Charged atmosphere in the diaspora of the third Jewish Commonwealth.
At 9:30 p.m. on Saturday night, Mordechai Brafman, a 27-year-old Miami Beach plumber, was driving south on Pine Tree Drive when he saw what he thought were two Palestinians on a car.
He made a U-turn at 48th Street and parked his truck in the right lane.
Behind the truck and in the left lane, just north of 48th Street, the car seen by Brafman was approaching. Ari Rabey and his father were driving home from their vacation in Colombia and California.
Brafman then exited his vehicle, remaining on the driver’s side.
Brafman fired his semiautomatic handgun 17 times at Rabey’s Hyundai as the two Israeli tourists drove past him, in what his lawyer, Dustin Tischler, later described as a “severe mental health emergency.”
Though the married Collins Avenue condominium owner told detectives that “he saw two Palestinians and shot and killed both,” only one round grazed Ari’s father’s ear as he drove the vehicle, and another hit him in the left shoulder.
Both Israelis survived without serious injury. Ari was treated at Jackson Hospital and later discharged.
The police arrested Brafman at 4887 Pine Tree Drive and charged him with two counts of attempted murder.
The Florida chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations has called for federal hate crime charges in relation to the shooting.
“It is the alleged shooter’s reportedly bias-motivated actions, not the actual ethnicity of the victims, that should be the determining factor for charges in this disturbing case,” CAIR-Florida Communications Director Wilfredo Amr Ruiz said.
“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.
Complaints of anti-Muslim bias rose by almost 70 percent in the period from January to June 2024, following the outbreak of the Gaza war in October 2023, compared to the same period the previous year, according to CAIR. It said it received more than 8,000 reports of discrimination against Muslims in 2023, the highest number in its 30-year history.
A 6-year-old Palestinian American boy was stabbed to death near Chicago in October 2023; three Palestinian Americans were shot in Vermont the following month and survived; and a Texas woman is accused of attempting to drown a 3-year-old girl with a Palestinian background in a swimming pool in May.
A year ago Brafman was interviewed by local media after vandalism to a bagel store on Miami Beach that had displayed an Israeli flag, Hebrew media reported. At the time Brafman called for more unity and less conflict between people.