It sounds like the plot of a particularly absurd black comedy: an American Jew goes out to hunt Palestinians on the streets of Miami, mistakenly identifies a father and son — both Israeli Jews — as Palestinian, and immediately unloads a magazine on them; the two miraculously survive and escape. At the hospital, the son publishes a post saying that he and his father “survived an attempted murder motivated by antisemitism,” signing off the post with the popular Israeli slogan, “Death to Arabs.” Only after learning that the attacker was a Jew seeking to kill Arabs does he delete his remarks and appear on Israeli television to say, “it doesn’t matter what we are, Jews, Russians, Arab … no human being has the right to take the life of another.”
This is not the first time that Israeli Jews were attacked after being mistaken for Arabs. During the tense days of October 2015, several such incidents occurred in Israel: soldiers shot and killed 28-year-old Simcha Hodadov, an immigrant from Dagestan who had moved to Israel for Zionist reasons, studied in a yeshiva, served in the Netzah Yehuda unit of the Israeli army, and later worked as a security guard. But the soldiers suspected he was Arab, so they opened fire. …..more
