Jonathan Ofir
Mondoweiss / February 22, 2025
Media coverage of the shooting of two Israeli tourists who were mistaken for Palestinians ignored the root cause of the violence: Zionism.
On Sunday, a 27-year-old Jewish man in Miami Beach named Mordechai Brafman, shot 17 rounds at a father and his son, Yarin and Ari Rabi because he believed “they were Palestinian.” Brafman’s social media profile seems to indicate an interest in Jewish vigilante groups and he thought he had killed them but they were only wounded. And it turned out that the two were actually Israeli tourists.
The story then had another bizarre twist: the son who had been shot, Ari Rabi, posted on social media that he was a victim of attempted murder for antisemitic reasons – a post which was later deleted:
“My father and I experienced attempted murder on antisemitic 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 Israel chai [the people of Israel live]. Death to Arabs ”.
So Brafman wanted the death of the two Israelis because he thought they were Palestinian, and one of the victims wanted “death to Arabs” (read: Palestinians) because he thought he was targeted for being a Jew.
The call for “death to Arabs” has basically been sanitized from Israeli media reporting. In an interview on Israeli Channel 13, Wednesday, the father and the son were asked:
“When you found out that he was Jewish, the shooter, and the reason he shot…”
Yarin, the father: “We didn’t find out immediately that he’s Jewish, only after we went to the FBI offices, then we realized it’s a Jewish guy.”
Interviewer: “And after you realized, when it turned out he simply mistook your identity?”
Yarin: “I don’t know what to say, I’m in shock”.
Now Ari, the son who earlier went “death to Arabs” comes in:
“It doesn’t matter what we are, Jews, Russians, Arabs, it doesn’t matter – no human being has the right to take the life of another human being, do you agree with me?”
Interviewer: “Of course, no question about it”.
So now, evidently, “Death to Arabs” Ari has become a professor of international law and a great humanist.
Ignoring the root cause: Zionism
The New York Times headlined their report of the case thus: “Florida Man Blames Mental Health Crisis for Shooting of Israeli Tourists.” Such framing is not innocent. It is strategically devoid of the main elements that are crucial to the case. It is not just important that Brafman is Jewish (they mention in the article), but that he was Zionist (which they never mention), and that he was anti-Palestinian. The “Florida man” and the fact that his lawyer says his client was experiencing “a severe mental health crisis which caused him to be in fear for his life” are ancillary matters.
But if not solely explained by mental illness, how can we understand the root of this violence? Ironically, it is the response by the victim of the shooting Ari Rabi that reveals the shooter’s true motive.
While there might have been mental health issues, the intent of the attack was quite clear and singularly racist, anti-Palestinian, and Rabi’s call for “death to Arabs” confirms that anti-Palestinian hate is not an incidental outlier or one-off mental disease. It is an ideological Zionist phenomenon not isolated by geography.
Rabi preceded his call for the death of Arabs with a core Zionist slogan, “Am Israel chai.” This was not a coincidence. It is an articulation of a Zionist societal understanding – we live as a “people of Israel” because “Arabs,” that is Palestinians, are killed.
Rabi’s response to the shooting, with the assumed anti-Jewish motive, released a reflexive genocidal call for the annihilation of Palestinians. This call was quickly dropped when it became clear that this was a “mistaken identity” shooting – but this only serves to prove the point. Rabi could only imagine that the person who targeted him was Palestinian, and his only response was to call for mass killings. This is a result of Zionism which only sees Palestinians as violent threats and sees Palestinian death as necessary for Zionism’s survival.
Open season on Palestinians, or anyone assumed to be
The “mistaken identity” aspect of this story is important to focus on too, as it provides further evidence. Brafman’s “mistake” in itself does not change the precision of his intent.
Such “mistaken identity” shootings by Jewish Israelis actually occur more times than one might think. In 2016, during what was called the “lone wolf intifada”, the killing frenzy among Jewish Israelis was particularly high. The current Israeli ‘liberal’ opposition leader Yair Lapid, opined at the time that “whoever takes out a knife or a screwdriver – should be shot dead” [my emphasis]. Sometimes it was simply enough to have a dark skin complexion, to be mistaken for a “Palestinian terrorist”, and this would sometimes result in a violent lynching, like in the case of the Eritrean refugee Habtom Zerhom – a lynching that was celebrated live on mainstream Israeli television.
And then there is the “shooting of one’s own” as when Israeli soldiers in Gaza, itching to shoot anything that moves in a given area, shoot Israeli hostages. This happened in December 2023, when three Israeli hostages (one was a Palestinian with Israeli citizenship) who had managed to separate from their captors a few days earlier, stood shirtless, waved white flags, and hung out a big banner upon which they wrote, with leftover food in Hebrew: “Help, 3 kidnapped”. Two of them were shot by an Israeli sniper who, according to the Israeli army felt “threatened”, from dozens of meters away, and the third was shot immediately after, while attempting to flee down the staircase.
The Israeli military investigation concluded that the shooting could have been avoided, but that there was no malice involved.
Why should the reflexive killing of assumed Palestinians ever involve malice? It is, after all, a second nature for so many Israelis. Unless the Israeli soldiers are told not to shoot, they shoot, that’s just the standard.
Shooting Palestinians just for being who they are, is a practice that has been repeated countless times in the Gaza genocide. Recently, one particular case was exposed recently in Israeli media (The Hottest Place in Hell in Hebrew, then +972 Magazine in English), of an elderly couple who was gunned down in the street in Gaza City. The man, over 80 years old, was used by Israeli soldiers as a human shield just prior to his murder. The soldiers wrapped an explosive cord around his neck and an explosive belt, threatening that “if he did anything wrong or didn’t follow orders, the soldier behind him would pull the cord, and his head would be torn from his body”. After eight hours of this, the couple was ordered to evacuate toward the “humanitarian zone” in southern Gaza. “After 100 meters, the other battalion saw them and immediately shot them,” a soldier said. “They died like that, in the street.”
This story more than any other shows Zionism’s disdain for Palestinian life. We have seen this in Gaza for the last year and a half, we have seen this in Palestine for the last 75 years, and we saw this dehumanization and genocidal impulse in Miami last weekend.
Jonathan Ofir – Israeli musician, conductor and blogger/writer based in Denmark
