Propaganda of the Deed: A Lazy Man's Game
On Wednesday the 21st of May 2025, police received calls about a shooting outside the Capital Jewish Museum in downtown Washington DC. A man and a woman were found unconscious and not breathing at the scene, and later died. The couple had been leaving a networking event to bring Jewish young professionals and the diplomatic community together at the museum. The event, organised by the American Jewish Committee, said it was open to those in the DC diplomatic community. The event’s theme was advertised as “turning pain into purpose”, and invited humanitarian aid organisers responding to the crises in the Middle East, particularly Gaza. The alleged shooter is 31 year old Elias Rodriguez, of Chicago, who had bought a ticket to the event about three hours before it began. He had been seen pacing up and down outside the museum before using a handgun to open fire on a group of four people, according to the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD). According to details in an affidavit, he initially opened fire on the victims, then reloaded and shot again “several more times” at closer range. It is said that as one victim tried to crawl away, he followed behind and fired again.
The suspect then went inside the museum, where he was detained. He repeatedly shouted “free Palestine” while being arrested, and even purposefully dropped a red kufiyah on the ground.
The two decedents were Yaron Lischinsky, 30, and Sarah Lynn Milgrim, 26, both of whom worked at the Israeli Embassy in Washington DC. Mr Lischinsky had planned to propose to Miss Milgrim in Jerusalem next week, according to Israel’s ambassador to the US, Yechiel Leiter. Lischinsky was a German-born Christian who moved to Israel as a teenager, where he served in the IDF. He later relocated to Washington, where he would act as a research assistant for the Israeli Embassy.
Sarah Lynn Milgrim was Jewish and hailed from Kansas. She worked in the Israeli Embassy’s public diplomacy department.
The alleged shooter, Elias Rodriguez, has been charged with two counts of first degree murder in relation to shooting, as well as the murder of foreign officials, causing death with a firearm, and discharging a firearm in a crime of violence. Authorities say the investigation is ongoing and that more charges could be brought against him as it develops, with Interim DC attorney Jeanine Pirro saying that it was too early to say whether prosecutors will seek the death penalty, but that this was a “death penalty eligible case”. Rodriguez will appear in court for a preliminary hearing on the 18th of June.
Rodriguez had been previously tied to the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), but hadn’t had any correspondence with them since 2017. The PSL took to X to deny any connection with the shooting, and to denounce it. Rodriguez was not on any police watch lists, and seemingly acted alone.
All of the above is the narrative and the facts as they have been reported in the mainstream media.
What most of the mainstream media has not reported is that, in the aftermath of the shooting, American blogger Ken Klippenstein published a document believed to be a manifesto written by Rodriguez prior to Wednesday night’s events. In this manifesto, Rodriguez allegedly explains that he had been compelled and radicalised by the atrocity footage coming out of Gaza over the last two years since October 7th 2023, and his understanding of Israel’s atrocities in the region for over a decade.
In the letter’s closing paragraph, Rodriguez supposedly justified his actions, writing: “Those of us against the genocide take satisfaction in arguing that the perpetrators and abettors have forfeited their humanity. I sympathize with this viewpoint and understand its value in soothing the psyche which cannot bear to accept the atrocities it witnesses, even mediated through the screen. But inhumanity has long since shown itself to be shockingly common, mundane, prosaically human. A perpetrator may then be a loving parent, a filial child, a generous and charitable friend, an amiable stranger, capable of moral strength at times when it suits him and sometimes even when it does not, and yet be a monster all the same. Humanity doesn’t exempt one from accountability. The action would have been morally justified taken 11 years ago during Protective Edge, around the time I personally became acutely aware of our brutal conduct in Palestine. But I think to most Americans such an action would have been illegible, would seem insane. I am glad that today at least there are many Americans for which the action will be highly legible and, in some funny way, the only sane thing to do.”
