Assassination & Murder: Behind the Killings of Israeli Diplomats

The recent political assassination of two members of the Israeli diplomatic mission in Washington DC has facilitated a frenzied campaign in which all supporters of Palestinian freedom are once again being tarred with the brush of anti-semitism. It has even been used by the war criminal, Benjamin Netanyahu, as a stick to beat some of his traditional European allies who have had the temerity to suggest that the Israeli war machine is violating basic humanitarian principles. 

Netanyahu’s verbal bombast was just a smokescreen for Tel Aviv to continue its daily butchery. The very next day, Israeli forces bombarded the last functioning hospital in northern Gaza, killed another 100 civilians and wounded a further 250.

The charity and human rights organisation, Action Aid, issued this report and statement:

”We are horrified to learn that Al-Awda Hospital in northern Gaza, run by ActionAid’s partner Al-Awda, has yet again come under intense attack by the Israeli military. In the last 24 hours, staff report that tank fire has hit the hospital’s surgery department, water tanks, fuel tanks and outpatient buildings. A warehouse housing medical supplies was also hit, sparking a huge fire which has yet to be contained, due to firefighters reportedly being prevented from reaching the site. The situation is incredibly dangerous, with no one able to enter or leave the facility, and around 160 medical staff and patients trapped inside, trying to continue saving lives under the non-stop sound of quadcopters firing overhead. This is at the same time as, after more than 11 weeks of total blockade, food, fuel and medical supplies at the facility are running perilously low. "

Compared to the mass murder perpetrated by Israel on a daily basis, the Washington killings pale into insignificance and most certainly take on a different colouration if your loved ones are buried under a ton of rubble.

A political assassination

Despite the ongoing Israeli barbarities, Donald Trump, together with Keir Starmer and a host of other European leaders, joined with Netanyahu yet again in raising the spectre of anti-semitism stalking Europe and America. The fact remains though that,  no matter how wrong you might think the Washington killings were, they were  patently not  motivated by hatred of Jewish people in general.

From what we know, the assassin, Elias Rodriguez, has no history of support for or involvement in any Islamist organisation. On the other hand, his poltical motive was and is crystal clear. He was so outraged by the incessant ethnic cleansing of Gaza  - and Washington’s support for it  - that he felt compelled to do something drastic. For him at least, the lives of two young  Zionists were worth taking in exchange for the thousands of young couples and children murdered by the regime which they served.  

From all accounts, he was also prepared to sacrifice his own life in the process. Reportedly, Rodriquez neither fled the scene nor offered any resistance. In his mind, it was a statement killing and his statement was; “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza.” 

If indeed Rodriguez was an anti-semite, this was a perfect opportunity to broadcast it. He did not take it, and for one very simple reason:  for him at least, gunning down two Israeli diplomats, however misguided, was a political act, an assassination of representatives of a brutal, fascistic-type regime. Putting moral indignation aside – whether it be Rogriguez’s or Netanyahu’s -  any objective observer would surely put it in that category. 

What didn't make the headlines

As much political capital as possible is being garnered from the young age of these diplomats and the fact that they were due to get married. It is this crude emotional manipulation that fills the headlines rather than the fact that the couple were career diplomats.  

Both Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim were fully conscious and salaried agents of the Israeli occupation. Lischinsky worked in the Political Department of the embassy and Milgrim in the Public Diplomacy department.

Milgrim and Lischinsky

Each of them furnished research and helped organise missions that helped promote the interests of the Israeli state and to whitewash its pariah status in large parts of the world. It was to that task that the couple's lives were wed and they died serving it.  

This is not to suggest that they deserved to be gunned down, far less so in such a brutal manner. However, it does provide a rather more plausible context for their execution beyond the smokescreen of two innocent young lovers being struck down in a wave of Jew hatred.

It is not the first time – and most certainly won’t be the last – when the Israeli oppression of Palestine breeds this kind of attack. Even prior to October 7, they were many different types of violence carried out by Palestinian groups.  Once such incident was the infamous assault at the 1972 Munich Olympics when an offshoot of the PLO, known as Black September, infiltrated the Olympic Village, killed two members of the Israeli Olympic team, and took nine other Israeli team members hostage. Those hostages were later also killed during a failed rescue attempt. 

Unlike the recent killings, none of the Israeli athletes held any political post or were attached directly  to the Israeli state. Their deaths served no purpose other than to give succour to the Zionist discourse. All supporters of the Palestinian cause –including those who defend the right of armed resistance – can learn much from this incident and how to respond to it. With this in mind I am reproducing below a contemporaneous response published in the September 15, 1972 issue of the US socialist weekly, The Militant.  For the sake of readability, I have added some paragraph headings.

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The deaths of 11 Israeli participants in the Olympics on Sept. 5 brought forth a hypocritical uproar of indignation from government officials and news media in capitalist countries around the world. The purpose of this campaign is to make the criminal look like the victim: to make Israel appear as the victim of Arab violence rather than the criminal oppressor of the Arab peoples. 

Leaving aside for a moment an evaluation of the terrorist tactics used at Munich, it is imperative that all supporters of human rights should stand squarely on the side of the real victims: the Palestinian people who are struggling to regain their homeland against the Zionist state of Israel. 

