I’ll have a post here on the Israel Embassy shooting as soon as I can make the time for it, but until then, do yourself the favor of reading the presumptive shooter’s manifesto, published at Ken Klippenstein’s Substack. Though I don’t agree with Klippenstein’s take on the shooting, he’s to be commended for publishing the manifesto, which is more than can be said of the usual defenders of “viewpoint diversity.”
It’s not enough, J.S. Mill writes, that you should hear the arguments of your adversaries from your friends, presented as they would present them, and accompanied by what they regard as refutations. “This is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into real contact” with your own mind. You “must be able to hear” the arguments “from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them” (On Liberty, ch. 2). And there’s no better way of doing the utmost for something than to risk your life on it.
It’s too bad that, given his circumstances, you won’t be able to engage in an extended dialogue with Elias Rodriguez on this topic, but perhaps some of his partisans can be persuaded to stand in for him. Let me see if I can rustle one up. I’ll get back to you when I do.
I hate to brag, by the way, but don’t you think my post a few days back was awfully prescient? It would be excessive of me to call up all of my posts on this topic that were. Reading them, you’d almost think I had some spooky kind of foreknowledge of violent events like the embassy shooting. I do. It’s called common sense. And it’s telling me that there’s more to come.
Thanks to Susan Gordon for drawing my attention to Klippenstein’s post.
Policy of Truth 
In your other post you write “As a purely moral matter, setting aside any strategic issue, trespass by pro-Palestine activists is perfectly justified–indeed, more than justified.” Elias Rodriguez might take that to mean you support his action. Is that what you intended?
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Applied to the Elias Rodriguez shooting, the quoted passage has the following intended implication: “If we set aside strategic considerations, and look at the shooting purely as a matter of whether it was morally justified to shoot the targets, the answer is ‘yes, it was justified.’ However, if we re-introduce strategic considerations, the answer becomes ‘no, it should not have been done.’ Since any overall verdict on whether to perform an action requires both types of consideration, the overall verdict on whether his action should be supported is ‘no’. For the same reason, however, the action deserves no specifically moral condemnation, and should get none.”
Both targets were employees of the Israeli Embassy, employed in one case by its political wing, and in the other by its public diplomacy and administrative coordination wing. Both, in other words, were functionaries and agents of a government in violation of a ceasefire, actively engaged in genocide. They volunteered for those positions in the full knowledge of the contribution they were making to the actions of the Israeli government, which wasn’t even their own government. They’ve falsely been described as “innocent civilians,” but they were absolutely not innocent. They were guilty civilians, guilty of helping to sanitize and cover up one of the worst crimes of the last several decades. There is no reason to sympathize with such people. They have gone where they deserve to be.
That is not a suggestion that Rodriguez should have done what he did, or that anyone should repeat his action. It’s a judgment of what the targets deserved by their own actions. If you voluntarily elect to work for a foreign government committing genocide, no one should sympathize with you when you’re killed, any more than we should spend our time crying over Julius Streicher, Alfred Rosenberg, Joseph Goebbels, or their subordinates or staff. The three named Nazis were executed, not because they physically killed anyone, but because they were officially employed by a government that physically killed people, and were complicit by their actions in those deaths. Even if you don’t believe in the death penalty (as I don’t), there is no reason to sympathize with them.
Whatever rationalizations the Israeli and American governments now serve up, both governments fully acknowledge and practice the rule I’ve just described. The Israelis have killed hundreds of Palestinian journalists along with their families, along with diplomatic personnel and people involved in research, public diplomacy, etc. In April 2024, they destroyed the whole of the Iranian Consular Section in Damascus, “killing several IRGC officers and civilians.” The pager attacks of September 2024 were aimed, not at militants, but at civilians with job descriptions comparable to the individuals Rodriguez shot. In that case, the Israelis killed not two individuals, but between 39 and 42, and injured over 3,000. The perpetrators didn’t have the courage to face their enemies in person as Rodriguez did, but killed people indiscriminately from afar.
