At a time when the Trump administration is fixed on purging academic campuses of pro-Palestinian activists, two staffers of an Israeli embassy were shot dead by a lone assailant in Washington. They were exiting a Jewish museum, barely two kilometres from the White House, when the gunman pulled the trigger. The killer later entered the museum and raised ‘Free Palestine’ slogans as security forces took him into custody. The Washington shooting is an awful instance of how geopolitical strife can ignite lone-wolf violence, putting diplomatic personnel and civilians at risk worldwide.
There can be no justification for taking any human life under whatever pretext. However, anti-semitic toxicity is at its highest across the world, most of which is self-inflicted. Whatever sympathy Israel had in the wake of the brutal Hamas incursion of 2023 that killed 1,700 people in Israel has evaporated after its blistering counterattack that has left at least 52,000 people in Gaza dead. Particularly heart-wrenching was the bodies of nine of a doctor’s 10 children, killed in a recent Israeli airstrike, arriving at a Gaza hospital where she was attending to patients.
Despite Israel’s scorched earth policy that has nearly razed Gaza, the Hamas militia continues to survive in its tunnels and hold hostages, though their support systems from Iran and Hezbollah have largely weakened. Instead of actively pursuing a negotiated settlement for the release of hostages, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has expanded the war and choked humanitarian aid, leading to global outrage. Israel’s closest allies are also no longer on the same page—the UK has paused trade talks, France and Canada have threatened sanctions, and the EU has begun reviewing a bilateral pact.
The US, however, remains an outlier. President Donald Trump has conflated criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, stifling free speech instead of addressing the root causes of protests on university campuses. He appeared implacable as he announced a crippling fund squeeze on Ivy League universities and barred Harvard from foreign student intake unless it shared information on participants of the anti-Zionism protests on its campus. That hung out to dry around 7,000 international students, about 800 of whom are Indians, before a court stayed the unsound Trumpian order. The clash of civilisations appears to be at its peak and needs no further escalation.