Lara Sheehi and the Jewish Museum Murders
Sporting her inverted red triangle earrings and weighing in at length (over an hour) on the Jewish Museum murders, Lara Sheehi in a May 23 interview did her best to remind us it is really a story about the struggle for Palestinian liberation. Oddly enough, no more than her Zionist opponents is she willing to credit Elias Rodriguez’s killings to insanity. It was “a political event.” On that we can agree. It’s just that for her Sara Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky were first and foremost “representatives of a genocidal colonial state.” For us, they were two innocent human beings, junior embassy employees who could not bear responsibility for state power and policy.
The small but wealthy Arab nation of Qatar that has long given safe harbor to Hamas terrorists now provides it for Hamas apologist and former George Washington University psychology professor Lara Sheehi. She was speaking, as she has repeatedly, with Jared Ware on his YouTube interview program “Millennials Are Killing Capitalism” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKybMe1rR1Q). She was “back in the settler colony,” as she put it, namely the United States, not only for the interview but for her renewed 2025 duties as president of the American Psychological Association’s Division 39. She is precise about terminology. Many of us struggle to find an adequate name for the 10/7 Hamas assault. For her it is the “Al-Aqsa Flood.”
Ware opens the interview by posting a screen shot of a May post on X about the murders by Susan Abulhawa: “Natural logic: when governments fail to hold Israel accountable for an actual holocaust being committed before our very eyes, no genocidal Zionist should be safe anywhere in the world.” Sheehi nods in apparent agreement and rings changes on Abulhawa’s language throughout the conversation. She rejects the notion that it was “some senseless antisemitic act,” merely “some targeting of Jewish folks.” It was “explicitly politically motivated action.” Indeed, “how much more explicit do you want it to be?”
Ascribing it to mental illness is just “individualist rot.” We need to keep our focus on the real goal, how to “stop this fucking genocidal machine.” That is the object of Rodriguez’s “intervention.” At some point, she argues, people have had enough. They act. Rodriguez acted. Sheehi makes clear it was justified. Indeed, “this is something the Israeli government does all the time, targeting diplomats.” Presumably Hamas’s Yahya Sinwar and Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah were diplomats as well.
Labelling Rodriguez “a bad actor” is really a way “to sideline militancy.” We must resist the “pull to moralization.” It cedes too much philosophical and political ground. We should instead interrogate “who gets to lay claim to innocence and who doesn’t.” The recourse to condemnation is fundamentally political.
Israel, she insists, is “a settler colonial that was built on genocide,” “on land that was stolen.” “The Zionist entity is a pariah state.” Resistance follows from that.
Cary Nelson is an emeritus faculty member at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a former president of the American Association of University Professors. His most recent book is Mindless: What Happened to Universities?