The next year, Israeli officials like Naftali Bennett self-righteously spoke on American campuses, suggesting that this pager attack be reproduced here, with targets that included members of the pro-Palestine movement–like me. In these same speeches, Bennett defended the mass starvation of the population of Gaza. When he spoke at Princeton, the President of the university apologized to him for the disruption of his speech, ignoring his explicit on-campus advocacy of genocide by mass starvation, and ignoring his threats to kill protesters by remote controlled bombs. I regularly encounter people who suggest in all seriousness that I should maintain a sense of equanimity and civility about being on the receiving end of a death threat of this kind. Meanwhile, when Israeli American government agents are attacked, I’m expected to express outrage. All that this proves is that cognitive dissonance lacks deterrent force. People in the grips of it can still say the dumbest things.
The American government has likewise recently killed people for playing a part in the propaganda apparatus of an enemy operation. Anwar Awlaki (2011), Samir Khan (2011), Mohammed Emwazi (2015), and Ahmad Abousamra (2017) are all examples.
People have suggested that Sarah Milgrim was somehow innocent because she advocated for humanitarian relief for the people of Gaza. What she did was advocate for humanitarian relief while working for a genocide. This is indistinguishable from the role played by Adolph Eichmann, who didn’t just “advocate” for but actually provisioned the death camps while also working for a genocide. The Israelis kidnapped and executed him. No one sympathizes with Eichmann because he fed a lot of Jews. He fed far more Jews than Milgrim ever fed Gazans. What they remember is that he fed those Jews so that they could later be killed. That’s what Sarah Milgrim did. She is not innocent. She is a moral heir to Adolph Eichmann. The Israelis should read their own propaganda and stop complaining about her death.
I’ve recently been reading about the 1963 Birmingham church bombings that famously killed four children. An activist, Diane Nash, is described in Taylor Branch’s history of the civil rights movement in this way:
“After the church bombing, she [Nash] and Bevel had realized that a crime so heinous pushed even nonviolent zealots like them to the edge of murder” (Parting the Waters, p. 893).
Gaza is the Birmingham church bombing multiplied by a factor of 6,000. If Birmingham could push Diane Nash “to the edge of murder,” we should be able to figure out why Gaza would have pushed Rodriguez over that edge. I agree that it was counter-productive of him to go over the edge. But that’s about it.
My post suggests that many more Elias Rodriguez shootings (etc.) are forthcoming–not because I want them to be, but because no one angry enough to pick up a gun is likely to listen to me at this point. I would suggest that Americans and Israelis either stop the genocide or prepare for death. The sick, dishonest game of moral hide and seek over the Gaza genocide is now entering its “seek” phase. Ready or not, here it comes.
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I think there are degrees of complicity, and those with a fairly low degree of complicity, as these two employees seem to have been, are not obviously a morally legitimate target of lethal violence. Not all “functionaries and agents” are equal, and proportionality is important.
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I don’t agree that their degree of complicity or culpability was low. Israel is engaged in a war of extermination in Gaza, an ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, and a series of aggressions against Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. These are continuations of ongoing aggressions since the nation’s founding. Any such ongoing aggression is going to have two components, one consisting of acts of force, the other of acts of fraud. Though the first is worse than the second, both are essential to the conduct of the war.
Not even a war of extermination can be sustained for long if those engaged in it think that it’s reducible to plain old amoral extermination, full stop. And despite their Schadenfreude at Palestinian suffering, Israelis don’t believe that. They believe that their Schadenfreude, no matter how grotesque, is morally justified because they, the heirs to “Western Civilization” are the moral, civilized party, whereas their antagonists are immoral, sub-human savages. Further they, the Israelis, believe that they’re the ones playing the merely defensive, victimized role whereas the Palestinians are the long-standing aggressors and victimizers. That lie–that interconnected series of lies–is what’s given moral warrant to the current genocide, and given it its longevity. Stripped of these rationalizations, the genocide (indeed, the occupation itself) would long since have ended. It’s precisely the work of public diplomats like Lischinsky and Milgrim to have kept that lie alive, and in so doing, to rationalize and prolong Palestinian misery.
