Did Elias Rodriguez do anything wrong?
The killing of two diplomats complicit in genocide has striking parallels to a 'Boy Avenger' who struck back against the Nazis.
(In condemning the killing of two Israeli embassy employees in Washington, few considered we aren’t the ones who have murdered 15,000 children. We haven’t dropped the equivalent of five Hiroshima A-bombs on a concentration camp. We haven’t perpetrated one of the worst wars of extermination in modern history. But we are being ordered to sympathize with two génocidaires as if they are peace-loving innocents.
No one has to support Elias Rodriguez, who allegedly shot the employees. But condemning his actions plays into the fascist agenda to rebrand protected free speech and ideas as terrorism.
We must stop groveling before the barbarians in power. They are the ones without a shred of humanity. Our only crime is protesting the genocide and calling for a secular democratic state for all people in Palestine in place of the Zionist pox on humanity.
Don’t be so sure Rodriguez’s actions will backfire either. Consider the case of Herschel Grynszpan. This article was originally published by Counterpunch.)
By Arun Gupta
Herschel Grynszpan did nothing wrong.
He was a refugee at 15 years old. He was impoverished, unable to get work papers, sleeping on the floor of his aunt and uncle’s apartment. The rest of his family had been booted out of the only country they had called home. His sister Berta wrote him of their “great misfortune,” without even a penny.
Grynszpan was distraught, unable to help them. He descended further into turmoil after being denied refugee status even though he “qualified in every way.” He was ordered expelled and hid in the attic of an abandoned apartment. Days later he purchased a gun.
On November 7, 1938, Grynszpan walked into the German embassy in Paris claiming to have an important document. “He was ushered into the office of a junior-level diplomat, 29-year-old Ernest vom Rath, who asked to inspect it. Drawing his gun, Grynszpan told him, ‘You’re a filthy Kraut, and in the name of 12,000 persecuted Jews, here is the document.’ He fired five shots at vom Rath, who died two days later.”
Grynszpan was referring to an ethnic-cleansing operation by the Nazis that deported 12,000 Jews to Poland including his family. After shooting vom Rath, he “willingly submitted to arrest by the French authorities, and immediately made a statement about the treatment of Jews at the hands of the Nazis.”
Vom Rath happened to die on the fifteenth anniversary of Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch in Munich. That day, November 9, 1938, Nazi bigwigs gathered in Munich to celebrate. During a “festive dinner,” “Herr Hitler” — as The New York Times called him in a fawning profile the next year in his mountain retreat “furnished harmoniously according to the best of German traditions” — ordered Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels to allow anti-Jewish pogroms already underway to continue and for police to stand back and stand by.
Kristallnacht, “The Night of Broken Glass,” was the first large-scale pogrom against German Jews after years of intensifying repression. “The scope of the resulting carnage was staggering: more than 1,000 synagogues were burned; over 7,000 Jewish-owned businesses were gutted; hundreds of Jews died; and 30,000 were sent to concentration camps at Buchenwald, Dachau, and elsewhere.”
Upon learning of Kristallnacht, Grynszpan was said to be horrified while Nazi propagandists planned to turn his case into “a show trial to represent the ‘cardinal sin of global Jewry.’”
Grynszpan is now considered a hero and “one who fought back.” Jewish museums celebrate him, and a street in Be’er Sheva, Israel is named for him. At least five books have been written about him. One book terms him “A Boy Avenger.” Another praised him for starting World War II precisely “to stop the ongoing war that Hitler had initiated against the Jews in 1933” (emphasis in original).
No one blames Kristallnacht on Grynszpan. Historians say his act was the “justification” or “pretext” for Kristallnacht. One author justifies it as “an ‘act of counter-violence’ in explicit protest against Hitler’s war against the Jews.” In other words, the boy avenger at most only sought to end a heinous violence.
It is similar to John Brown’s attempt to incite a slave revolt with his deadly raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1959. There is simply no social, historical, or material reason one can oppose counter-violence against such vicious ideologies.
The same is true for Zionism and its agents. On May 21, Elias Rodriguez allegedly killed two Israeli embassy employees in Washington. The parallels to Grynszpan are striking. Rodriguez walked into the museum and identified himself as the suspect. He told police at the scene, “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza.”
The embassy employees were as guilty as vom Rath despite farcical attempts to paint them as peacemakers. In his alleged manifesto, Rodriguez called his act an “armed demonstration.” The term evokes counter-violence, putting the burden of violence on the target.
Some leftists, however, wailed after the shooting, “I can never support murder” and We love life!” Denouncing Rodriguez is capitulating to Zionism. Leftists who denounced Hamas after Oct. 7 legitimized Israel’s strategy to sell genocide as self-defense. Denouncing Rodriguez is legitmizing Zionist attempts to paint resistance to genocide as genocide. Should we now criticize any freed person who struck a mortal blow against a slave owner to free the enslaved?
