The Washington Attack: Israeli ‘Defense Forces’ Kill 60,000, a ‘Terrorist’ Kills Two

By Jeremy Salt

The genocide would have been stopped, and the sign that the international ‘rules-based order’ was actually working would have prevented the Washington attack.

The killing of two Israeli embassy staff in Washington was clearly an act of retribution, not antisemitism. Elias Rodriguez pulled the trigger but the genocidal regime in Tel Aviv cocked the pistol.

The atrocities it has committed with the active support of the US government finally pushed a young man with no known criminal record into committing this one violent act against two young people in the prime of their lives, just like the thousands of young people Israel has killed in Gaza.

Had Netanyahu and his fascist gang been stopped long ago, this never would have happened. And why weren’t they stopped? Because the governments that could have stopped them are fully complicit in their crimes.

Under the direction of their politicians and military commanders, Israeli soldiers, pilots, and drone operators have murdered nearly 60,000 civilians. They have launched hundreds of attacks on health centres, destroying hospitals or putting them out of service. They have murdered or wounded thousands of health and aid workers. The true death toll is undoubtedly much higher because of bodies that cannot be recovered from the tons of rubble over them.

Since the beginning of March this year, when Israel blocked all aid from entering Gaza, 50-100 or more Palestinians have been murdered every day by its military.

The Gaza Health Ministry has just released figures on the 16,503 children known to have been killed since October 2023: 916 under one year of age, 4365 aged one to five; 6101 aged 6-12; and 5124 aged 13-17. Again, the true toll will be higher because of bodies unrecoverable from under rubble.

Dr Ala al Naja’a, a pediatrician working in the emergency department of Al Tahrir hospital in Khan Yunis, has just had the horrifying experience of receiving in shrouds the charred remains of nine of her ten children, all under the age of 12, killed in an Israeli missile strike on her home. The tenth child survived but was injured. Her husband is in the hospital, seriously wounded. A British volunteer doctor at the hospital said the children’s bodies were “charcoaled to a crisp.”

Entire families have been wiped out in missile attacks on civilians. Thousands of children have not just been orphaned because their parents have been killed, but have been left without any immediate or extended family to look after them, because all relatives have been killed.

UN Women estimates that 28,000 women and girls have been killed in Gaza since October 2023. Malnourished women are unable to breastfeed their children. Miscarriages are up 300 per cent, including miscarriages as a direct result of Israeli air attacks.

Following Israel’s destruction of hospitals, obstetric care is available at only seven out 18 partly functioning hospitals, four out of 11 field hospitals, and one health centre. Women are forced to give birth in tents without any access to medical support. Children are at risk from the moment they are born, from missile attacks or the lack of medicine and equipment to give them proper care. A doctor in Rafah reported that five babies were sharing one incubator.

Mass starvation is imminent, but hundreds of Gazan civilians – including children – have already been starved to death. This is not ‘collateral damage’ in war but the result of a decision taken by the barbaric regime in Tel Aviv.

The UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, says the entire population of Gaza is facing famine. In its attempt to drive the UN out of Palestine, Israel has hired US contractors to provide food aid, but only in the south. The Palestinians will be driven out of the north if they want to eat, and will not be allowed back. This is food used as a weapon of war, a gross violation of international law.

Just before the two Israeli embassy employees were killed, the UN’s chief humanitarian coordinator said that 14,000 babies were at risk of imminent death unless food was allowed into Gaza. Perhaps this is what finally triggered Elias Rodriguez’s decision to go into the street and shoot the two Israeli embassy staffers attending a ‘young diplomats’ conference.

The Bible says, “Thou shall not kill.” The Bible is right, but when the Bible is used to justify mass murder, we are living in a moral swamp. The rules and moral exemplars apply only to the weak, not the strong. Out of the eight billion people living on the planet, someone was bound to strike back on behalf of the weak.

As part of the genocide, Israel – and Trump – continue to plan the mass expulsion of Palestinians to impoverished countries. They have the Israeli public behind them. A Penn State University poll carried out in March this year, reported in Haaretz and Palestine Chronicle, found that 82 percent of Israelis polled supported the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza and 56 percent the expulsion of Palestinians still living in their pre-1967 occupied land.

Ninety-three percent believed the Biblical command to ‘erase Amalek’ applies today, and 47 percent thought all Palestinians in occupied Gaza’s cities should be killed, following the Biblical example of Joshua’s destruction of Jericho and the massacre of its people.

These exterminationist desires would naturally apply to the West Bank, where life for Palestinians amounts to a pogrom that has continued for 58 years, compared to the pogroms carried out more than a century ago by Cossacks in the Russian Pale of Settlement that lasted for a few days.

While eyes are focused on Gaza, Israel is carrying out a second-level genocide on the West Bank. Hooligans, vandals, and murderers in uniform authorized by the criminal collective in Tel Aviv run riot across the West Bank. The 25,000 residents of the Jenin refugee camp have been ethnically cleansed, buildings have been destroyed, and the camp has been turned into a military base. D-9 bulldozers rip up the streets of the town and destroy electrical cables and other utilities.