In short, Israel and its allies have waged war a “hundred years’ war” against the Palestinians precisely because they’ve employed zealously motivated, full-time propagandists whose job it is to rationalize Israel’s crimes. Both of the targets of the Rodriguez shooting precisely fit this description: they played the role eagerly, enthusiastically, voluntarily, and with full knowledge of what it was about. They were not mere clerks or janitors or tangential paper pushers. They were willing, knowing, self-conscious, ambitious public diplomats working to effectuate a war of annihilation. Their boss, Yechiel Leiter, the Israeli ambassador, spoke here at Princeton University about a month ago (part of a nation-wide tour in defense of Israel’s genocide). He eagerly, righteously defended Israel’s war of annihilation at that talk–starvation, bombing, and the forcible expulsion and re-expulsion of starving, dying people. All fair, all deserved, all par for the course. Meanwhile, one person protesting outside was threatened with arrest for using the word “Nazi.” (I was right there when it happened; the person escaped arrest only by managing successfully to flee the scene.) Anyone who works for such a person as Leiter–who works to give him the intellectual ammunition to go on a speaking tour advocating such things–is (like the ambassador himself) a military target in the most obvious and straightforward sense. To be a public diplomat for a genocidaire like Leiter is not a peripheral role, or one with a low level of complicity. It’s right there in the driver’s seat with Leiter himself, along with Leiter’s bosses, Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, Katz, and all the rest.
Someone might argue that Milgrim was not a public diplomat but a humanitarian aid worker. This overlooks the fact that Israel’s “humanitarian aid” program is an essential part of its genocide. Israel dismantled UNRWA so as to supplant it, and put its own mercenaries in UNRWA’s place (“GHF“). Many journalists have now documented how, relying on the sheer desperation of the Gazan population, Israel has used this tactic to lure Gazans to their deaths, and generally to foment chaos in order to facilitate social breakdown (the best work I’ve read is by Jonathan Cook: see 1, 2, and 3). The bottom line is that as far as Israel is concerned, “humanitarian aid” is a euphemism for genocide. To describe Israel’s humanitarian aid program as humanitarian is like describing the Nazi gas chambers as an exercise in public hygiene. The Nazis lured people into “showers,” then gassed them; the Israelis lure them toward food distribution sites, then shoot them. The underlying principle is the same. I have no tears to cry for genocidaires. And that’s what both of these targets were.
I would add that as Israeli citizens, both were liable for military service, and so, were what Jeff McMahan calls “contingent combatants,” ready to make their active, physical contribution to genocide when called to do so (Jeff McMahan, “The Ethics of Killing in War,” Ethics 114:4 [July 2004], p. 697). That by itself makes them targets. (I don’t mean to imply that McMahan would agree; I just like his phrase.) Just to be clear: I don’t mean that anyone who might hypothetically become a soldier in the IDF is a target. I mean that a voluntary government functionary in the diplomatic service, of age to serve, absolutely is a target. Military service is an essential part of the career trajectory of a person in such a career. It’s implausible to imagine such a person volunteering to work as a public diplomat for genocidal regime, defending the war itself, then claiming conscientious objector status to the war. So the reasoning stands.
I would also add that (with one qualification) when a regime uses an otherwise prohibited tactic, like bombing embassies, it forfeits the right to expect immunity from that tactic. The Israelis have not just killed a few public diplomats here and there, but bombed whole embassies and killed hundreds of public diplomats, journalists, and intellectuals (see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). I don’t mean to imply that if X kills innocents, then the receiving side Y may also kill innocents. The principle I’m advocating isn’t unbounded. But if X uses an otherwise prohibited tactic to kill people who are part of the war effort, then X forfeits immunity against the same tactic similarly employed by Y, the target. The application here is obvious. (Here’s The New York Times wondering out loud if it’s OK to bomb an embassy. Experts say it’s OK! No comparable article on whether it’s OK to shoot two embassy staffers. Consider me the expert saying it’s OK.)
Though many people have claimed that Rodriguez could not have known that Lischinsky and Milgram were embassy employees, that’s not obvious in itself, and in any case, they were attending a “Young Diplomats Reception” sponsored by the AJC, a pro-genocide organization. Rodriguez had a ticket to the event.
While one could have wished that Rodriguez had aimed at someone higher up in the organization, the higher up a person is, the harder it is to target them. It’s not appropriate to demand that people fighting a genocide (however inadvisedly or ineptly) find the hardest targets to hit before they target anyone.