Oct. 7 was simply counter-violence. The colonizer is responsible for all violence because they create the colonized and any means they use to resist. Oct. 7 showed Zionism for what it is. When after 20 months of extermination, Israeli officials vow to destroy “everything left in the Gaza Strip,” are they any different than the Germans who Grynszpan fought against?
If you want to condemn someone, condemn genocidal Zionists and their American backers. Then condemn yourself, condemn me, condemn all of us who should be protesting, disrupting, organizing with all our body and soul to stop this genocide.
We cannot allow the ghouls to define our politics and ideas. Two agents of a genocidal regime deserve zero sympathy. If a young Ukrainian man shot dead two Russian embassy employees in Budapest, liberals would be celebrating him.
Rodriguez acted because we have failed. In his manifesto he praised the “Nonviolent protest in the opening weeks of the genocide [that] seemed to signal some sort of turning point,” and the shift in public opinion “against the genocidal apartheid state.” But he lamented that “thus far the rhetoric has not amounted to much.” His answer was to follow “Aaron Bushnell and others [who] sacrificed themselves in the hopes of stopping the massacre.”
Rodriguez indicated he was “bringing the war home,” but he didn’t act impulsively. He became “acutely aware of our brutal conduct in Palestine … 11 years ago during Protective Edge.” Back then he said his action “would have been illegible, would seem insane.” Now he says he is “glad” that “there are many Americans for which the action will be highly legible and, in some funny way, the only sane thing to do.”
Denouncing Rodriguez is like denouncing history. He is the third young man in less than a year who has picked up a gun to force political change in a left direction. These men are products of our age. They are filling a vacuum resulting from a left that has collapsed in confusion, defeat, and exhaustion.
Can anyone appalled by the MAGA-DOGE wrecking ball credibly claim they would denounce Matthew Thomas Crooks had his bullet taken a slightly different course on that fateful day in Pennsylvania?
Then there is Luigi Mangione. He is a folk hero. The killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson likely saved thousands of lives. It appears to have led one insurer to reverse a policy limiting anesthesia during surgeries as well as an industry-wide caution on denying medical claims. Leftists who denounced the killing aren’t reading the room. Our healthcare system is so murderous that 41 percent of Americans under the age of 30 approved of the killing, more than who disapproved.
People are being pushed to violence because we are not creating alternatives. When whacking one fat-cat CEO of a predatory insurer saves far more lives than a years of a sputtering “Medicare for All” campaign that should make us realize how irrelevant the left is.
There is one credible argument against the counter-violence of Rodriguez, and that is outcomes based: Does the act further political goals?
Accelerationism, bring the war home, and “propaganda of the deed” acts often backfire, such as bombings by the Weather Underground in the early 1970s. They wrongly concluded a revolution was possible and they could accelerate it. Perhaps it seemed easier and more glamorous than the hard work of organizing a public radicalized by Vietnam and Watergate.
Another reason radicals are queasy about Rodriguez is fear that the Empire will strike back. This is also wrong. It’s similar to liberals who claimed Trump would be worse on Gaza than Biden. How exactly does one make genocide worse?
How can things be worse on the homefront? ICE will supercharge ethnic cleansing if it gets $150 billion in the budget bill. Trump is setting up a global gulag for immigrants. Mahmoud Khalil has been a political prisoner for almost three months. Liberal intelligentsia have rolled over in the media, academia, and legal world.
MAGA fascists are working to crush the left with Project Esther. They want to label peaceful dissent against Zionist genocide as the “Hamas Support Network,” equating it with terrorism. This is a ploy to eliminate left-wing protest and squelch First Amendment freedoms.
Fasists would also love to arrest journalists, strip and deport immigrants with citizenship, and ship us off CECOT. Rodriguez did not create this dire state of affairs. At most he sped up the process like Grynszpan and Brown.
At the same time, no one should do the state a favor by endorsing violence against individuals or groups. But neither should we cower in fear that pogroms are next and the Proud Boys will haul us off to FEMA camps. MAGA fascists want us to be afraid to protest, speak up, and fight back.
Instead, we need to realize that repression gives us freedom. If they are trying to crush us, then there is nothing worse they can do to us. We have to fight for our lives loudly and openly for what believe. We owe no consideration to fascists anywhere who want to destroy us and everything we cherish.
No one knows the effects of Rodriguez’s actions. It took more than 50 years for historians to tell Grynszpan’s story and longer for him to be considered a hero. We should resist the temptation or pressure to denounce Rodriguez. Historians may one day say Elias Rodriguez did nothing wrong.
I will not condemn him.