The campaign to whip up anti-Arab hysteria began immediately after the incident, with banner headlines condemning "Terror at the Olympics" and "Murder in Munich." President Nixon called the guerrillas "international outlaws," and a State Department statement labeled them "outlaws, brigands, murderers and an intolerable affront to human society." Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern joined in the chorus, urging international sanctions against Egypt and Lebanon to "root out these international outlaws." 

The entire publicity campaign is designed by the capitalist rulers to bolster the image cultivated by Israel as a small, defenseless country at the mercy of the Arab people. The reality is the opposite. 

Role of Israeli state

The state of Israel - backed to the hilt by U.S. military might - is based upon the brutal suppression of three million Palestinian Arabs. The Israeli government expelled hundreds of thousands of Arabs from their homeland, expropriated their land and property, and condemned them to miserable lives in refugee camps. The Israeli state's wars of aggression have cost the lives of many thousands of Arab civilians. The "humanitarian" Israeli state tortures Arab liberation fighters that it captures, uses napalm against Arab civilians, and destroys entire villages as retribution for acts of resistance by Palestinian liberation fighters. 

Such Israeli atrocities against the Arab people do not produce headlines or condemnations from capitalist government officials and politicians. 

No. The uproar over the killings at the Olympics has been consciously manufactured by the imperialist powers and the media they control in order to try to turn public opinion against the Palestinian liberation movement. The enormous publicity cannot be explained simply because the killings occurred dramatically at the Olympics. This can be seen by comparing the media response to the killings at this year's Olympics with the response to the massacre of Mexican student protesters just 10 days 'prior to the opening of the Olympics in Mexico City in 1968. 

On Oct. 2, 1968, the Mexican government sent 5,000 troops and 300 tanks against a peaceful mass rally protesting political repression in Mexico. At least 50 young people were murdered and 1,000 wounded. When that happened there was no international protest from capitalist heads of state.Even news coverage on this cold-blooded massacre was suppressed. The U. S. State Department stated only that "The disturbances in Mexico City affected only a small part of the population and order is now restored." 

Anti-Arab racism

Another pernicious feature of the anti-Arab campaign over the Munich killings is blatant racism. For example, the New York Times, an influential mouthpiece for a section of the capitalist class, called the guerrillas "fanatics" who had "plumbed new depths of criminality." The editorial continued, "These criminals have much sympathy in Arab nations." It concluded that "The primary responsibility for ending these crimes is that of the Arab states." 

The liberal New York Post said the incident showed how "a fanatic idea can push men to the depths of inhumanity, where they betray what is human in them." The racist implication in all this is that all Arabs are criminals and fanatics, less civilized, and perhaps not quite human. In this way the capitalist media attempts to divert attention from the actual reason why Arab liberation fighters are led to sacrifice their lives in desperate terrorist attempts. 

The cause of terrorist acts is not "criminality'' but the brutal oppression, human degradation, and suffering inflicted by Israel on the Arab people - oppression that calls forth all forms of resistance.The danger is that Israel will now use the Munich incident- as it has used other guerrilla actions - as a pretext for intensifying its aggressive acts against the Palestinian liberation movement and Arab civilians. Even before the news of the death of the nine Israeli hostages, the Israeli newspaper· Davar wrote: 

"As far as Israel is concerned this is an act of war, not only by members of the terrorist organizations, but also by Arab countries whose open support for the murderous terrorists made possible this deed .... If they do not now eliminate the terrorist bases within their borders, Israel will undertake the task." 

Why terrorist tactics don't work

Among supporters of the Palestinian struggle, it is necessary to oppose terrorist tactics as ineffective and in fact harmful to the Palestinian struggle. Such acts of assassination or kidnapping of individual Israeli citizens play into the hands of the Zionist state by enabling it to pose as the innocent victim of violence. Terrorist acts place obstacles in the way of the Palestinian guerrilla movement by providing a pretext for Israeli retaliation. 

They are also an obstacle to supporters of the Palestinian struggle within Israel itself - those who are trying to win over the masses of Israeli working people to support for the rights of the Palestinians. And they are an obstacle to the international movement in defense of the Palestinian struggle because such terrorist acts make it more difficult to expose the Israeli state as the real oppressor and the source of violence. 

Secondly, kidnapping is simply ineffective in forcing concessions, as demonstrated in the Munich incident. The response of the capitalist rulers to kidnappings throughout the world is increasingly to refuse the kidnappers' demands and to sacrifice the hostages in order to capture or kill the kidnappers. 

Thirdly and most important, individual terrorist acts are a diversion from the task of mobilizing the Arab masses in struggle. A handful of revolutionists cannot substitute their own action for action by the masses. Rather, revolutionists must be present wherever there is potential for mass struggles, exposing the Israeli state as the source of violence and injustice, and helping to demonstrate the power of mass action. 

In this regard it is instructive to compare the effectiveness of the Mexican students' tactics in 1968 with the terrorist tactics of the guerrillas at Munich. The mass actions by the Mexican youth won international sympathy, whereas the Munich kidnapping has created more sympathy for the state of Israel than for the Palestinian liberation struggle. 

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The Militant today would disavow almost every word of this statement which was the basis for its Middle East policy for over 50 years since the Israeli state was founded. That aside, despite its age, the statement retains all the vital elements of a working class policy in support of the Palestinian liberation struggle today.