A proviso: I would just emphasize, as I did in the other comment, that while I regard these individuals as legitimate targets, I don’t think Rodriguez should have shot them, and don’t think that those of us removed from the immediate physical battlefield should be resorting to violence even against legitimate, deserving targets. I’m at work on another post, similar to my “Against Trespass,” that explains this. This is not because these particular targets were innocent. They weren’t. Just war theorists commonly distinguish two types of innocence: innocence as blamelessness, and innocence as harmlessness. Milgrim and Lischinsky were innocent in neither sense. They were blameworthy and actively harmful. But violence is suicidal and self-defeating. That’s why I oppose it here. I sincerely wish the shooting hadn’t taken place, and hope no one engages in more. But I have no tears to cry for the victims.
That’s what I would have told Sirhan Sirhan, Aaron Bushnell, Shamsuddin Jabbar, Elias Rodriguez, Mohammed Soliman, and anyone similarly inclined: don’t do it. Nothing of value can be achieved through random, half-discriminate violence. The truth is, we are surrounded by sociopathic evil in a delusional, self-righteous, but fundamentally sociopathic society. We can’t, short of collective suicide, go to war against it. We simply have to learn how to avoid complicity in it as best we can, and endure. If that sounds defeatist, it’s less defeatist than violence. If defeat is a permanent state of affairs, you have to learn to live with it. Violence can’t change that.
Obviously, I don’t mean that Palestinians, Syrians, Lebanese, and Yemenis shouldn’t wage war against Israel over there. They absolutely should. Selfish as it may sound, my preference is that the war not spread.
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RE “That’s what I would have told Sirhan Sirhan, Aaron Bushnell, Shamsuddin Jabbar, Elias Rodriguez, Mohammed Soliman, and anyone similarly inclined: don’t do it.”
Perhaps you did NOT get what Bushnell tried to convey?
What Bushnell’s desperate act exposes is that some 95-99% of people anywhere DO NOTHING when confronted with grave injustices such as the current US-Israeli Holocaust of the Palestinians, just like all the “bad German people” during the Nazi Holocaust, whom they are happily pointing the finger to as examples of OTHER PEOPLE who are bad and evil in their deep dishonesty, self-delusion, and madness.
He pointed exactly this reality out in one of his last statements:
“Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”
Now WHY is it that 95-99% of people anywhere DO NOTHING when confronted with grave injustices? Because “advanced” humans have a malignant disease called a “Soullessness Spectrum Disorder” …. https://www.rolf-hefti.com/covid-19-coronavirus.html
Because of this big truth Bushnell is pointing to lots of truth-hating cowardly soulless people resort to slandering Bushnell as mentally disturbed or fanatical, having been suicidal (he was not), etc. or try to misrepresent him negatively in some other form –anything in order to NOT see the real truth about themselves. But that is no surprise of course because…
“The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduces them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.” — Gustave Le Bon, in 1895
“America is the greatest exporter of violence the world has ever known. So wear your patriotism on your sleeve and be proud. You are a depraved citizen of the world’s worst killer nation.” — Paul Craig Roberts, Ph.D., economist & former US empire official, in 2015
“The US empire is quantifiably the most destructive and tyrannical force on this planet, by an extremely massive margin. No other power has spent the 21st century killing people by the millions and displacing them by the tens of millions. No other power is circling the planet with hundreds of military bases, starving people around the world with blockades and economic sanctions, staging proxy wars, color revolutions and coups all over the earth, and working to destabilize and destroy any nation anywhere on this planet who dares to defy its dictates. Only the US empire is doing this. No other power comes anywhere remotely close.” — Caitlin Johnstone, Independent Journalist, in 2024
“I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine, at the hands of their colonizers (=the genocidal US empire and its genocidal Israeli colony), it’s not extreme at all.” — Aaron Bushnell, shortly before he set himself on fire
If you have been injected with Covid jabs/bioweapons and are concerned verify what batch number you were injected with at https://howbadismybatch.com
“We can have the world of our dreams tomorrow, but we have to be willing to fight today.” — Aaron Bushnell, in 2023
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Aaron Bushnell could have conveyed what your quotations say above without burning himself alive. He could just have asserted what the quotations say, and defended it. That said, the last quotation contradicts what he did. You can’t “fight today” if you’re dead, and you can’t have the world of our dreams tomorrow in a posthumous state.
I didn’t say, and didn’t imply, that Bushnell was mentally disturbed or fanatical. All I said was that I don’t think he should have committed suicide. There are many options between doing nothing and committing suicide, and I wish Aaron Bushnell was here to engage in some of them.
