Lone Assassins Never Achieve Their Political Goals
On May 21st a 30-year-old Chicago resident named Elias Rodriguez (allegedly) murdered two young Israeli Embassy staffers named Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgram as they were leaving the Jewish Museum in Washington DC. As he was arrested, he was recorded shouting, “Free Palestine.” According to a short manifesto believed to be from the shooter published by the journalist Ken Klippenstein, Rodriguez was inspired to do this in response to Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, writing, “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.” The reality is that regardless of Israel’s crimes, such an attack on minor- and sympathetic- Israeli officials had no chance of harming Israel’s operational capacity or turning the world further against Israel’s government, and instead could inevitably only lead to more harm to Palestine and it’s supporters. Given that both of these things are fairly obvious and could easily be determined by a rational person, contra the manifesto, such an action is what you could call insane.
In the abstract, a fairly strong case could be made for using violence against agents of the Israeli state. After all, Israel’s actions are criminal, and if there was any earnestness in the claims of Western leaders, the “responsibility to protect” doctrine declared in places like Yugoslavia would certainly apply to stopping Israel’s genocide. The problem, however, with an individual deciding such a thing is ,if you are so inclined, you could make a moral argument to kill more or less anyone you choose, which is the main theme of the famous novel Crime and Punishment. Once a person starts thinking like this, he could just as easily kill a healthcare CEO, IRS agents, or any President. In all cases, one could declare, “This is a bad person who has killed others, and I should stop them.” There are, of course, many other moral arguments about how one has no right to ever be the “judge, jury, and executioner,” as they say, but the bigger issue is the actual impact of such assassinations, which almost always harm whatever cause the individual intends to help.
In the annals of histor, there are no examples that come to my mind of a “private” political assassination helping any intended ideological goal. Machiavelli goes on about assassinations at some length in his “On Conspiracies” section in Discourses on Livy and notes that assassinations commonly only work when it is what we now call a “lone wolf” who is willing to die or otherwise be captured for the mission. He says the things for which a man will most likely try to kill a political leader are outrages against his honor or stealing his paternity [inheritance]. One of the earliest political assassinations about which we know a significant amount is the murder of Philip of Macedon by a courtier named Pausanias. In that instance, according to Diodorus Siculus, Pausanias had been sodomized by a gang led by a government official, and instead of punishing him, Philip simply gave him a diplomatic post away from the capital (perhaps history’s first recorded instance of “kicking the can down the road” following a sexual assault.) Pausanias did achieve his goal of avenging his own honor, but if his goal had been to hurt the Macedonian state, well, that put Alexander on the throne, and Macedonia reached unprecedented heights.
Among the most famous ideological political assassinations is that of Julius Caesar. It is quite obvious to look at it that in the long run they did not at all succeed in restoring the Republic or power to the Senate. We can’t know what Caesar would have done had he remained alive, but it is plausible, though far from certain, that as the situation calmed, he would have ceded at least some degree of power back to the Senate. It is, at the very least, unlikely that he would have set up the Principate in the fashion in which Augustus did following his victory in the civil war. There are good arguments that Rome was ungovernable at its size as a Republic so the Principate was necessary regardless, but that is irrelevant to the question of if the assassination achieved its goals, which it most certainly did not.
In modern history, there is one assassination remarkably similar to the one that just happened in Washington. On November 7th, 1938 Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old Jew of Polish origin who was living illegally in France, went to the German Embassy and murdered Ernst vom Rath, a minor diplomatic official. Though there was speculation about a personal relationship between the two (possibly an invention of his lawyer who was trying to get him convicted on lesser charges, which would be the case if it were not considered a political killing) it is generally believed this was in revenge for his parents’ deportation to Poland and the oppression of the Jews in Germany, which is what Grynszpan told police after the killing. Few now would deny that there was a general moral justification for armed resistance by Jews against Nazi Germany, but of course this act of violence made things much worse. The murder of vom Rath was what triggered the Kristallnacht, “The Night of Broken Glass,” which is considered to be the beginning of the Holocaust. It is plausibly claimed that the Nazis were waiting for a pretense for such a pogrom, but it is Grynszpan who provided one. The reality is that if you hate a political faction enough to give up your own life to assassinate one of them, the odds are that they want a pretense to crack down on people like you, as commonly happens after any such killing.
History is full of examples of men who somehow or another got overwhelmed with the world’s evils and decided that a high-profile killing would be just and somehow improve things, but I can’t provide an example where it worked that way. As part of an organized military strategy either by a government or rebel group, targeted assassinations can work as intended, though even in those circumstances the campaign is rarely successful and commonly just increases violence. There is perhaps an “accelerationist” argument in favor of such assassinations, but it is a deranged mind that sacrifices its life in an act of violence, hoping it somehow produces the desired outcome. What we can see clearly is that Rodriguez’s murder of Israeli officials has absolutely no chance of helping Palestinians in any way, and instead serves as little more than a gift to the Israeli government which wants any justification to continue its campaign of genocide, as well as to American Zionist politicians who want to treat all pro-Palestine activism as dangerous criminality. That only bad things could come from this crime would have been obvious to Rodriguez in the first place if he was thinking rationally.
Brad Pearce writes The Wayward Rabbler on Substack. He can be found on Twitter @WaywardRabbler.
