‘Free Palestine’ is not a war cry. Don’t use embassy killings to distort protests | Opinion
Expressing grief and anger over a gunman’s killing of two people in Washington, including an Israeli embassy worker, feels necessary, not just because I want to bemoan the loss of a young couple who should still be alive, but because I must say this to condemn the full scope of violence that has happened, is happening and is yet to come.
Because the suspected gunman, Elias Rodriguez, reportedly shouted “Free, free Palestine” as he fired at Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky, those three words, in the minds of some, refute 19 months of nonviolent demonstrations calling for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. Sit- and teach-ins, marches, and boycotts, interfaith shabbos and iftars reduced to little more than a vigilante training ground. Some go further, using the murder of two people to, in effect, justify the murder of two million.
Congressman Randy Fine, a Florida Republican, tweeted in the immediate aftermath that “Muslim terror has come to our Nation’s Capital tonight.” Fine wrote that “these demons must be put down by any means necessary.” I suspect the shooter thought the same thing when he opened fire.
Fine has as much evidence as me that Rodriguez is Muslim. But who cares! As a child of 9/11, I’m well aware of our country’s muscle memory response to violence, especially if it can be positioned as proximate to Islam. Later, Fine said we should do Gaza like America did Hiroshima and Nagasaki, though he later denied the most direct interpretation of the words spewed from his mouth.
“In World War II, we did not negotiate a surrender with the Nazis. We did not negotiate a surrender with the Japanese. We nuked the Japanese twice in order to get unconditional surrender,” Fine said. “That needs to be the same here.”
Were I personally trying to defend Israel, I wouldn’t suggest a nuclear strike less than a mile away from the nearest Israeli city! But somehow, I don’t suspect Fine was carefully computing the blast radius as he embraced the language of genocide.
Picking Fine’s ideas apart is like Paige Bueckers crossing up a third-grader. But this fully sentient straw man embodies the status quo. Stateside, Lindsey Graham, like Fine, also compared Gaza to Hiroshima and suggested Israel “do whatever.” Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, running a moderate primary challenge to Donald Trump in the 2024 Republican primaries, moderated on everything but her hawkishness, finding time in her campaign to visit Israel and write “Finish Them” on an Israeli rocket. Over a fifth of those “finished” are, according to a Reuters report, under the age of 12.
Meanwhile, millions in America and around the world have called for a Free Palestine. Some shout it from the streets in demonstrations defined by distinctly nonviolent resistance. Some utter the phrase quietly in their prayers, like the Palestinian, Lutheran pastor Munther Issac. Many Muslims, like comedian Ramy Youssef shared on “Saturday Night Live,” yearn for it, too. There are those who long for a secular, democratic state where all people are treated equally, and forced refugees who want to return home to the land they were expelled from. Free Palestine is not the universal war cry its detractors claim.
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There is an obvious asymmetry of what language gets immediately coded as bigoted compared to the speech and action from the other “side” in this dispute.
For example, a Pew poll from 2024, months after the October 7th attacks, found 34% of Israelis believe the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) military response has “not gone far enough” in its war against Hamas. When nearly 70% of United Nations-confirmed deaths are women and children, I wonder how far a military can go before ending up in Randy Fine territory. Another poll from May of this year found 82% of Israeli Jews support the forced expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza — a literal and uncomplicated call for ethnic cleansing. Another poll found a small majority of Israelis oppose allowing humanitarian aid, which includes food, baby formula and medicine, into Gaza. The rest, the poll suggests, would rather Israel starve an entire territory, including its children.
We know the Israeli government’s cruelty to Palestinian people, even when it’s (apparently) supported by the majority of Israeli citizens, does not define all of Jewish life. Nor does someone’s beliefs, abhorrent as they may be, give anyone a defensible pretext for killing people. I have no problem with that; my issue is that such charity is rarely offered in reverse. Not in Gaza, where bombs are more plentiful than bread. Nor to-foreign born activists like Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian student that the Department of Homeland Security forcibly removed from his apartment and his pregnant wife.
I frequently remember the late Susan Sontag’s words shortly after 9/11, “Let’s by all means grieve together. But let’s not be stupid together. A few shreds of historical awareness might help us understand what has just happened and what may continue to happen.”
Angsty posts won’t make Donald Trump unplug the war machine abroad or the assault on free speech here. Not even mine. Besides, that’s not my job. I’m paid to offer a few shreds. So at the very least, when what happens happens, we can’t say we didn’t know.
This story was originally published May 28, 2025 at 10:25 AM with the headline "‘Free Palestine’ is not a war cry. Don’t use embassy killings to distort protests | Opinion."