I understand why Bushnell did what he did, but he was a talented, intelligent person, and he’s deprived us of his talents and intelligence. The movement for Palestine has to be built to last. It won’t last if people adopt either suicide or homicide as a tactic. In the first case, we’ll implode. In the second case, we’ll be wiped out. There are better ways of doing things. We should find them and adopt them.
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It’s not clear to me in any detail, as yet, precisely what Lischinsky and Milgrim’s aims and/or jobs were, or even whether Rodriguez knew precisely whom he was shooting at. But suppose you’re right about all of that. I’m still not convinced that that gives them the degree and kind of complicity to make them legitimate targets.
a) One of your main arguments is that they were propagandists for the Israeli state’s genocidal actions. Suppose they were. That makes them morally complicit, but does it carry the kind of complicity that makes lethal violence against them count as justifiably defensive? That’s not obvious. I think people have a right to propagandise for evil. The fact that speech, used for evil ends, contributes causally to these evil ends does not, under a liberal (let alone a libertarian) conception of rights, make the speech itself an actionable rights-violation. Now when the speech consists of giving orders to one’s minions to carry out the relevant actions, then the speech becomes the kind of speech-act that is an actionable rights-violation. But liberalism resists the temptation to slide from that kind of case to mere propagandistic support, placing them all equally the “driver’s seat” as you put it. It also resists the temptation to equate ideological support with material support.
Your argument seems uncomfortably close to Angelo Codevilla’s argument that upon occupying Iraq the u.s. should have executed all the members of Saddam Hussein’s regime, including “the media, and of course the leaders of the party’s ‘social organizations’ (labor, youth, women’s professional, etc.).”
I talk about Codevilla here: https://reasonpapers.com/pdf/28/rp_28_2.pdf
b) I take your description of pro-Israel propaganda as “fraud” to be making a case for regarding such propaganda as rights-violating. But if we’re using “fraud” in a specific legal sense, where A defrauds B by inducing B to make an economic exchange by misrepresenting what’s being exchanged, then the equivalent would be that, by misrepresenting Israel’s actions as necessary and justified, the propagandists would be defrauding people into donating to, and otherwise supporting, the Israeli cause. I worry that that stretches the concept of “fraud” (in the actionable legal sense), but even assuming the stretch can be defended, the victims of the fraud would be the donors, not the murdered Palestinians, and so that won’t give you what you want.
c) You also argue that Lischinsky and Milgrim were legitimate targets because they were likely to become members of the IDF and to participate in the genocide. Again, under a liberal conception of rights, people do not become legitimate targets of violence for rights-violations they are likely to commit. An exception: if someone has already been engaging in an ongoing series of rights-violations, one can take the likelihood that this series will continue into account in determining a legitimate response. But in order for that principle to apply here, it would have to be the case that Lischinsky and Milgrim were already engaging in sufficiently serious rights-violations prior to joining the IDF, and that’s one of the points I’m not convinced of.
d) You say that “when a regime uses an otherwise prohibited tactic, like bombing embassies, it forfeits the right to expect immunity from that tactic.” This strikes me as too much aggregation. A regime is not an agent, it’s a collection of agents, so it matters whether the people being targeted by the tactic in retaliation are the same people who can be meaningfully said to have “used” the tactic. You in effect acknowledge this when you concede that “don’t mean to imply that if X kills innocents, then the receiving side Y may also kill innocents.” But I think your concession has a broader moral. Killing innocents is not the only kind of unjust military action. Killing people whose complicity is either too peripheral or of the wrong kind will be so as well. As a general rule, the use of an unjust tactic by one side does not license use of the same unjust tactic by the other side.
e) You say it is “not appropriate to demand that people fighting a genocide … find the hardest targets to hit before they target anyone.” Well, if the legitimate targets are the harder ones and the illegitimate targets are the easier ones, then yes, it is appropriate to demand that they go after the harder targets. I’m sure it was easier for the Allies to firebomb Dresden than to send a squad of assassins into Berlin to take out Hitler and his top cronies, but that doesn’t make it justified.
