The Killing of Israeli Embassy Staffers: Netanyahu’s Antisemitism Canard

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. 

OPINION: Expulsion and Occupation: Israel’s Proposed Gaza Plan

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 21 May.  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 19 May 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.”

READ: Israel deploys regular infantry, armored brigades to Gaza amid escalating genocide: Report

On 20 May, 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.

OPINION: Euphemistic practices: The IDF, killing aid workers and self-investigation

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.