He shot two Israelis - because he thought they were Palestinian

This absurdity exposes the wilfully ignored horror of anti-Palestinian racism

This is so bizarre, so disturbing, that it frankly sounds like a dark satire in a very edgy comedy. Well, alas, it is all too real.

Morchai Brafman is a 27-year-old plumber from Miami in Florida, and he is Jewish.

On Saturday night, using a semi-automatic handgun, he fired 17 bullets at two men in a car. His motive? Well, when he was caught, he told police that he had “seen two Palestinians and shot and killed them.”

Here is yet another grim example of where the normalisation of anti-Palestinian hatred leads.

This time, there was a twist. The two victims were not Palestinians at all. They were in fact Israeli tourists, Ari Rabi and his son Yaron Rabi. They had only just arrived on their Florida holidays, probably looking forward to temperatures which have been reaching the late 20s.

As it happens, they were not killed, indeed they were only lightly injured.

But they had concluded that they had been attacked by an Arab assailant. And so the son posted the following on social media:

My father and I went through an attempted murder with an antisemtic background. They tried to murder us in the heart of Miami, but God is with us, so it didn’t work out for him. I want to say thank you to everyone for the support and that we don’t take it for granted. Am Yisrael Chai

before the message ended, defiantly: “Death to Arabs 🙏"

So in a scenario where a Jewish American shoots two Israelis, the overriding feeling in the hearts of both perpetrator and victims is visceral hatred of Arabs.

Interestingly, when the victims then appeared on Israeli TV station Channel 13, they took a rather different tack.

So they conclude that interview by saying “No human being has the right to take the life of another human being, do you agree with me?”

This is quite the leap from ‘Death to Arabs’. It is not unreasonable to presume someone who writes those words is not a peacenik, and is almost certainly a supporter of Israel’s genocidal onslaught in Gaza and its murderous rampage in, say, Lebanon, so it would be interesting to hear how he squares ‘No human being has the right to take the life of another human being’ with that.

This remains an anti-Palestinian hate crime, by the way. In truth I’m not entirely sure about how Miami law operates in this area, but in British law, perception and motive matter. For example, there have been multiple examples of British Sikhs being attacked by racists who believed them to be Muslim. This is then treated by British law as an Islamophobic hate crime.

In Palestine itself, the genocidal frenzy of the Israeli state has led to the slaughter of Israelis. In December 2023, three Israeli hostages who were shirtless - thus clearly not armed - and waving a white flag and shouting in Hebrew were shot dead by the Israeli army. Quite reasonably, the conclusion there was if these three Israeli hostages were killed, then what hope for Palestinian civilians?

In the current so-called ceasefire in Gaza, Israel has reportedly violated the ceasefire 266 times and killed 132 Palestinians. That we still call this a ceasefire is indicative of how devalued Palestinian life is.

By contrast, a single Israeli has been killed in Gaza during the so-called ceasefire that I’m aware of. His name, Jacob Avitan, who was a 39-year-old civilian contractor with Israel’s Defense Ministry. And who shot him? The Israeli army, because they thought he was Palestinian.

This all speaks to the nature of what racism really is. What are known as ‘races’ are social constructs. Racism is about how people are racialised. As a piece in the Times of Israel noted back in 2016, many of today’s Palestinians are descendants of the original Jews. they since converted to Christianity or Islam - or both, Christianity, then Islam

An article in Science journal at the turn of the century found that, as per their genetics, many Arabs and Jews are closely related. It noted that ‘the Y chromosome in Middle Eastern Arabs was almost indistinguishable from that of Jews’.

Another more recent study in 2020 found that most of today’s Jewish and Arab-speaking populations share a strong genetic link to the ancient Canaanites.

And yet the Palestinian people are widely presented as subhuman in Israeli society. That’s because this isn’t about “race”, it isn’t about religion, it is about colonialism and dispossession. A people were dispossessed from their land, occupied and ethnically cleansed. Accordingly they are racialised as inferior in order to justify their fate, much as the European colonisers racialised Black Africans in order to justify enslaving them, subjugating them, stealing their lands, and thieving their resources.

What we do need to talk about is anti-Palestinian racism, which has only accelerated since Israel’s genocide began, and a Jewish American man shooting two Israelis thinking they’re both Arab, and his Israeli victims believing their attacker was Arab and responding with ‘Death to Arabs’, is part of that.

There has been endless talk about antisemitism and Jewish safety. Well, antisemitism is real, and Jewish people in the diaspora have the right to feel safe. The problem, of course, is that real, actual antisemitism, an evil which needs to be fought, has been conflated with any signs of sympathy with the Palestinian people and objections to Palestinians being murdered.

A particularly shameless example of this was written by Melanie Phillips in the Jewish Chronicle, headlined ‘If you support the Palestinian cause in any form, you’re facilitating Jew-hate.’ The subheading then singles out the governments of Canada, the UK and Australia as ‘some of the worst offenders’. This is actually helpful, because it is simply honest about what Israel’s cheerleaders have sought to do.