Many have claimed that Rodriguez and his alleged actions are driven by antisemitism, however, if one reads the manifesto, it is evident that his supposed actions were driven not so much by a hatred of Jews, but a disdain for Zionism and the state of Israel — these are not the same thing. This was not a neo-Nazi that came after Jewish people deliberately looking for Jews to kill, this was someone who was trying to send a political message by killing diplomats of the state of Israel. Now, let me be clear, that’s still not okay — violence is unacceptable no matter the intent — but its a different thing to just senseless racist/antisemitic hatred. Conflating antisemitism with opposition to the Israeli government’s policies or ideology is dangerous — not just for Jewish and non-Jewish supporters of Palestinian rights, who are losing their jobs, being doxxed and harassed online, attacked physically, and facing censure for trying to save lives, but for Jews everywhere. If we conflate Zionism with Judaism — as Israel itself does — then we say that to be Jewish is to be Zionist which is not inherently the case. Netanyahu and others have devoted their lives to binding the fate of all Jews to the furtherance of the Israeli state — attempting to fasten a 5,000-year-old religion to a 150-year-old colonial project. Such conflations muddy the water between ethnicity, religion, and nationalism. Not all Jews support the Zionist project or the state of Israel generally, and certainly not the ongoing genocide in Gaza. The reason the vast majority of people are criticising the state of Israel has nothing to do with its supposed Judaism, but with its genocide in Gaza and its flagrant disregard of international law (not only their illegal occupation of the West Bank, the longest military occupation in modern history, but also their international humanitarian and human rights law violations — which has seen the International Criminal Court issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant). No state, regardless of its state religion, would or should be allowed commit such atrocities as these. There is nothing inherent in Jewish people nor Judaism to permit atrocities— but there is within the ethno-supremacist ideology of Zionism. It is Zionism, not Judaism, which commits and permits the atrocities we are constantly seeing on our social media feeds.
The mainstream media’s reporting of the shooting, as with its reporting of October 7th, contra to its framing of the repeated atrocities in Gaza (lest we forget how the BBC, for instance, routinely worded headlines so that Palestinians “die” perpetrator-less, natural-disaster-esque deaths, while Israelis are killed) has been packed to the brim with solemn moralising — appeals to emotion and sentiment, a humanizing of the victims, and a politicization of the atrocity against the Pro-Palestinian movement, devoid of the context of the state of Israel’s atrocities over the past 75 years, let alone the past 2. So, allow me to add a bit more nuance.
In a sort of parallel to the War on Terror, which itself fed the al Qaeda hydra and put British citizens on the frontline, the state of Israel’s 75+ year history of oppression against Palestinians, was what led to the atrocities which Hamas committed on October 7th. Likewise, the ongoing genocide in Gaza over the past two years, and the public’s feeling that it is unable to meaningfully change or stop that reality through non-violent protest without heavy state censorship and oppression, leads the disenfranchised to more extreme, and occasionally, as in this case, regrettable, means. Just as regrettable is the state of Israel’s own atrocities, especially against Embassy workers and diplomats. After all, it’s a bit rich all this moralising from Netanyahu and his cabinet given literally the day before the Israeli Embassy attack, IDF soldiers were caught on camera firing “warning shots” at a European diplomatic delegation visiting the occupied West Bank to assess the humanitarian situation and document the ongoing violations perpetrated by the Israeli occupying forces against the Palestinian people. The shots were fired because the delegation, who were there on an official invite from the Palestinian Authority, apparently strayed from an “approved route” — the soldiers wanted to ensure that the delegation did not enter “an area where they were not authorised to be”. Basically, they shot at a diplomatic delegation to prevent them from seeing too much of their crimes. Not to mention Israel’s covert operation in Lebanon last year where they used thousands of sabotaged, explosive communications devices and pagers against not just Hezbollah fighters, but Lebanese children and healthcare workers. Did the rogue, pariah terrorist state which fires at diplomats, kills journalists at record breaking levels, and fashions new methods of sabotage and warfare against civilian populations really not expect any blowback for their actions?
We can, and indeed we should, absolutely denounce the (alleged) actions of Elias Rodriguez. Especially those of us on the left who sympathise with the Palestinian cause. Not just because violence is wrong, but because he played the lazy man’s game — adventurism, the propaganda of the deed. For those of you who aren’t that clued up on your Marxist terminology, adventurism is a particularly anarchistic idea which emphasises spontaneous action undertaken by individuals as a basis for collective actions. To paraphrase at length from Prole Wiki, the anarchist adventurists believe that any action that undermines the state in any capacity, however insignificant, is desirable — acts as small as graffiti are supposedly a way of raising individual consciousness for anarchism, and once enough people are convinced of anarchism, then they can start a collective anarchist revolution. It can be done by a single person at any time, without prior planning or organizing. One such adventurist tactic is the concept of propaganda of the deed — when, according to anarchists, someone rebels in such an audacious way against the system that it is supposed to inspire in everyone else, a revolution. This was, essentially, Rodriguez’s (alleged) intent — as he is alleged to have said in his supposed manifesto, if he had committed this crime 11 years ago, it would have been illegible to the American public at large. It is only now that the Palestinian plight is fresh in the minds of the American people that such a crime would be legible, and, presumably, able to incite a revolution…
Adventurist action is encouraged independently of considerations of whether or not there is revolutionary potential given the conditions. Pure audacity and “bravery”, by which they really mean self-destructiveness and martyrdom, is seen as the height of “heroism” and it is believed that if only they could push it further or far enough then something would finally change. But it never does, all it does is encourage individualism via disregarding collective coordination, and strategic incompetence by resulting in failure of coordinated actions and plans necessary for revolution. In propaganda of the deed, psychological reasons, primary amongst them fear, are believed to be the reason people don’t wage a revolution tomorrow, when actually it is the material conditions and practical logistics of achieving one.
