The Dangerous Psychology Behind the DC Murders

On Wednesday night in Washington, D.C., two Israeli embassy staff members were gunned down outside the Capital Jewish Museum. Their killer, Elias Rodriguez—a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation in Chicago—was quickly apprehended. But the footage of his arrest is chilling. He appears calm. Detached. Lighthearted, even. As if he hadn’t just ended two lives—but simply made a statement.

And in his mind, maybe he did. Because to Rodriguez, Israel isn’t real. Not a nation. Not a people. Not a place shaped by grief, survival, or hope. It is a metaphor. And metaphors, once dehumanized enough, can be destroyed without remorse.

Earlier this year, I published the first comprehensive, IRB-approved qualitative study examining what Americans actually know, believe, and think they know about Jews and Israel—and, critically, which interventions most effectively change hearts and minds. Within this research, I segment pro-Palestinian culture and examine the psyche of American anti-Zionism.

In my research, Rodriguez is not an anomaly. He is an avatar of a growing ideology I call the Burn It Down Crowd—a faction of pro-Palestinian activism that isn’t truly about Palestine. It’s about rage. Disillusionment. Collapse. This crowd isn’t fueled by a desire for peace or dignity, but by contempt for U.S. institutions—capitalism, the police, the military, the very idea of structured power. In their eyes, Israel is not a sovereign state—it’s a stand-in for every domestic system they already loathe.

To them, Israel is the police. Israel is Amazon. Israel is ICE, Wall Street, and the Pentagon. It’s not a country with cafes, children, or mourning. It’s the ultimate symbol of imperialism, whiteness, gentrification, and violence. And because it’s a symbol, not a people, it can be attacked with impunity.

Rodriguez made his worldview explicit at a Chicago rally in 2017. He linked the murder of Laquan McDonald and Amazon’s expansion bid as two sides of the same systemic coin. “Amazon’s whitening of Seattle is structurally racist,” he said. “Do we in Chicago want cities where only the rich and white can live?”

This kind of conflation—where all injustice collapses into a single villain—creates a framework in which the Israeli embassy, and the people inside it, become acceptable targets. Not because Rodriguez understood the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but because, in the symbolic cosmology of the Burn It Down Crowd, Israel isn’t a country. It’s the empire. The enforcer. The villain.

And in a culture obsessed with anti-heroes, villains are there to be taken down.

In my research on narrative psychology and modern activism, I’ve found that Israel occupies a unique role in the American imagination. For many—especially younger Americans steeped in symbolic activism—Israel has become the most emotionally accessible target for expressing outrage toward domestic injustice. It serves a psychological function: a proxy for pain that feels too big, too nebulous, or too dangerous to direct inward.

Why Israel? Because it’s easier. It’s cleaner. It comes with a script. And it’s emotionally safer to rage against Israel than to take on the messiness of local systems, American politics, or personal responsibility in civic engagement.

But once a country becomes a symbol, its people become expendable. That’s why this murder matters beyond its horror. It is a symptom of what happens when ideology overtakes empathy. When myth is mistaken for truth. When symbolic warfare becomes more satisfying than moral clarity.

Elias Rodriguez didn’t see his victims as people. He saw them as extensions of a system he had already condemned. He didn’t kill in a vacuum—he killed in a culture increasingly detached from reality, where performance is prized over principle, and dehumanization masquerades as justice.

There is a difference between critique and erasure. Between protest and punishment. Between standing for justice and reveling in destruction.

The Burn It Down Crowd thrives in that gray zone. They are not fighting for a future—they are reenacting their resentment. Their rage is real. But their target is fantasy. And fantasy, when left unchecked, kills.

We must be honest about where we are. The murder of two Israelis in D.C. was not just a terrorist act—it was a cultural indictment. A mirror held up to our inability to see Israelis as fully human when they are cast as villains in someone else’s ideological theater.

Because this isn’t just about symbolism. It’s about the deliberate and growing villainization of Israel—a moral distortion so complete that it renders Israeli lives expendable. It is this collapse of empathy, this mythologizing of evil, that must be called out for what it is: not justice, but dehumanization. Not solidarity, but scapegoating.

And until we confront the cultural machinery that turns Israel into a villain, we will keep writing scripts that end in blood.