And while pro-Israel cheerleaders have sought to portray the left as the real danger when it comes to antisemitism thanks to its solidarity with the Palestinian people, they not only let the far right off the hook - when that’s where the real danger of antisemitism comes from - they’re often allied to that far right. Think Viktor Orban in Hungary, think of course Donald Trump - who has made repeated antisemitic comments - and Elon Musk - who not only did what many of us would regard as two very clear cut Nazi salutes, and told the far-right German AfD that its country should move beyond its “past guilt”, but even endorsed the claim that Jewish communities promote “hatred against Whites”.

But note how anti-Palestinian racism and anti-Arab racism has simply been airbrushed from the conversation, underlining how Palestinian and Arab life simply doesn’t matter.

In October 2023, in Illinois, United States, 71-year-old landlord Joseph M Czuba stabbed to death a 6-year-old Palestinian-American boy, Wadea Al-Fayoume. This little boy was stabbed 26 times, and his mother, 32-year-old Hannan Shahin, was stabbed more than a dozen times but thankfully survived.

Investigators determined the victims were, and to quote the sheriff’s office at the time “targeted by the suspect due to them being Muslim and the ongoing Middle Eastern conflict involving Hamas and the Israelis.” His trial is only now due to start, and the family have also launched a civil suit.

In November 2023, three 20-year old Palestinian college students were shot in the US state of Vermont whilst wearing traditional Palestinian scarves. They were walking near the home of their grandmother, and stated they believed the shooting was a hate crime. One of them, Hisham Awartani, was left paralysed from the waist down.

This anti-Palestinian racism often merges with anti-Muslim hatred: indeed it is today reported that Islamophobic assaults have surged in the UK by 73% in 2024. In the US, anti-Muslim incidents rose about 70% in the first half of 2024.

US politicians and media outlets, meanwhile, have engaged in outright genocidal rhetoric against Palestinians. In November 2023, a Republican State lawmaker, Michelle Salzman, was asked “We are at 10,000 dead Palestinians. How many will be enough?” and she replied “All of them”

In February 2024, Tennessee Republican Representative Andy Ogles was asked about the deaths of Palestinian children in Gaza, and responded “we should kill ‘em all.”

In July 2024, US Senator Lindsey Graham described “the Palestinians in Gaza” as “the most radicalized population on earth”

Trump’s pick for US Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, once declared ‘there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian.”

Within Israeli society, anti-Arab hatred is completely mainstream. In 2016 - long before 7th October - nearly half of Israeli Jews reported they wanted to remove the entire Arab population of Israel - that is Palestinian citizen of Israel, not the West Bank or Gaza.

In 2022, Israel Katz, now Israeli Defense Minister, warned Palestinian citizens of Israel that they would suffer another Nakba if they flew the Palestinian flag - the Nakba being the murderous ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948.

Israel’s Nation State Law, passed back in 2018, enshrines the idea that only Jewish citizens of Israel have the right to self determination.

A new poll finds that 72% of Jewish Israelis “don’t trust” Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up a fifth of the population, with 45% saying they are not willing to have “social friendships” with Arabs.

Nearly three quarters support ethnic cleansing the entire population of Gaza, in line with Trump’s genocidal proposal. 60% consistently oppose all humanitarian aid to Gaza, which would mean all Palestinians there dying. Polling has also found that Jewish Israelis are evenly split on whether an “appropriate use of force” or “too much force” has been used in Gaza.

Israel of course imposes apartheid, with the 3 million Palestinian citizens of the West Bank subjected to the longest occupation of modern times, deprived of basic rights, suffering mass incarceration either in kangaroo courts or without charge or trial, the theft of their land, ethnic cleansing, mass killing, we could go on.

Anti-Palestinian racism is simply the inevitable underpinning of Israeli settler-colonialism - it is used to justify dispossessing and subjugating the Palestinian people. This type of racism is not specific to Israel: it is invariably exists wherever there is settler-colonialism.

And of course Palestinians have been slaughtered by the Israeli state using Western weapons and Western support in vast numbers since the genocide began, mostly women and children, and that has become completely normalised, as has the incessant genocidal rhetoric of Israeli leaders and officials. Indeed, Western politicians and media outlets don’t even bother to hide the fact they do not regard Palestinian life as having equal worth - or even a fraction of the worth of an Israeli or Western life.

Anti-Palestinian hatred is, alas, embedded in Western media, in Western politics, and Western culture. It is not even acknowledged, let alone challenged - instead it is promoted by our elites.

And that is the context in which an American driven by anti-Palestinian hatred shot two Israelis who responded with anti-Arab hate.

The New York Times preposterously headlines this as ‘Florida Man Blames Mental Health Crisis for Shooting of Israeli Tourists.

How insulting. Hatred of Palestinians is not caused by mental illness. It is caused by a Western facilitated colonial project, Israel’s occupation and colonisation of Palestine. And here is just one manifestation, no matter how preposterous it may seem.