Suppose, counterfactually, that the Palestinians rather than the Israelis were the aggressors in this conflict. Would that make it permissible for the Israelis to bomb hospitals etc. because that’s easier than hunting down the specific Hamas leaders? I don’t think so. (I’m more impressed by the jus ad bellum / jus in bello distinction than you are.)
f) You say, citing your “Against Trespass” post, that although you regard Lischinsky and Milgrim as legitimate targets, you’re still against Rodriguez’s actions, because they are likely to have bad results. It sounds to me as though you’re saying that although the shootings were morally justified, they weren’t prudentially justified. But as an Aristotelean I can’t buy that distinction. Taking into account the likely results of shooting someone is part of the moral calculation. Or as Aquinas puts it, in order for an act of war to be just, not only must the act not be evil in itself, but its likely bad consequences must not be greater than its likely good consequences. That’s a matter of justice, not just of expediency.
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I have to take a rain check on a full response to your comment, because it’s a complicated issue that probably shouldn’t be relegated to a comment. I need to write a self-standing post about it, but don’t have time right now. My basic take, however, is that I think you’re under-estimating the implications of what you’ve granted at the outset of your comment.
Suppose that Rodriguez knew that he was shooting at Israeli diplomats, and suppose that his targets were in fact employees of the Israeli embassy. In that case, he was shooting not simply at “propagandists,” but at people who played a knowing, voluntary, active, remunerated, fully operational role in Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. A genocide involves a division of labor, both “civilian” and “military.” Some people give the orders from the top. Some people do the killing on the ground. Some people give the orders on the ground. Some people manufacture the materiel required to do the killing. And some people do their best to obsfuscate what is going on so as to give moral cover to the whole operation. That last is what Lischinsky and Milgrim were doing. In some ways, “complicity” understates their culpability. They were part of an ensemble of actors that was collectively responsible for the act of genocide itself.
By my account, Karoline Leavitt is not simply a “propagandist,” in the way that, say, Greg Johnson is. Karoline Leavitt is the White House Press Secretary. The Press Secretary is a member of the Executive Office of the President. By contrast, Greg Johnson “merely” runs a white nationalist website (Counter-Currents). The website cheerleads for ICE but lacks any causal connection to ICE operations. Johnson’s overt views are worse than Leavitt’s, but Leavitt’s culpability for ICE’s actions is a case of collective responsibility, not mere complicity. She isn’t merely cheerleading for ICE. She is an integral part of the causal chain that leads to and helps cover up ICE’s plan of mass deportation. She gets real time information from ICE, spins it, then coordinates with ICE on how to handle any blowback from critics. Though she happens to be at the top of her division of the Executive Office, what is true of her is true of every member of her staff. She is merely the pretty face that presents their work. The actual work is being done by people behind the scenes.
I would add that if there are putatively innocent organizations that maintain covert operational ties to ICE, then if the relevant tie can be established, and is robust, they have the same status as Karoline Leavitt et al. If for instance a think tank just happened to publish a strategic blueprint for ICE, and handed it ICE in the full intention of having ICE implement it, and ICE did so with their approval, they are morally on par with the White House Press Secretary.
I should stress that I am neither condemning nor condoning the idea of anyone’s actually targeting Karoline Leavitt et al. for assassination. For present purposes, I take no position on that topic whatsoever. I’m simply using it as an example to illustrate my larger point.
The example I cited was that of Julius Streicher and Der Sturmer. Streicher was not a combatant in World War II in the sense of actively fighting on the front lines, or actively supervising a death camp, etc. He did “propaganda.” But he didn’t simply express his views, full stop. Early on in the Third Reich (before the war), he had an official title within the party. During the war, he had the role I’ve assigned to “putatively innocent organizations that maintain covert operational ties” to some gravely unjust government. He had clear-cut ties with Hitler. My view is that he could have been shot dead at any time between 1933 and 1945. Whereas, say, Charles Coughlin and George Lincoln Rockwell could not. They were “mere” propagandists. (The scare quotes indicate that “mere” propagandism was still seriously culpable, just not culpable in the way that justified killing them.)
Since my view is that both the top of the hierarchy and the whole staff are relevantly culpable (“operationally culpable,” we might call it), I think it’s legitimate to permit an assassin to decide which part of it to attack. If resistance is justified, and the targets are legitimate, we can’t impose a demand of tactical quixoticism on people engaged in front line resistance. Yes, in an ideal world, they would go after the top of the hierarchy. But making that demand comes close to requiring that they engage in a highly risky, costly operation with the near guarantee of failure. They have no such obligation. As far as I’m concerned, the entire Embassy is a legitimate target. It follows that anyone working for it is.