The public around at the world is aghast at the barbarity of what it is seeing both in Gaza and the West Bank yet the Israeli regime reacts with fury when just two of its embassy staff are killed – two compared to close to 60,000 Palestinians butchered in Gaza – as if there could be no possible reason for someone wanting to do this. This is surely a sign of just how crazy these people are.

“Hatred and radicalism have no place in the USA,” wrote Donald Trump. The message needs to be addressed to Israel, apart from Trump’s own complicity in the genocide. Were there a genuine ‘international rules-based order’, Netanyahu, Saar, Smotrich, Ben Gvir, the whole rotten bunch constituting the Israeli ‘government,’ would have been slung into prison long ago.

The genocide would have been stopped, and the sign that the international ‘rules-based order’ was actually working would have prevented the Washington attack. Unfortunately, Israel’s partner in crime, the US government, has the power to make sure the ’rules-based order’ does not work.

The manifesto posted online by Elias Rodriguez makes it clear that Israel’s atrocities were the reason for the Washington attack. “The atrocities committed by Israel defy description and defy quantification,” he wrote. “I have no trouble believing the estimates that put the (death) toll at 100,000 or more. What more at this point can one say about the population of mangled and exploded burnt human beings who were children?” He referred to how Israelis themselves “boast about their own shock at the free hand the Americans have given them to exterminate the Palestinians.”

In Paris in 1927, Sholem Schwarzbard assassinated the Ukrainian fascist Symon Petliura in retaliation for the massacre of his family in the 1919 pogroms. At his trial, he was acquitted because it was understood why he took his revenge.

In Paris again, in 1938, a Polish-German Jewish teenager, Herschel Grynszpan, assassinated the German diplomat Ernst Eduard vom Rathis His HIS in retaliation for the deportation of his family from Germany to Poland.

No-one except the Nazis called him a terrorist. The influential American journalist Dorothy Thompson wrote that this “boy” would soon go on trial, but “who is on trial in this case? I would say we are all on trial. I say the men of Munich are on trial, who signed a pact without one word of protection for helpless minorities … whether Herschel Grynszpan lives or not won’t matter much to Herschel. He was prepared to die when he fired those shots. His life was already ruined.”

Grynszpan said that “being a Jew is not a crime. I am not a dog. I have a right to live and the Jewish people have a right to live on exist on this earth. Wherever I have been, I have been chased like an animal.

Palestinians have the same rights and have also been “chased like animals,” or “human animals,” as Yoav Gallant called them. The Nazis called their Jewish victims rats, Zionist fanatics call their victims cockroaches and snakes. The Nazis wanted to destroy the Jews, Zionists want to destroy the Palestinians.

Adding to the public calls for their extermination, the deputy speaker of the Knesset, Nissim Vaturi, recently called for Palestinian men and women to be separated so the men can be ‘executed’ en masse.

Dropping a nuclear bomb on them is another solution, suggested two years ago by Amichai Eliyahu, an equally murderous party colleague of Itamar Ben-Gvir. Taken up by US senator Lindsey Graham when drawing a parallel with what the US “had to do” when dropping bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this ‘solution’ has now repeated by Florida senator Randy Fine, who said the US had ‘nuked’ Japan twice to get unconditional surrender “and that needs to be the same here.”

Nazis called the assassination of Vom Rath an attack on the German people, not what it was, an attack on a senior figure in a genocidal Nazi state. The government of Israel and its lobbyists everywhere are responding in the same way to the Washington attack, by describing it as an ‘antisemitic’ attack on the Jewish people and not what it was, a blow struck against a state committing genocide.

‘Western’ politicians and their media are complicit in the genocide. Over nearly eight decades, they have continued to fund and arm Israel despite the crimes it was regularly committing.

Their intelligence agencies helped Israel to assassinate Palestinians around the world. They allowed it to run wild for nearly 80 years, and only now, after more than 18 months of sustained savagery, do they seem to be waking up to what they have done. Finally, they are starting to feel the heat.

“Israel is not the Messiah but the Golem,” Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht wrote long ago (1983) in The Fate of the Jews. In Jewish folklore, the golem is the animated spirit created from inanimate material, usually clay, generally obedient but also capable of causing hubris. “Created to save the Jews, it has turned on its creators, corrupting and destroying them by its very success at making them a nation like all others …. The Israelis are surviving but not as Jews.” In fact, the world Jewish mainstream regarded Zionism as a corruption of Judaism from the beginning.

Finally, there is this from the Zionist architect of assassination and mass murder, Benyamin Netanyahu, following the decision by three governments to suspend trade relations with Israel:

“I say to President Macron, prime minister Carney and prime minister Starmer, when mass murderers, rapists, baby killers and kidnappers thank you, you’re on the wrong side of justice.”

Mass murder, rape, the murder of babies and kidnapping is exactly what Netanyahu has orchestrated. He is a major war criminal and the punishment for the atrocities he and his entire cabinet of war criminals have committed in occupied Palestine cannot come too soon.

– Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press) and The Last Ottoman Wars. The Human Cost 1877-1923 (University of Utah Press, 2019). He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.

The views expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of The Palestine Chronicle.