The concept is intimately associated with the idea of an “excitative”. That the oppressed masses simply need an “excitative” in the form of some deed or another targeted at the sources of their suffering, whether in form of an assassination, bombing, public disruption etc. This conception fails to understand that the masses don’t need an excitative and instead need a revolutionary organization capable of providing education and leadership. The masses, already suffering under exploitation, do not need a demonstration of what evils are befalling them. They are aware. What they lack are the revolutionary organization and education capable of guiding them to the overthrow of their oppressors. In Lenin’s words, even the slaying of a hundred monarchs could not compare in value to the revolutionary consciousness of the proletariat compared to the work of organizing them. This kind of neo-anarchist horizontalism has tended to favour strategies of direct action and withdrawal — people need to take action now and for themselves, not wait for compromised elected representatives to act in their stead. At the same time, they should withdraw from institutions that are not contingently, but necessarily corrupt.
However, such exitarian attitudes, the abandonment of mainstream media and politics, has historically allowed our ideological opponents, especially the neoliberals, though increasingly the fascists, to extend their power and influence in these important realms of libidinal programming. As Mark Fisher remarked back in 2013, “Neo-anarchism isn’t so much of a challenge to capitalist realism as it is one of its effects.” The emphasis on direct action, especially violent direct action as of late, conceals a despair about the possibility of indirect action. To quote Fisher again, “it is via indirect action that the control of ideological narratives is achieved. Ideology isn’t about what you or I spontaneously believe, but about what we believe that the Other believes — and this belief is still determined to a large extent by the content of mainstream media.” If you were Capital, which would you prefer to face; a carefully co-ordinated mass movement, or spontaneous outbursts from individuals? Now, this is not to say that we must all become orthodox Marxist-Leninists — I don’t think such a situation would be desirable, even if it were possible — but to quote Fisher once more: “The fact that we have been left with a choice between Leninism and anarchism is a measure of current leftist impotence. It’s crucial to leave behind this sterile binary.” A Leninist Party might not be necessary, but some form of collective organising certainly is. Instead, lone wolves like Mangione and Rodriguez will take matters into their own hands, too lazy to put in the hard legwork of community building, and organizing for collective action. They, and their supporters (of which, I expect, Mangione will have much more than Rodriguez when all is said or done), may celebrate their “heroic” and “courageous” action which might, in both cases, end up with their eventual demise at the hands of the state, but their actions will ultimately have no lasting impact for their respective causes. And, in the case of Rodriguez, will actually do more to derail and discredit the cause which he allegedly claims to be acting on behalf of.
After all, if I’m to be favourable to the United Healthcare killer, whether he be the currently accused or not, (a) though he was an adventurist, he obviously had a goal and because so many people had been directly victimised by healthcare in the US, as soon as we knew who the victim was, everybody immediately understood what the motives were, even if they didn’t agree with his methods. In other words, his actions did help to raise class consciousness. And (b), there was not already such a popular movement for free healthcare in America which could be discredited by the violent direct action, as there already is for a Free Palestine.
The Israeli Embassy shooting isn’t really comparable to the United Healthcare case. When Mangione allegedly targeted the United Healthcare CEO, he targeted THE UNITED HEALTHCARE CEO. Mangione didn’t go and kill the receptionist at United Healthcare and then turn around and say ‘free healthcare’. Elias Rodriguez went against low-level people, and his actions will be used against the pro-Palestinian movement — a movement which has already found itself the victim of draconian measures internationally, but especially in America where Palestinian protestors are literally being disappeared. No wonder PSL have denounced the shooting and Rodriguez’s alleged actions: no organiser is going to do something like this because it’s catnip for the federal government who are already clamping down on free speech and free association. Rodriguez is either an adventurist who thought he’d get some Mangione-style attention and cred, or he sincerely thought it was the right thing to do, but either way what he did was wrong. Yes, the footage out of Gaza will remain nightmare-fuel for an entire generation, and it needs to stop immediately, but just because you’re tired of putting the hard work in doesn’t mean that you get to cut corners and try a shortcut, and in so doing, only allowing for further repression of the cause which you supposedly partook in that action for.