I would exclude ancillary employees whose work is causally irrelevant to military operations. A janitor cleans the embassy, but makes far too attenuated a contribution to matter. But “diplomats” are no different from intelligence agents for a hostile, genocidal power. Their work is very clearly related to military operations. I reiterate that I’m not prescribing that anyone actually harm them.
But once harm befalls them, I am unapologetic about declaring it justified after the fact. It is justified. If they don’t want it to happen, they should stop playing an active role in Israel’s genocide. They should stop lying to the world that they are being targeted because they are Jewish. They should stop telling the officialized lie that resistance to Israel is anti-Semitism. They should stop covering up Israeli atrocities, and stop enabling more and more of those atrocities to take place under the guise of “self-defense.”
We should refrain from harming them, and actively discourage attacks on them, simply because attacking them does no good, and produces problematic consequences. But when such attacks happen, however regrettable, we should point out that they had it coming. I have no sympathy for them, or for the blatant lie that their deaths are simply an expression of unreasoning or malign anti-Semitism, full stop. Smiling, beautiful people like Lischinsky and Milgrim have brought us a century of misery, and promise to bring us indefinitely more death and destruction. They have conveniently weaponized their ethno-religious identity as the moral armor that gives them immunity for anything they choose to do. No one should feel sorry for them. They could have chosen and done otherwise than make themselves an active part of a killing machine for apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. They didn’t.
The proper object of our condemnation should not be Rodriguez, but Lischinsky and Milgrim, along with the government they worked for, along with our own government, the government behind Israel, facilitating genocide and now a further war of aggression against Iran. All of this–apartheid, ethnic cleansing, genocide, aggression–is their doing, the doing of the whole of Israel’s military-diplomatic-intelligence apparatus.
Death is what happens to those who bring death on others. The killing will only stop when Israel stops the killing, the killing that they started long before October 7, 2023. Until that happens, what happened to Lischinsky and Milgrim will happen again. People can condemn me for saying it, or take it under advisement as the best advice anyone could give them. I no longer care how they take it. If they don’t pay attention when I say “stop the killing,” I have no reason to care if they pay attention when I applaud the defensive killing that inevitably takes place as a result. Obviously, I exclude present company from the preceding claim. But if the shoe fits anyone else, as I’m sure it does, they can wear it with my wholehearted blessing.
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I agree that being part of the operational machinery of mass-murdering regimes gives propagandists like Streicher and Leavitt a greater degree of complicity than the sorts of propagandists who merely cheer the massacres from the sidelines. But that’s why I stressed the difference between “degree” and “kind.”
Let’s say Hans and Franz are both functionaries of a Nazi or Nazi-like state, and both are complicit in that state’s genocidal activities. Hans is complicit because he’s actually carrying them out. And by that I don’t necessarily mean that Hans is literally pulling triggers or dropping in the gas, though that would certainly count; if Hans is simply giving orders to other people who will do these things, that will count as “carrying out” too. If you commit the illocutionary act of giving an order, in a context where it is clearly highly likely that your order will be obeyed, then you are not merely causally contributing to the action, you are partly committing it. “I was just giving orders” is no more a defense than “I was just following orders.”
Franz, on the other hand, doesn’t give orders; he merely propagandises on behalf of the regime. However, he is so placed as to be, in your words, “an integral part of the causal chain that leads to and helps cover up” the genocide; he gets “real time information” from those who are actually carrying it out, he “spins it,” and then “coordinates with” [the SS, Gestapo, etc.] on “how to handle any blowback from critics,” thereby giving “moral cover to the whole operation.” Suppose all this makes Franz’s causal contribution to the result as great as Hans’s; and since the causal contribution is deliberate, this may well make his degree of complicity as great as Hans’s. (Actually Franz’s causal contribution may be even greater than Hans’s, if Franz is a top-level functionary whose propaganda has a wide reach, while Hans is a low-level grunt whose personal and direct involvement is limited to shooting a few prisoners one afternoon. I don’t have a fully worked out story as to what difference that might or might not make to their degree of complicity.)
