how they intend to dismantle the pro-Palestine movement in 12-24 months. Project Esther’s strategy rests on weaponizing false accusations of antisemitism to repress the movement, which has been championed by the Trump administration.
Project Esther talking points are being parroted by mainstream media reporting on the D.C. shooting. The torrent of stories implying (or outright stating) that ‘to be part of the movement for Palestinian freedom is to link arms with Jew-killers’ is only the most recent example of this. (A more robust account of the media’s relationship to Gaza can be found in this Al Jazeera documentary.)
When journalism is reactionary, it is failing. When journalism replaces questions that require critical thinking and nuance with ones that fit easily into existing oppressive narratives, it is failing. When journalism refuses to ask the question “why,” it is failing.
Many of our visceral reactions to things from the most devastating atrocities to everyday hardship are filtered through the lens of reactionary rhetoric intended to distract from the roots of suffering. Stepping back to ask the question “why” can be a shield against dehumanization and a radical act. Now more than ever, we need journalism that opens portals, not shuts doors, on hard questions.
Below are a list of publications that I turn to in these times:
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