It has long been a cliché on the internet: type in the words “Florida man” with a random date and one invariably finds a story of something morbid or ridiculous carried out by one of the upstanding citizens of the Sunshine State. Past highlights include: “Thousands of Florida gun owners planning to ‘shoot down’ Hurricane Irma;” “Florida man who tried to ‘run’ to Bermuda in giant inflatable bubble rescued by coast guard…again;” and, perhaps the most Floridian of all: “Florida man charged with assault with a deadly weapon after throwing alligator through Wendy’s drive-thru window.” Perhaps the only thing that could make these stories more absurd is tossing Zionism into the mix.

On February 15, a Florida man shot and wounded two Israeli tourists, a father and son, in an unprovoked assault in Miami. The attack, captured on CCTV, was carried out by a Jewish man who had mistaken the Israelis for Palestinians. The assailant, 27-year-old Mordechai Brafman, confessed to the attacks upon his arrest. Believing the victims were dead, he told police: “I saw two Palestinian men and I killed them both.” The victims in fact survived, one suffering a wounded shoulder and the other an injured elbow. 

According to the arrest report, Brafman fired 17 shots at the pair with a semi-automatic handgun. The victims have since been named by police as Ari Rabey and his father Yarin. Brafman is currently being held at a county jail in Miami. Why he believed the two men to be Palestinian, rather than any of the other myriad ethnicities found in the Miami area is unclear. Perhaps expecting clarity from this particular Florida man is asking for a bit too much. Dustin Tischler, a lawyer for Brafman, told the Washington Post that his client had been “experiencing a severe mental health crisis which caused him to be in fear for his life.” Brafman has been charged with two counts of attempted murder, with prosecutors also pursuing hate crime charges. 

But it does not stop there. Not only did Brafman “wrongly” assume that his victims were Palestinian, but they in turn assumed themselves to be victims of an attack that singled out Jews. Evidently an ardent Zionist himself, Ari Rabey reportedly took to X, formerly Twitter, arm still bandaged, to write (in Hebrew, translated as follows): “My father and I went through a murder attempt against anti-Semitic background. They tried to murder us in the heart of Miami, but the creator of the world is with us… israel Live, death to the Arabs.” The post has since been deleted.

There has been an uptick in anti-Palestinian violence in the US since the Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023. Notable incidents include the fatal stabbing of a six-year-old Palestinian American boy in Illinois, the attempted drowning of a three-year-old Palestinian American girl and the stabbing of a Palestinian American man in Texas, the beating of a Muslim man in New York, the shooting of three Palestinian American students in New York, and an attack on a pro-Palestine protest in California by a violent mob. A cynic might wonder whether Brafman’s case might have received more coverage if the attacker had in fact been an Arab, as his victims appear to have believed. 

Florida’s chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has called for federal hate crime charges against Brafman, as he admitted to targeting his victims because of their alleged ethnicity. “It is deeply ironic and telling that both the alleged pro-Israel perpetrator and the pro-Israel victim in the Miami Beach shooting reportedly hold racist anti-Palestinian views,” said CAIR’s national executive director, Nihad Awad, on X.

But herein lies the weirdness of this event, which cannot be disentangled from the absurd nature of Zionism itself. The attack was an antisemitic hate-crime in a literal sense. Brafman, a white man, attacked the victims because he thought they looked Palestinian. But Palestinians are a semitic people. In fact, Arabs in general are semitic and Ari and Yarin just happen to be Arab Jews. They looked like people who are native to the land of Palestine, because they are like them. These are the kinds of knots into which people tie themselves when they come from somewhere else to settle on stolen land. 

Israeli author Alon Mizrahi captured the surreal nature of the incident on X: “The shooter is an Ashkenazi, a white European Jew,” he wrote. “His victims are Arab Jews. To him, brown Jews look like Arabs. But that’s only because they are. If there ever was a more perfect demonstration of the fake and made-up idea of a Jewish ethnicity, or nation, I never heard about it.”

The media coverage of the incident (of which there has been suspiciously little) typically refers to the Brafman’s having “mistakenly” believed the victims to be Palestinians. This is the final irony. In terms of ethnicity at least, they are—as Arab Jews—not that far from being Palestinians. What we have here is a case of two Arab men being shot by a Jewish man and, in response, one of those Arab men posting on Twitter “Israel live, Death to the Arabs!” In these dark times, even Florida Man is sinking to new depths.