But although Hans and Franz may be complicit in equal degree, their complicity is of different kinds. Hans is complicit in genocide in virtue of, well, committing acts of genocide (whether by giving orders or by following them). Franz is complicit in genocide in virtue of issuing propaganda. In Aquinas’s terms, the two acts may have the same end, but they have different objects. And although both act and object are relevant to moral assessment, an action’s object is what most fundamentally makes an action the kind of action it is. Lethal violence is appropriate as a defensive response to acts of genocide, but I do not think it is appropriate as a defensive response to propaganda. Even propaganda that is intended to make a substantial causal contribution to genocide, and does in fact makes such a contribution, still, as far as I can see, does not count as carrying out genocide. It’s carrying out propaganda.
Now admittedly there may be some cases where the line between propagandising for something and ordering it may be blurry, as in Mill’s example of the mob in front of the grain merchant’s house.* But most distinctions have blurry edges; that doesn’t invalidate the distinction.
You say: “They’ve falsely been described as ‘innocent civilians,’ but they were absolutely not innocent. They were guilty civilians, guilty of helping to sanitize and cover up one of the worst crimes of the last several decades.” Okay, but again, yes, that is what they are guilty of: “helping to sanitize and cover up” the genocide. That is not the same thing as being guilty of the genocide itself. And so in that context I think it makes sense to describe them as innocent – innocent of the crime to which killing them was supposedly a legitimate defensive response.
Here I would also distinguish between the kind of “cover-up” that involves, say, actually destroying evidence (and thus being in that sense an accessory), and the kind that simply involves, again in your words, “spin” and “handling blowback from critics.” I want to resist assimilating Spin Doctor Mengele to actual Doctor Mengele. Killing someone for engaging in spin is disproportionate – not because the spin’s contribution to the genocide is too tenuous (like that of the proverbial janitor) but because it’s of the wrong kind. (That’s also why I resist your comparison between Milgrim and Eichmann. Eichmann didn’t just provision the camps, he held a position of authority and directed the process of shipping prisoners [not just food] to the camps. He wasn’t just a glorified caterer.)
You write: “If resistance is justified, and the targets are legitimate, we can’t impose a demand of tactical quixoticism on people engaged in front line resistance.” Well, yes, but that depends on whether the targets are legitimate. If the targets are complicit in virtue of proagandising for the genocide rather than for carrying it out, then in my view they are not legitimate targets, and the fact that they are easier to reach doesn’t justify killing them.
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* “An opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor, or that private property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer, or when handed about among the same mob in the form of a placard.” (Mill [and Taylor?], On Liberty, ch. 3.)
[I leave aside the complication that in light of Mill’s economic views it’s not impossible that corn-dealers are in fact starvers of the poor, which might affect the case.]
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Irfan, I, as an anti-Zionist Jew, agree with you.
Zionists love to smirkingly announce, “FAFO” [Fuck Around and Find Out] to Palestinians and their supporters. As could be predicted, they shriek, when it is applied to them.
Here is one of the best pieces I’ve read on the subject:
https://infinitejaz.substack.com/p/the-civil-assassination-comes-home?r=4nftp&fbclid=IwY2xjawKh00RleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETFZZjhzT2I5R2NjaldOalRFAR7qQJ2HNz3Hhg7X_88WWDAsm0xPoLH57CoQWSufUp_4Hr0YxOy3UKS3fJTCQw_aem_SsGw03SP8WpdlpTkl79kgg&triedRedirect=true
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I agree with much that he says, but though (like him) I regret that the shooting took place, I actually regard both individuals as legitimate military targets for the reasons I gave. It’s a little odd how much celebration there was over the killing of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson, and how much of a taboo has grown up over the idea that Lischinsky and Milgrim could be legitimate targets. The case for shooting Thompson was ambiguous at best. The case for shooting Lischinsky and Milgrim is not.
The difference seems to rest on their association with Zionism. Thompson was a Christian (I guess); in any case, his death had nothing to do with Zionism or Israel. So he’s dispensable. Lischinsky and Milgrim by contrast were Zionists, and Milgrim was Jewish. That gives their lives a sanctified status that no one dare question. You have to wonder how much longer rational people can buy into a version of Jewish supremacism or Divine Election. 5785 years seems like long enough, but I could see this going on another five or six thousand years.
Lischinsky’s X feed is worth reading, to see how avid a defender of Israel’s genocide he was.
https://x.com/yaron_li
Like I said, life is a test of endurance.
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