When Elias Rodriguez shot and killed Israeli embassy staffers Sarah Milgrim, 26, and Yaron Lischinsky, 30, in front of the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., he shouted the now-familiar chant “Free, Free Palestine,” pulled out a keffiyeh, and said, “I did it for Gaza.” The day before his murder spree, he ranted in a social-media post, according to CBS, “stating that nonviolent protests have not worked, and ending with the phrase ‘Free Palestine.’”
Is it really a mystery where he was indoctrinated with hatred for Israelis, Jews and Zionists?
Like their anti-Israel professors, architects of the academic Palestinian resistance, anti-Israel students have grown bolder and more confident since 2021, the result of so many efforts to “center decolonization and raise the voices of Palestinian scholars.” Except their praxis is more overt and violent.
Within hours of the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the National Students for Justice in Palestine released a “Day of Resistance Toolkit,” proclaiming itself not merely “in solidarity with this movement,” as their professors had in 2021, but rather “part of this movement.” The toolkit also asked members to sign the Towfan Al-Aqsa Statement, posted on a Google Drive by “Bears for Palestine,” the University of California, Berkeley’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. (Bears are the school’s mascot.)
That statement said: “Resistance comes in all forms—armed struggle, general strikes and popular demonstrations. All of it is legitimate, and all of it is necessary.”
Having taken the rhetorical leap from protester to armed combatant, the statement continued in academic jargon that would make the “Scholars for Palestinian Freedom” proud: “We as students possess an obligation to support the liberation movement and embody a solidarity that transpasses theory and is grounded in practice.”
The curious phrase “solidarity that transpasses theory” stands out. The verb “transpass,” meaning “to go beyond,” has been obsolete since the 17th century, having been replaced by “transcend.” But the word has re-emerged with another meaning in the world of “Queer Theory,” which signifies a performance so successful and convincing that a person of one gender “passes” for another. If this is the authors’ intention, it suggests violence disguised as, or “passing for,” theory.
Whatever their etymological intentions, using the phrase “a solidarity that transpasses theory” was clearly meant to be an erudite way to indicate action and imply violence.
Taking cues from their professors’ call to action, the students would opt for an even more active praxis.
The anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace claims that its “commitment to racial justice is a core praxis in our work, by which we mean an ongoing cycle of action and reflection within which we are striving to dismantle racism—both outside and within the organization—while also working to grow a liberatory culture for our organizing.”
The impact of the “Palestine and Praxis” professors on their students is apparent in the life of Rodriguez, a 2018 graduate of the University of Illinois at Chicago who protested with various groups throughout his college years. Though the facts of his life are not yet fully known, the path to his May 21 murder of two individuals because he believed they were Jewish, seems to have begun in 2014, presumably when the 2018 graduate would have started college.
So far, no evidence that he was a member of SJP has emerged, but Chicago media identified Rodriguez as a member of ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) Coalition, and we know he was a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, which often protests in conjunction with the SJP (as it did in a Nov. 13, 2023, protest at the university where I teach).
Rodriguez left behind a note, referred to as his “manifesto,” that shows a trail to the praxis ideals. In it, the English major identified a statement he wrote before his murder spree as a “text to fix its meaning.” He also alluded to his “nonviolent protest” history and acknowledged that “the rhetoric has not amounted to much.” He identified the missing element of his attempt at “bringing the war home” as “armed demonstration” and “armed action,” using the terms as euphemisms for the murders he set out to commit.
Rodriguez wrote that even though “such an action would have been morally justified taken 11 years ago during ‘Protective Edge’ … to most Americans such an action would have been illegible, would seem insane.” (The Israel Defense Forces initiated “Operation Protective Edge” in 2014 to stop rocket fire from Hamas in Gaza after 250 rockets were fired at Israeli civilians.)
But times have changed since 2014, and Rodriguez knew it. He wrote with confidence that “today at least there are many Americans for whom the action will be highly legible and, in some funny way, the only sane thing to do.” His defense attorneys will likely use these words in an insanity defense. The prosecutors might want to look into his “praxis professors.”
The academic Palestinian protest rhetoric, from praxis to armed struggle, is nothing new but rather a replication of the birth of modern terrorism when self-defined terrorists—first in Russia, then throughout the West—decided that the old rhetorical propaganda of previous radical movements was obsolete.
Today’s radical students may flatter themselves as the first thinkers to decide that the importance of their cause justifies “transpassing theory” and taking up “armed combat,” but the Berkeley Bears and their followers are merely following a pattern established by their ideological forebears, who were also frustrated by their inability to persuade through well-crafted arguments. Beginning in the second half of the 19th century, anarchists, anti-capitalists and other radical revolutionaries abandoned rhetoric and embraced violence.
Bruce Hoffman attributes the idea of “propaganda by deed” to Carlo Pisacane, duke of San Giovanni (1818-1857) in Italy, who wrote that “ideas result from deeds, not the latter from the former,” and argued that violence was far more effective than traditional forms of persuasion, such as “pamphlets, wall posters, or assemblies.”
Walter Laqueur attributes the idea to Pyotr Kropotkin (1842-1921), another aristocrat who gave up his position to fight against the system he was born into. Kropotkin wrote that “One such act [of violence] may, in a few days, make more propaganda than thousands of pamphlets.”
In the 20th century, the new preferred euphemism for violence was “direct action.” It became so popular that a French terror group took the term as its name: “Action directe.” The American terrorist group the Weather Underground preached “direct action” throughout its propaganda. In “Communiqué #1,” dated May 21, 1970, co-founder Bernadine Dohrn wrote that, “our job is to lead white kids into armed revolution … . Tens of thousands have learned that protest and marches don’t do it. Revolutionary violence is the only way.” Its “Prairie Fire” manifesto in 1974 insisted that “Action teaches the lessons of fighting and demonstrates that armed struggle is possible.” The group’s actions consisted of a series of “Days of Rage” violence and many high-profile bombings.
In advancing their praxis movement, the “Scholars for Palestinian Freedom” resemble many of the Russian anarchists who turned from theory to deed. Sergey Stepniak-Kravchinski (1851-1895) welcomed the advent of the terrorist who “no longer strives after that abstract moral beauty which made the propagandist resemble a being of another world.” Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876) wrote that the “bandit is the only true revolutionary, a revolutionary without fine phrases or book-learned rhetoric.” Sergey Nechaev (1847-82) denounced the “idle word spillers” of an earlier era. Kropotkin called them “cautious theoreticians.” John Most (1846-1906) called them “‘enlightened’ pussy-footers.”
As military analyst Andrew Fox, a former major in the British Army, recently put it, “the spiral from slur to slogan to stone is always shorter than we think.”
This is an apt description of academia’s pushing the envelope from words to chants to violence. The praxis call to action in 2021 led inexorably to the “transpassers” of theory in 2023. They took over campus buildings and set up encampments on school property. At Columbia University, they held hostages inside Hamilton Hall when they “occupied” the building. And in Washington, D.C., one went looking for Jews to murder and succeeded. He did it for Gaza.
Originally published by the Investigative Project on Terrorism.
See Part 1 of this column, “Radical U: Professors as architects of the campus Palestinian resistance.”
