Israelis express horror at D.C. embassy attack as politicians trade blame

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TEL AVIV – Israelis expressed horror and sorrow Thursday at the killing of two young Israeli Embassy workers outside a Jewish museum in Washington by a shooter who then screamed, “Free, free Palestine!”

While many Israelis said they were at a loss for words over the tragedy, politicians began to trade blame for the attack. At least four Israeli government ministers took to X to accuse their leftist countrymen of fueling the deadly attack with their criticism of the government.

Far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir said that “antisemites around the world are emboldened by vile politicians” opposed to the war in Gaza. He singled out opposition politician Yair Golan, a former general who on Tuesday said Israel is in danger of becoming “a pariah state,” adding that “a sane country doesn’t engage in fighting against civilians, doesn’t kill babies as a hobby.”

“Yair, the blood of the embassy employees is on your hands,” Diaspora Minister Amichai Chikli wrote on X, while transportation minister and government loyalist Miri Regev described the attack as “the Golan effect.”

Golan put the blame on Israel’s far-right government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose members have publicly called for the deliberate starvation and mass displacement of Gazans, and reinstitution of Israeli settlements in the Strip. Those were the actions that gave “fuel to antisemitism and Israel hatred,” he said, and constituted a “danger to every Jew in every corner of the world.”

Hours before the attack, Netanyahu had told reporters that he was still not ready to declare an end to the war in Gaza. The war has long been unpopular with Israeli opposition leaders, family members of the Israeli hostages, and the thousands of their supporters who have flooded the streets on a weekly basis, arguing that the war endangers the remaining hostages in Gaza. However, Golan’s comments also stood out as a rare rebuke of the Gaza war’s civilian casualties in Israel, where nightly news programs rarely broadcast, and seldom criticize, images of death and destruction from the enclave.

Wednesday’s attack killed Yaron Lischinsky, who worked as a Middle East and North Africa researcher at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, and fellow embassy colleague Sarah Lynn Milgrim, who worked in the public diplomacy department. Lischinsky recently bought an engagement ring and was planning to propose to Milgrim, the Israeli ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter, said at a news conference late Wednesday.

The shooting will be investigated as a possible hate crime, said Steven J. Jensen, the assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Washington field office.

Netanyahu did not refer to Golan but said in a statement that he has ordered increased security at Israeli diplomatic missions around the world and that Israel would fight “blood libel that is costing us in blood.”

Members of Netanyahu’s government – the most hard-line in Israel’s history – have long accused leftist opponents of posing a threat to Jews in Israel and of emboldening antisemitic attackers across the world. For months, Netanyahu’s coalition partners have compared anti-government protesters to Hamas, the militant group that vows to destroy Israel.

Hamas attacked communities in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing about 1,200 people and taking more than 250 others hostage. The Israeli response has leveled much of Gaza, displaced 90 percent of the population and killed more than 53,000 people, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but says the majority of the dead are women and children.

Soon after the war began, U.S. federal officials said they were responding to a rise in threats against Arab, Muslim and Jewish communities, with experts saying there was a significant spike in hate incidents.

The Anti-Defamation League, a pro-Israel advocacy group that tracks cases of antisemitic harassment, vandalism and assault in the U.S., said in April that it had recorded more than 9,350 antisemitic incidents in 2024, with a majority of incidents containing “elements related to Israel or Zionism” for the first time since its audit began in 1979.

In a March report, the Council on American-Islamic Relations said its offices received more than 8,650 complaints of anti-Muslim discrimination in 2024 and that the war in Gaza “drove a wave of Islamophobia in the United States.”

On Thursday morning, Israeli President Isaac Herzog pleaded with the Israeli public to recognize the gravity of “this sad and difficult morning, of a very serious terrorist attack, and at a time when the State of Israel is facing many threats … [and] stop the mudslinging.”

“When it comes to the despicable murder in Washington, domestic Israeli political views have no significance,” Herzog said.

Cochav Elkayam Levy, the head of a nongovernmental commission investigating crimes perpetrated against women and children on Oct. 7, said Milgrim had helped her coordinate her visits to the U.S. and described her as a “remarkably intelligent young woman so deeply committed to human rights” who was active in multifaith and cross-cultural human rights initiatives.

Elkayam Levy said she, like many Israelis she spoke with Thursday morning, were still struggling to make sense of the embassy shooting.

“The fact that she was killed in this way, it makes me feel like we’re losing our legitimacy to exist,” she said.