For those who warned of ‘Free Palestine’ violence, fatal shooting at DC Jewish museum offers grim validation

JTA – Two months after Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel, a man with a gun walked up the steps of a synagogue in Albany, New York, and fired into the air while shouting, “Free Palestine!”

Children were inside the building at the time. It was, it seemed, nearly a nightmare scenario for those anxious about how protests against Israel’s war in Gaza could lead to antisemitic violence.

In that case, no-one was harmed before the man was arrested. But on Wednesday night, 21 May, the nightmare came true.

A man opened fire on people exiting a reception for young Jewish professionals at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, DC, killing two Israeli embassy staffers. He then entered the museum and shouted, “Free Palestine!” as he was taken away by police.

During nearly 20 months of vociferous protests against Israel, some have increasingly warned that anti-Zionism could motivate the same physical danger as white supremacy or extremist Islamic fundamentalism. Last Wednesday night, the shooting offered a cruel validation.

“For those who wondered about the context of whether a particular chant was hate speech or antisemitic, this is what it looks like when physically manifested,” Sacha Roytman Dratwa, an Israeli military veteran who is the chief executive of the Combat Antisemitism Movement, said in a statement.

“The murderer did not know his victims were Israeli, he just knew they attended a Jewish event,” he said. “When we say that the antisemites don’t hate Jews because of Israel, but rather, they hate Israel because it’s the Jewish homeland, this is what we mean.”

Lethal antisemitic violence against Jews and Jewish institutions in the United States has been relatively rare. The deadliest incidents, including the 2018 Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh; the shooting at a California Chabad the following year; and the 2014 attack on a Jewish community centre in Kansas City, were carried out by avowed white supremacists. There have also been attacks by Islamic terrorists, including the synagogue hostage crisis in Colleyville, Texas, in 2021, and incidents attributed to pure racial animus.

But until Wednesday night, there hadn’t been a deadly attack on a Jewish institution carried out by someone who appeared to be primarily motivated by far-left pro-Palestinian activism or steeped in traditional progressive politics. When watchdogs such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) or the US Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism warned that the antisemitic left was as dangerous as the antisemitic right, they often drew criticism.

“The ADL isn’t helping anyone when it defines a bomb threat at a synagogue and a Students for Justice in Palestine rally as equally antisemitic,” an editor at the New Republic wrote in early 2024, after the antisemitism watchdog released an audit showing a record-high number of antisemitic incidents, more than a third of which involved criticism of Israel.

Now, the ADL and others are issuing statements to say they were right.

“For those who claim that ‘globalise the intifada’ is peaceful and not antisemitic, the horrifying shooting of two young Jewish adults is proof that you are wrong,” said Daniel Rosen, the president of the American Jewish Congress. “Words matter. Just because one person pulls the trigger doesn’t mean they acted alone.”

ADL Chief Executive Jonathan Greenblatt said the shooting was foretold by the spike in antisemitism in the US since 7 October. The organisation doesn’t consider all criticism of Israel or pro-Palestinian advocacy antisemitic, but it treats anti-Israel activism directed at Jewish institutions or people who aren’t engaged in Israel advocacy as antisemitic incidents. Greenblatt publicly adopted the position in 2022 that anti-Zionism ran the same risk of violent attacks as antisemitism.

“When antisemitic rhetoric is normalised, tolerated, or even amplified in our public discourse, it creates an environment where violence against Jews becomes more likely,” Greenblatt said after the shooting. “In a climate of relentless antisemitism in the US and globally since 7 October 2023, unfortunately, this tragedy was inevitable.”

Voices on the right echoed the idea that the Capital Jewish Museum shooting was unavoidable, sometimes specifying those that they believed had amplified and normalised antisemitic rhetoric.

“This type of tragedy is the natural progression of events when the morons running our colleges, far-left politicians, and hate merchants on social media continue to normalise and seemingly encourage antisemitism in this country,” tweeted Dave Portnoy, the Jewish founder of Barstool Sports.

“This psychopath who murdered the two staff members of the Israeli embassy in Washington DC tonight will rot in jail hopefully for life, but he’s not the only one guilty here. There were other murderers,” tweeted Hillel Fuld, an American-Israeli influencer whose brother was murdered in a Palestinian terror attack.

