House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) sharply denounced the anti-Israel movement on Tuesday, describing it as making common cause with terrorists and putting “a bounty on the heads of peace-loving Jewish Americans.”

Johnson gathered on the steps of the Capitol with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), dozens of members of Congress, Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Yechiel Leiter, American Jewish Committee CEO Ted Deutch, hostage family members including Ronen Neutra and staff from the Israeli Embassy and AJC for a vigil honoring Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, the Israeli Embassy employees killed by an anti-Israel activist outside an AJC event at the Capital Jewish Museum last month.

“It’s a dangerous time to be a Jewish American,” Johnson said, noting that the House had taken extra precautions to keep the event under wraps for security reasons. Visible and covert security surrounded the gathering.

“The monster who murdered [Lischinsky and Milgrim] was not motivated by peace, [but] something very different. He went to a Jewish museum to hunt down Jewish people, and we want to be crystal clear tonight: This is targeted antisemitic terrorism,” Johnson said. “There are no shades of gray. There is no other way to describe it, as we’ve seen in the weeks since this violence is definitely not isolated.”

He said that the D.C. shooter and the individual who attacked a march for the hostages in Gaza in Boulder, Colo., were “united in their sick hatred of the Jewish people.” He highlighted that both shouted “Free Palestine” during their attacks, a slogan he noted has proliferated at protests on college campuses and in American cities.

“‘Free Palestine’ is the chant of a violent movement that has found common cause with Hamas,” Johnson said. “It’s a movement that has lost hold of the difference between right and wrong, between good and evil, between light and darkness … They proclaim that violence is righteous, that rape is justice and that murder is liberation. They have created a culture of lies that puts a bounty on the heads of peace-loving Jewish Americans.”

Jeffries described the shooting as domestic terrorism and said Lischinsky and Milgrim were “victims of the same deadly antisemitism that fueled the attacks in Boulder, the attack at Gov. Josh Shapiro’s home in Pennsylvania, at synagogues, yeshivas, businesses and communities all across America.”

“Antisemitism has been a painful reality of Jewish life throughout the world for thousands of years, but now too many of our Jewish brothers and sisters here in America fear for their safety,” Jeffries said. “In this country, antisemitism has been metastasizing like a malignant tumor, and we must all work together to eradicate this cancer.”

Referencing the week’s Torah portion, when God instructed Moses to appoint elders to help him lead the Jewish people through the desert after leaving Mount Sinai, Jeffries said that lawmakers from both parties need to step up to help the Jewish community fight antisemitism.

“We will not let you shoulder this burden alone,” Jeffries said. “That’s a moral necessity here in the United States of America.”

Leiter said that “the intifada has been globalized, and like [George] Orwell’s ‘1984,’ ‘Free, free Palestine’ means ‘Death, death Israel,’ and it is now incumbent upon all of us to confront it,” Leiter said. “Today we are challenged to act, to honor the fallen, not just with words, but with a renewed commitment to fighting the scourge of hate, fighting the demonization and delegitimization of the State of Israel.”

AJC’s Deutch said that “antisemitism is antisemitism, period. There should be no more debate about which kind of antisemitism is more dangerous, or which we need to be more afraid of.”

“It is clear every antisemitism is and has been deadly, from the extreme left to the extreme right,” Deutch said. “Both must be condemned by everyone, no excuses, because if you can only see antisemitism when it is convenient then you’re not seeing it at all.”

He described the demonization of Israel and trends of blaming it for “every injustice in the world” as the “current socially acceptable form of antisemitism,” which has “sanitized” the hatred.

“There is a straight line from the demonization of Israel, the dangerous lies that people peddle about the one Jewish state to the antisemitic violence that impacts real people,” Deutch said. “When calls to globalize the intifada and chants [of] ‘from the river to the sea’ are screamed at protests, these must be called out for what they are. They are not slogans for a social justice movement. They are incitement to violence. Everyone must call that out forcefully and with clarity.”

Deutch said he appreciates Congress’ work to improve Jewish communal security, but argued that it is not normal nor acceptable for any religious group to need armed guards and security checkpoints to gather and practice their faith.

Lischinsky and Milgrim’s supervisors at the embassy shared statements from their families, highlighting their lives, the positive impacts they had on their communities and their passion for their work at the Israeli Embassy.