Ninety-nine years ago, on 25 May 1926, a man in his late forties walked down the street in the Latin Quarter in Paris.

When he reached Gilbert bookshop, shortly after 2pm, he was approached by another man, slightly younger than he was. “Are you Mr Petliura?” asked the younger man in Ukrainian. Symon Petliura did not answer, but raised his cane, whereupon the other man, Jewish anarchist Sholem Schwarzbard, pulled out a gun, shot Petliura five times, and after Petliura lay on the ground, twice more for good measure. Petliura, the head of the government-in-exile of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, was very dead indeed.

At his trial, Schwarzbard explained that he killed Petliura in revenge for the pogroms of 1919 in which his family died. At the time of the pogroms, Petliura headed the Directorate of the Ukrainian National Republic. Appearing for the defence, Haia Greenberg, who survived the pogrom in Proskurov (which Ukrainians would subsequently and aptly rename Khemlnytskyi in honour of the father of Ukrainian nationalism and one of the most sadistic antisemitic mass killers in European history), testified about the atrocities, and recounted that Ukrainian soldiers said they had been ordered there by Petliura. Witnesses for the prosecution argued that Petliura was not involved. The doubts about Petliura’s personal involvement proved immaterial, and the French jury acquitted Schwartzbard.

When I first heard of Elias Rodriguez’s assassination of two Israeli embassy staff a couple of days ago, I found myself thinking about Schwartzbard and others who have felt compelled to give up their life trajectory and attack foreign diplomats and representatives of genocidal governments. Herschel Grynszpan is better known than Schwartzbard. He assassinated German ambassador Ernst vom Rath in December 1938, in Paris as well. (And I thought Paris was supposed to be the city of love.) Vom Rath’s killing served as the pretext for the German atrocities of Kristallnacht. The drama and tragedy of vom Rath’s liquidation and Grynszpan’s subsequent death was, as some may recall, much more colourful, elaborate and sensational, with the distinct possibility of an ongoing sexual relationship between Grynszpan and vom Rath prior to the assassination weighing on judicial processes both in France, and later, once the Nazis got their hands on Grynspan, in Germany.

All three instances — Schwartzbard’s, Grynszpan’s and Rogdriguez’s — are what is now commonly referred to as lone-wolf attacks. All three occurred against the backdrop of large public sympathy for the targets’ governments’ victims, and, in all three, the actions were the work of politically motivated, organisationally unaffiliated individuals.

Lone-wolf attacks are not confined to assassinations of representatives of genocidal governments. Luigi Mangione’s killing of UnitedHealthCare chief executive Brian Thompson, which was widely applauded across US social media, springs to mind.

Lone-wolf assassinations are essentially performative. They follow the logic of what anarchists called the propaganda of the deed. The elimination of the targets does not functionally disrupt the adversaries. Rather, the main effect is grabbing attention, making a statement and forcing others to react. In this, lone-wolf assassinations resemble other performative acts of resistance, especially those involving self-harm.

For example, in December 2023 a protester set herself alight outside the Israeli consulate in Atlanta in protest over Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. American authorities were quick to suppress much of the reporting over that incident with very few details about the event and the protester’s identity being publicly available. Remarkably, even today, publicly available information on the incident is scant, attesting to the control security authorities exercise over the press.

Authorities were less successful in suppressing the reports over Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation two months later, on 25 February 2024. Shortly before setting himself alight outside the Israeli embassy in Washington DC, Bushnell, a 25-year-old US Air Force serviceman, announced he was protesting against “what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonisers” and that he would “no longer be complicit in genocide”.

The self-harm component of these acts is what makes them such powerful forms of direct action and propaganda of the deed. For sympathisers, they are genuine expressions of concern and altruistic selflessness. For opponents, they are incomprehensible, insane, irrational or misguided. Law-enforcement agencies face great difficulty trying to pre-empt and prevent lone-wolf attacks. And once they take place, attackers are impervious to the usual deterrents. If the lone wolf willingly dies or turns himself or herself in, there is not much law enforcement can do to deter the attackers. In fact, lone wolves’ subsequent trials or funerals become further opportunities for public political subversion.

Successful lone-wolf action and defiant self-harm raise immediate concerns for authorities. One is the “copycat” effect. A successful lone-wolf attack could easily inspire others. The other concern is that of an immediate conflagration of mass protest and civil action. It was Tunisian street vendor Muhamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation in December 2010 that set off the Arab Spring.

It is the strategic irony of lone-wolf action that the harsher the government crackdown, the more motivation is generated for attacks. The more open government and civil society become to open protest and civil action, and the more government is willing to accommodate the cause that drives the protests, the less likely these attacks become. But this comes at a political cost. Relaxing control, empowering protest movements and opening up the door for subversive political mobilisation can become politically challenging if government cannot or will not accommodate the needs and demands that drive protests. Moreover, some governments prefer to tighten the screws, absorb lone-wolf attacks and other direct action and then use these as a pretext to crush the protest movement.

In any event, given the unwillingness and failure of governments throughout the world, and especially in the Middle East, to effectively confront and stop Israel, and given the current urgency, rage and despair at the unfolding extermination in Gaza, the potential for both “copycat” lone-wolf attacks on Israeli targets and the eruption of large-scale, disruptive protests remains substantial.

An earlier version of this paper appeared with photos on my substack site.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.