At least Mangione (allegedly) had the organisational ability to plan and directly target one individual who is a figurehead of the root of American suffering in regards to healthcare— I still think it was wrongheaded, as if chopping off the head of the hydra of Capital would kill the beast. Rodriguez, on the other hand, seems to have allegedly acted rather indiscriminately — he didn’t know for certain who he was killing, presumably just going off of guess work and association that these two people coming out of the event were Israeli Embassy workers. In a sick and twisted sense, I guess he just “got lucky” — his action would have been nowhere near as “legible” (if indeed it were “legible” at all given how the media has been able to so effectively manipulate it into an antisemitic hate crime) had he killed two humanitarian aid workers who were also in attendance at the event, for instance. This is adventurism — its not a way to build a cohesive movement.
This is not to say that all direct action is ineffective, just as not all indirect action should be written off as ineffective. However, we ought to denounce violent direct action, which only seeks to provide palliative excitatives in the form of politically-motivated murder. The Israeli Embassy shooter’s actions will only serve to undermine and discredit the popular mass movement of non-violent protest and direct action that has taken place over the last 2 years. Rather than turn to political assassinations, we ought to favour collective, non-violent (by which I mean, no loss of life) direct action which seeks to materially address the root cause of suffering. Palestine Action, for instance, is one such organisation, involved in direct action to stop the functioning of the state of Israel’s war machine (or genocide machine as it ought to be called), through things like the damage of Elbit Systems’ weapon manufacturing facilities, the disruption of the weapon manufacturing supply chain, and other actions which not only raise awareness of the Palestinian plight, but materially impact the state of Israel’s ability to commit genocide in Gaza. These people are not, unlike Rodriguez, taking the lives of others in some attempt to shock the working class into revolution — these people are sacrificing themselves to actually try to tackle the material root of Palestinian suffering. Their belief is that if the supply of weapons to Israel can be disrupted, and if the investments in the state of Israel retract due to their unpopularity, and, by extension, unprofitability, then maybe, just maybe, we can change something. Hard, long work? Certainly. Idealistic? Perhaps, but not so idealistic as believing that murdering two Israeli Embassy staffers will incite the working class of America into an out-and-out revolution against the state of Israel.
And this is why I found Rodriguez’s reference to Aaron Bushnell in his supposed manifesto so distasteful. Though Bushnell may have been trying, like the Israeli Embassy shooter, to provide the population of America an excitative towards revolution, he did not do so through the murder of others — rather his was an image much more powerful: this was a young man who, like many of us, was sickened by his complicity in the atrocities the state of Israel has been able to perform against the Palestinian people with the support of the Western powers, so sickened that he, a serviceman of the US Air Force, set himself on fire outside the front gate of the Israeli Embassy. Bushnell chose to take his own life to send a political message, martyring himself. The Israeli Embassy shooter, by contrast, decided to take the lives of two others to send his message.
Organisations like Pal Action are exactly that: organisations. They are not lone individuals thinking they can change something through the propaganda of the deed. These people seem to have an almost adventurist understanding of self-sacrifice — there are people currently going on hunger strike to protest the genocide in Gaza, and still others are taking up direct action against companies complicit in this genocide, and in so doing, performing a sort of suicide: receiving criminal records, thereby effecting their employability, hence effecting their ability to obtain the necessities of life -but with less narcissism and laziness than the Israeli Embassy and United Healthcare shooters. And perhaps this sense of self-sacrifice for the collective good is exactly what the left is lacking. We have been so socialised and naturalised to a politics of selfishness under the neoliberal regime and its Randian rational egoism (the idea that an action is only rational if it maximises one’s self-interest), that we believe it is natural for us to act selfishly. As we have been forced to remember over the last 2 years by the footage from Gaza, the luxuries and privileges we enjoy come at the expense of people thousands of miles away. Every Coke and Burger King you enjoy kills a Palestinian child, and this has always been the case — only that now it’s become too real for us to ignore, we are forced to look at the cost of our Big Macs: a livestreamed child holocaust. We are all plugged in to this matrix of complicity, and so perhaps the only way to unplug ourselves is to relinquish our pleasures and our privileges, to deny hedonism, to say no to the cheap thrills and the short-termism, and the preservation of ourselves and our interests. If neoliberalism thrives upon our desire for preservation and for the comfortable life, perhaps the only way to get rid of it is to embrace the death-drive and act contrary to preservation — to say that we will risk our lives to no longer be complicit in this slaughter. We here in the relative luxury of the West are like those citizens of Le Guin’s Omelas — a utopian city whose existence requires that a single unfortunate child be kept in perpetual filth, darkness and misery. But our Omelas does not require a single child, it requires all the children of the Gaza strip, all the children of the Global South and the developing world, and countless other victims.
