On May 21, 2025, in Washington, D.C., two members of the Israeli embassy were assassinated at the Jewish Museum by a man named Elias Rodriguez.
The victims — a man and a woman, Sarah Lynn Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky — were described by the perpetrator as “collateral victims” of the ongoing genocide in Palestine, particularly in the Gaza Strip.
Although this double murder is unequivocally condemnable, it echoes a historical event that took place 87 years earlier. On November 7, 1938, in Paris, Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old Polish Jew, assassinated Ernst vom Rath, a German embassy official, in an attempt to draw international — especially French — attention to the plight of Jews in Nazi Germany.
Eighty-seven years separate these two acts, yet a common thread seems to unite them: a desperate attempt to denounce what the perpetrators perceived as the beginning, or repetition, of a genocide.
Shouting “Free Palestine,” Elias Rodriguez reportedly described his act as a cry of alarm, carried out on behalf of the Palestinian people.
Rodriguez is a 31-year-old man of South American origin, based in Chicago. From a middle-class background, with no ethnic or religious ties to Palestine, he is believed to be a left-leaning Catholic, politically active on issues related to slavery, imperialism, and occupation. His father reportedly served in the Iraq war. His personal history is shaped by struggles for historical justice, yet he had no direct connection to the Middle East.
In both cases — Grynszpan in 1938 and Rodriguez in 2025 — we are confronted with politically motivated killings, intended as desperate warnings in the face of perceived mass atrocities.
The consequences are similarly tragic: Grynszpan was arrested, later handed over to the Nazis after the occupation of France, and eventually deported. Elias Rodriguez has just been indicted and is likely to face a life sentence for his crimes.
History appears to stutter, repeating its darkest chapters. Today, recent comments by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — referring to Palestinians as “human animals” — evoke a dehumanizing rhetoric eerily reminiscent of early 20th-century ideologies. We are witnessing the return of unapologetic ethno-racial nationalism, rooted in the revisionist Zionist current inspired by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, where radical nationalism slips into identity-driven extremism.
The condemnation of genocide must never be selective.
When a political leader claims to represent a “people of light” while orchestrating — in just a few months — an unprecedented campaign of mass bombardment against a civilian population, we must name things clearly: Benjamin Netanyahu today represents a modern form of racial fascism, one that draws on the ideological excesses of Europe’s darkest century.