What story is the Boulder attack part of?

This past Sunday, a man attacked a group of people walking down a pedestrian mall in Boulder, Colorado with Molotov cocktails and a makeshift flamethrower. The group was part of “Run for Their Lives,” an organization affiliated with Israel’s Hostage and Missing Families Forum, which organizes such walks to advocate on behalf of the 23 Israelis captured by Palestinian militants on Oct. 7, 2023, who are believed to be alive and in Gaza.¹ Thirteen people, including the alleged attacker, were injured. Among the injured victims was an 88-year-old woman who reportedly fled the Nazis as a child. Video showed the alleged attacker shouting, “We have to end Zionists” and “How many children have you killed?” Police say he shouted “Free Palestine.”

The man accused of carrying out the attack is Mohamed Soliman, a 45-year-old Egyptian who has been living in the U.S. since 2022. The Department of Homeland Security says he was given a tourist visa that has since expired. Yesterday, Trump immigration officials detained Soliman’s wife and five children and revoked their still-valid visas. Though Soliman told authorities that “no one, including his family, knew about his plans for the attack,” as the Associated Press reported, the White House has already publicly declared their plans to deport the entire family, posting ghoulishly on Elon Musk’s X: “Six One-Way Tickets for Mohamed’s Wife and Five Kids. Final Boarding Call Coming Soon. ✈️”

The attack has been framed almost uniformly in U.S. media as part of a pattern of rising antisemitism in reaction to October 7 and Israel’s subsequent actions in Gaza. Indeed, it comes weeks after the fatal shooting of two Israeli embassy staffers — one an American Jewish woman, the other a German-born Christian² veteran of the Israeli military — after an event for young diplomats at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. The alleged shooter in that attack, a 31-year-old Chicago man named Elias Rodriguez, was reportedly briefly associated with a fringe Marxist-Leninist group called the Party for Socialism and Liberation as recently as 2017. Rodriguez reportedly told police: “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza, I am unarmed.”

There are reasons to question that framing. It seems both attacks were explicitly identified by their alleged perpetrators as being against Israel and its supporters specifically, not Jews per se. A manifesto allegedly by Rodriguez and published by the journalist Ken Klipperstein made no mention of Jews or Judaism; the letter described his action as an “armed demonstration,” and compared it to a 1972 attempt by an artist to throw former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara into the propellers of a Martha’s Vineyard ferry in protest of the Vietnam War.

Authorities say Soliman had been preparing for the attack for a year and had specifically looked for a “Run for Their Lives” protest to target; he seems to have driven nearly a hundred miles from his home in Colorado Springs for the attack.³ The hostages have been a charged symbol of Israel’s actions in Gaza. As I’ve written before, from the Israeli perspective, “they are the war—the casus belli, the unimpeachable justification for its continuation, and the primary war aim, all rolled into one.” That the organization that lends its name and slogan to the marches, the Hostage and Missing Families Forum, has been one of the most outspoken critics of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and lately his decision to unilaterally break the ceasefire and resume the slaughter in Gaza — likely at the cost of many of the remaining hostages and prisoners of war’s lives — is a bitter irony. But it seems to be an irony that the attacker, surely aware of the yellow ribbons and hostage posters used to defend the massive destruction of Gaza since October 2023, was either unaware of or disregarded.

We don’t have to take the alleged attackers’ alleged word for any of this of course. In targeting an event for young diplomats at a Jewish museum, sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, the Washington shooter seems to have been conflating Jews with Israel, whatever personal antisemitism he does or does not harbor. It isn’t even clear that he knew his victims were Israeli embassy employees. Maybe any junior diplomat attending an event at a Jewish museum was, in his eyes, as responsible for the tens of thousands of dead in Gaza as a former defense secretary was for the millions killed in Vietnam. The marchers in Boulder — many of whom were Jewish, though likely not all — had even less responsibility for anything happening in Gaza, or even Israel. As one of the apparent targets of the attack can be heard shouting back at Soliman on video: “We’re here. We can’t do nothing about that.”