In Richard Matheson’s short story Button Button a suburban couple are confronted with a button. They are told that if they decide to press the button, they will receive a large sum of money; however, someone that they don’t know will die. This is essentially the situation that we in the belly of the colonial beast, sat as we are in the relative lap of a luxury bought with the blood of others, are posed with — however, unlike Matheson’s characters, we don’t even have choice. We are quite literally born onto the button, constantly pressing it down, complicit in the deaths of people we don’t even know, so that we can enjoy our Domino’s Pizza and Hewlett Packard laptops. How do we respond to this situation? Some simply do not care, and just further engross themselves in the spoils of slaughter. Others, like Aaron Bushnell, are unable to live with this forced complicity, taking their lives out of protest. If you ever wondered what you would have done in the time of the Holocaust, wonder no more: you are acting now as you would have then. But if we get organised, if we act collectively, we can overthrow this forced complicity and save lives— and both non-violent direct action, as well as indirect action, will be crucial in this process. What we can be certain of is that no one can say anymore that they didn’t know: we all know now that our luxuries come at the expense of the oppressed people of the world. The question is what we are going to do about it?
One can understand why the Israeli Embassy shooter was radicalised by the horrors of our post-October-7th world, not just the atrocity footage coming out of Gaza, but the media double standard even against atrocities here in the West. How much airtime and attention is being given to the two victims in this case, to humanising and making the public sympathise with them? Where is this treatment for the tens of thousands of Gazans who have been the victim of genocide over the past two years — didn’t they have hopes, dreams, ambitions, partners they might want to have gotten engaged to? How many of them were children, parents, mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, brothers, sisters, babies? Where was all this media coverage for the first post-October-7th fuelled victim of violence here in the West, Wadea Al Fayoume, who had just celebrated his sixth birthday before he was killed by his landlord, Joseph Czuba. Police found Wadea and his mother, Hanan Shaheen, with severe stab wounds inside a house she rented from Czuba in a Chicago suburb on the 14th of October 2023. Hanan lived, Wadea did not. In the aftermath of October 7th, despite having expressed no anti-Muslim views previously, Czuba, a live-in-landlord, asked Hanan to move out of the home, stating Islamophobic prejudice. A few days after that conversation, Czuba forced his way into her room and stabbed her with a knife more than a dozen times, telling her that “You, as a Muslim, must die”. After Hanan retreated to call for help, Czuba proceeded to attack her son — he stabbed Wadea 26 times. Wadea loved soccer, he loved basketball, his last words to his mother? “Mom, I’m fine”. Rodriguez had this little boy’s photo on his window in his flat in Chicago. Where was the coverage of this in the mainstream media? Did it compare to the scale of what we are seeing now in regards to the two decedents in this case? No, because there is an imbalance in our reporting here in the West. Islamophobia has been so normalised in Western society that when a genocide occurs against a majority Muslim population, or when a Muslim Palestinian-American child dies at the hand of a brain-broken Zionist Islamophobe, it hardly breaks headlines, but when two Israeli Embassy staffers get shot, we will humanize them fully. The attention on this crime and the moralising over it, in the context of media silence regarding Gaza, is truly cynical. The maxim, often attributed without proof to Stalin, still holds true: one death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.
Did Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgram deserve to die? Of course not (even if Lischinsky’s social media shows him to have been a staunch defender of Israel, celebrating Israel’s murder of 2 red cross workers as well as retweeting denial of the famine which is ongoing in Gaza). But nor did Wadea, nor the countless Gazans who now lay dead at the hands of the state of Israel. We need to keep up the same attitude for both sides, all the while remembering who the perpetrators are. If the state of Israel actually wanted to make Jews across the world safer, they would end their occupation of the Palestinian territories, end their genocide in Gaza and help rebuild the strip, and liquify their apartheid regime to pave the way for a multi-ethnic one-state solution akin to South Africa. Until they do this, we, the people of the world, must not remain silent — we must organise collectively to demand the change we want to see in the world, and do so in a way that respects the sanctity of every single human life, and people’s capacity and propensity to change. As Rodriguez’s neighbour, John Wayne Fry, remarked when asked by reporters about his neighbour’s alleged actions, “I wish that I had an opportunity to talk to him. I learned during the Vietnam War that you don’t stop war with bombs and guns, you stop wars by talking to your neighbours. There’s something more powerful than a bullet.”