The Performative Intimacy of Anti-Semitic Terror

The Atlantic

2 days ago

Yesterday's violent attack in Boulder, Colorado, at a weekly Jewish-community gathering to support the release of Israeli hostages held by Hamas, left eight people hospitalized. One of the victims is a Holocaust survivor, according to a local rabbi. Jewish leaders nationwide are demanding greater government action to protect the community, which is still reeling just two weeks after the killing in Washington, D.C., of two young staff of the Israeli embassy, gunned down outside an event hosted by the American Jewish Committee.
The anti-Semitic motivation of these attacks is clear. Such homicidal hate crimes have no justification; indeed, their collateral damage is to destroy the space for any reasonable debate about how Israel has conducted its war in Gaza. The two attacks are linked not only by their motivation, but by their horrific, performative intimacy. Terrorism always aims to shock with the gruesomeness of bloody murder—one thinks of the Islamic State decapitation videos. Yet terrorism typically wields the threat of random violence, the notion that any innocent might be caught in its vortex of cruelty. These attacks are different because they were directed very specifically at people the attacker took to be Jewish. Their intimacy was precisely intended to inflict horror on a particular community and imply that no Jew could be innocent.
In Boulder, the suspect in police custody has been charged with a federal hate crime. He has been named as Mohamed Sabry Soliman, and used a flamethrower and Molotov cocktails to burn his victims. He reportedly yelled 'Free Palestine!' during the attack. The attacker's method had an improvised yet theatrical quality; even if its symbolism was not consciously intended, the effort to incinerate Jews has a hideous historical echo.
In the case of the D.C. attack, the suspect, Elias Rodriguez, drove from Chicago to the Capital Jewish Museum. There, he allegedly found and killed two Israeli embassy staff—according to reports, shooting his victims multiple times like a mob executioner. Authorities say the suspect also chanted 'Free, free Palestine' when he was detained, adding, ' I did it for Gaza.'
Pervasive anti-Semitism is what enables attackers to believe that they are striking back at Israel by trying to kill any Jew, anywhere. This hateful mindset assigns responsibility for specific Israeli policies to Jewish people all over the world. Jews thus stand condemned purely for being Jewish. This is a sure tell of anti-Semitic unreason—given that neither American Jews, nor Israelis themselves, are of one mind on anything, let alone the Netanyahu government's Gaza policy.
The Colorado victims were meeting in support of hostages taken by Hamas. The D.C. victims were working to advance their embassy's diplomatic mission. Both sets of people belonged to the best traditions of dialogue and peaceful advocacy, the absolute opposite of irrational hate. The personal, proximate violence that these attackers used was designed to create a spectacle that makes all Jewish Americans feel vulnerable.
Both alleged perpetrators pointedly had no intention of trying to escape from the scene of these crimes. The attacker in D.C., after all, concluded his attack by going into the Capital Jewish Museum, where people aided him, thinking that he was seeking refuge from the violence outside; he was detained only after he identified himself as the assailant and yelled pro-Palestinian slogans. The Boulder suspect was easily detained after witnesses identified him to arriving authorities. The premise of these attackers' grotesque performance is that killing Jews, any Jews, is justified and good. Terrorism usually seeks to cloak its hate in a higher cause. But these recent attacks dispense with the pretense. 'Free Palestine,' in the mouth of these attackers, is a threat of extermination, the expression of an eliminationist project. With the horrible intimacy of their point-blank shooting or flamethrower immolation, the perpetrators appear to think they have begun that project. Although a graphic description of these attacks—a fleeing victim hunted down or burned alive—may risk the crimes' glorification or mimicry, their qualitative horror should not be glossed over.
As far as we know, these assailants are not part of a larger terrorist scheme. The 'lone wolf' phenomenon makes preventing this kind of violence more difficult; with no organizational footprint for intelligence services to track, nothing in the profile of either suspect raises any obvious flag that would have provided a possible warning of such an attack. Buttressing support and protections for the Jewish community is important, but will be imperfect. The solution is simply to delegitimize, constantly and forcefully, these acts—without qualification or broader discussion. Public discourse must maintain a strong distinction between what Israel does and who Jews are. To do otherwise is to side with this terror.