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Making this even harder to parse is the fact that conflating Jews with Israel — and in turn with Israeli military and state policy — is a pastime of both unrepentant antisemites and the Israeli government and its defenders. Who can forget Donald Trump telling a group of American Jews that he had just spoken with “your prime minister” — meaning Netanyahu — in 2019? In reaction to the Boulder attack, a Jewish conservative council member in nearby Aurora — who in the past has claimed a wish to be “on the frontlines … [in] Gaza” — blamed her Democratic Jewish colleagues for the attack, apparently based on their insufficiently hardline pro-Israel views, saying: “Shame on you! You’re not Jewish, you’re a Democrat!”

None of that means that antisemites don’t have a history of confusing or euphemizing Jews as “Zionists,” or that the victims of these attacks experienced anything less than genuine terror. That Rodriguez, and perhaps Soliman, either couldn’t or wouldn’t make a distinction between Jew and Israeli, civilian and military, low-level staffer and leader, speaks to how these conflations poison everyone’s thinking, including those who claim to oppose only Israel’s actions.

There other narratives that these latest attacks can — and will — be slotted into, ones that lead to other conclusions. They are part of a broader pattern of violent echoes of the Gaza War, one that targets not just or perhaps even mainly Jews or supporters of Israel: the murder of six-year-old Wadea Al-Fayoume, a Palestinian-American boy in Chicago; the shooting of three keffiyeh-wearing students of Palestinian descent in Vermont; the seventh-grade teacher in Georgia who threatened to behead a student who objected to displaying the Israeli flag; the Miami man who shot two visiting Israeli Jews because he mistakenly thought they were Palestinians. In April, a mob of ultra-Orthodox Jewish men violently attacked protesters outside the Chabad headquarters in Brooklyn — including a woman who herself had been raised attending Chabad synagogues — who had come to oppose a visit by the far-right Kahanist Israeli government minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has repeatedly called for the depopulation and re-settlement of Gaza by Jewish Israelis. A bystander, mistaken for being one of the protesters, was repeatedly assaulted and kicked by the men, who shouted rape threats at her and chanted “Death to Arabs” in Hebrew.

But identifying these latest attacks as part of that story might lead one to the conclusion that Israel’s continuation of the genocide is making everyone — Jews, Arab-Americans, and bystanders alike — less safe. Not all the dangers are the same: Palestinian-American and immigrant critics of Israel and U.S. police face heightened surveillance and violence. Jewish Americans now seemingly find themselves targeted as proxies for a foreign government’s actions. But as the mistaken identity attacks show, all communities suffer in an atmosphere of suspicion and spiraling political violence.

Trump and his acolytes are slotting the latest attack into another narrative entirely, focusing on Soliman’s expired visa as part of their broader effort to demonize and mass deport immigrants, especially those seen as enemies of the regime. Neither he nor his Jewish fascist immigration advisor Stephen Miller made any mention of Jews or antisemitism in the wake of the Boulder incident, the New York Times reported. Instead he “pinned blame for the attack on former President Joe Biden’s immigration policies and said it was a reminder of ‘why we must keep our borders SECURE.’”

The rounding up of Soliman’s family, without any publicly available evidence that they committed or even abetted a crime, is yet another way of capitalizing on a tragedy, no less pernicious than the weaponization of hostages and a communal history of antisemitism to justify war crimes on a massive scale. It shouldn’t be hard to condemn it all.

1  The group claims these aren’t protests, but “runners” are asked to wear matching shirts with advocacy slogans and encourages them to carry Israeli and other flags, so call that what you will.

2  Yaron Lischinsky was the son of a Jewish father and a Christian mother who identified as a “Messianic Jew” — a sect that combines modern Jewish practices with core Christian tenets including baptism, belief in the Trinity, and worshiping Jesus as the resurrected messiah. Many of its members, including apparently Lischinsky, consider themselves Jews but are generally not accepted as such by the rest of the Jewish world.

3  Soliman also, notably, originally planned to make it a mass shooting, but switched to Molotov cocktails when he couldn’t buy a gun because of his immigration status, the Denver Post reported. They report that he also intended to kill himself in the attack.