This article is posted here with the permission of Canadian Friends of Peace Now, and of the author.
My Instagram feed Thursday morning was flooded with tributes to lives cut short, as it has been almost every day for the past 19 months. But this time was different. The evening before, two Israeli Embassy staffers were shot dead outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, DC. They had been attending an interfaith event for young professionals — a space meant to build bridges — when they were gunned down by a man shouting “Free Palestine.”
Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky were not soldiers, politicians, or symbols. They were ordinary people. And writing about them in the past tense already feels wrong. They weren’t in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were hunted down and murdered by someone who believed that Jewish blood spilled on the streets of an American city might somehow satisfy the dream of globalizing the intifada.
We’ve seen this before in Paris, Mumbai, Buenos Aires, Pittsburgh, Jerusalem. Jews gathering in prayer, in celebration, in community, murdered by those who believed their deaths would make a statement. For some, this attack might seem like a shocking escalation. But for many of us, it feels like the culmination of something we’ve been warning about for a long time.
This violence didn’t emerge in a vacuum. It was incubated online in an algorithmic ecosystem that thrives on outrage and rewards dehumanization. Social media platforms have become breeding grounds for antisemitic incitement. When calls for “resistance” mask celebrations of violence, we get what we saw in Washington: the normalization of Jewish bloodshed.
Today, we mourn two young people who woke up in one of the safest cities in the world and never made it home. We mourn what they might have done, who they might have become, a life they had just started to build together. The heightened antisemitism underlying the violent act that took their lives has existed as long as I’ve been involved in Jewish spaces. But that doesn’t numb the pain.
Grief for Palestinians too
Yet grief is not a zero-sum equation. My heart has also been broken for the staggering loss of life in Gaza. For the children pulled from rubble, the families left with nothing, the people enduring a nightmare with no end in sight. The grief I feel today for those young Jews in DC does not negate the grief I feel for Palestinians. It lives in the same space in my heart that aches for every civilian trapped in cycles of violence they did not choose. My grief is expansive. It demands we stay human even when staying human hurts.
That’s why I cannot look at this moment and remain silent about the role the Israeli government has played in bringing calamity upon Gaza’s civilians, with the full support of their American counterparts. There is no moral clarity in a strategy that treats civilian casualties as collateral damage, no justice in a policy driven more by political survival than true security needs. When we defend every action uncritically, we forfeit the moral foundation Zionism was built on. We cannot continue to justify the unjustifiable simply because the threat to us is real. If we do, we lose our values and become complicit in the cycle of violence.
In the face of such profound pain and complexity, our challenge is to refuse easy answers. We must confront hate wherever it rises, demand accountability from all leaders, and hold fast to the humanity that violence tries to erase. Even when this moment makes us feel like it’s us versus the world, our reaction must be to work tirelessly toward peace. It feels paradoxical to talk about peace on a day like today, and that is precisely why we must. Only by doing so can we hope to break this cycle—and honour the lives lost. If your outrage targets only one side, it’s not truly about justice. If your compassion comes with conditions, it’s not genuine compassion.
We will not end this nightmare through vengeance. We will not build a future on each other’s graves. And we will not survive — not as peoples, not as movements — unless we learn to mourn every innocent life taken, and to see the other side’s dead not as enemies, but as our own.
Because they are.