“Candace Owens. Piers Morgan,” he wrote, naming prominent media personalities who have espoused or provided a platform for anti-Israel rhetoric. “Every single person who held Hamas and Hezbollah flags in the streets, every person who supported them, every person calling to globalise the intifada, and every single human being who contributed to Jew hatred online by spreading Hamas propaganda and blood libels. You are all guilty, and you have blood on your hands.”

Emily Schrader, an American-Israeli commentator and activist, wrote that the shooting should put to rest any argument that “Free Palestine” is merely a rhetorical flourish.

“May every person who said that this ‘Free Palestine’ movement is simply ‘speech’, understand once and for all that this is exactly what the anti-Israel movement seeks to do – radicalise and justify unspeakable violence against civilians,” she tweeted. “This isn’t ‘resistance’, it’s cold-blooded murder.”

Some have long argued that “Free Palestine” is an inherently antisemitic and dangerous slogan and movement.

“‘Free Palestine’ – the slogan, the fantasy, and the policy – has always consciously implied the mass murder of Jews in their towns, streets, shops, and living rooms,” Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, an Egyptian dissident who became a foreign policy analyst in the US wrote in Tablet Magazine soon after 7 October.

“Few are willing to say so openly, but in many intellectual, professional, and popular circles in the Middle East and the West, the idea of Palestinian national liberation has long been framed in terms that condone or necessitate the indiscriminate killing of Jews,” wrote Mansour, who last year joined the Israeli think tank Jerusalem Center for Foreign Affairs. On Thursday, 22 May, he tweeted that he knew and liked Yaron Lischinsky, one of the victims in the DC shooting.

Last month, after pro-Palestinian protesters clashed with pro-Israel demonstrators in Brooklyn when an Israeli far-right minister was speaking, pro-Israel Democratic Representative Ritchie Torres wrote that violence should have been expected.

“Violence isn’t a bug but a feature of the so-called ‘Free Palestine’ movement, which has no desire to free Palestinians from Hamas,” Torres said at the time.

On 22 May, he said the shooting at the Capital Jewish Museum had made “tragically real” the danger of the movement. “When you repeat slogans like ‘globalise the intifada’, you are inciting violence against Jews in the US and around the world,” Torres tweeted. “The danger of incitement is no abstraction.”

The voices characterising the DC shooting as an outgrowth of contemporary rhetoric included some who regularly criticise the far right in Israel and the US.

“More information will emerge, of course, but it’s clear that antisemitic speech, including criticism of Israel that crosses the line into justifying the murder of Jews or Israelis, can inspire violence,” Rabbi Jill Jacobs, the chief executive of Truah, the liberal rabbinic human rights group, wrote on Facebook.

Some have argued that “Free Palestine” isn’t inherently dangerous, and should be heard as a peaceful call for liberation in most cases. But Alana Zeitchik, a New York City influencer who came to prominence after her family members were taken hostage on 7 October, wrote on social media after the shooting that she had been unable to overcome an instinctive revulsion triggered by the chant, as much as she might have wanted to.

“The sound of the chant, ‘Free, free Palestine!’ makes me recoil in disgust,” she wrote on Instagram. “The feeling is immediate alarm and disgust. It’s a feeling of fear for myself and my loved ones, and now it’s also associated with a radical man who killed two Jews outside of a Jewish event. It’s not because I don’t want Palestinians to be free, it’s because too many of the people who chant it are radical Jew-haters.”

Zeitchik said, “I have tried to uncouple the feeling from the words for the sake of my Palestinian friends, but I cannot. Not now and maybe not ever.”

In the wake of the shooting, Benjamin Birely, an Israeli doctoral student whose popular Instagram account, HolylandSpeaks, says it gives “nuance where others aren’t or can’t”, compared the violent radicalisation of anti-Israel leftists to the radicalisation of those who have absorbed Islamophobia online and gone on to attack Muslims.

“When Israelis are relentlessly and unquestioningly demonised as the manifestation of all that’s evil in the world, this is what happens. The global left – and I mean left, not liberals or centre-left moderates – has created an environment ripe for violent radicalism,” Birely wrote, adding that it was essential now to hear condemnation of the shooting from those on the far left.

“The far left is a danger to Israelis and Jews everywhere, and it’s time that the few same voices that remain in those circles speak up now,” he wrote, “before more Jews are murdered.”

• Correction: This story has been corrected to show that Daniel Rosen is the president of the American Jewish Congress, not the American Jewish Committee.