A young couple was executed in cold blood on Wednesday night, outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. Yaron Lischinsky, 30, and Sarah Lynn Milgrim, 26—both staffers at the Israeli embassy—were leaving a cultural event promoting interfaith understanding when they were gunned down on the sidewalk.
The shooter, 31-year-old Elias Rodriguez of Chicago, shouted “Free, free Palestine” while being handcuffed by police. He subsequently boasted, “I did it for Gaza.”
Rodriguez, a radical-leftist activist, didn’t know anything about Lischinsky and Milgrim. Before obliterating them, he didn’t check what causes they supported. Nor did he delve into their positions on Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza.
Had he done so, he would have discovered that both were involved in advancing dialogue and building bridges. Lischinsky, a promising diplomat in the embassy’s political division, focused his efforts on outreach—engaging with D.C. think tanks, universities and faith communities—to present a more nuanced, human face of Israel.
Milgrim had spent years volunteering with coexistence initiatives. Her social-media pages were filled with photos from interfaith Passover seders, joint Arab-Jewish youth workshops and campus activities aimed at furthering peace and reconciliation.
But none of that mattered to Rodriguez or his many supporters online. It’s a phenomenon that follows a familiar pattern.
On Oct. 7, 2023, Israelis awoke to a nightmare that under any other circumstances would have shattered any illusions about the possibility of achieving some sort of equilibrium, let alone peace, with the enemies next door. That morning, Hamas terrorists and Gaza civilians stormed the border, gleefully raping, torturing, burning and butchering more than 1,200 men, women and children.
During the rampage, proudly documented by the perpetrators on cellphones and bodycams, the barbarians abducted 250 other innocents, 58 of whom remain in captivity, some alive and some dead.
Among the hardest hit on that fateful Shabbat-Simchat Torah weekend were residents of liberal/left-leaning kibbutzim and rave-goers attending the peace-and-love-themed Nova music festival.
Many of the communities in that area of southern Israel near the border had spent years fostering friendships with their neighbors in Gaza, welcoming them into their homes, providing them with employment and often driving them to Israeli hospitals for medical treatment.
These predominantly progressive Jews—champions of Palestinian statehood as a solution to the “conflict”—believed that the fondness was mutual. Though this might have been the case on an individual basis, it was of no use on that fateful weekend.
Take the massacre at Kibbutz Be’eri, for instance, where entire families of peace-seeking Israelis were annihilated. Among the survivors was Avida Bachar, a farmer who lost his wife, his 15-year-old son and one of his legs in the sadistic assault.
After months of rehabilitation, Bachar began divulging in interviews that he had abandoned his left-wing views. What he experienced at the hands of Hamas and its supporters wasn’t merely traumatic on a personal level, he explained; it was a betrayal. He now realizes that goodwill and empathy cannot fend off evil.
With courageous candor, he also acknowledges that had the Oct. 7 atrocities been carried out in Judea and Samaria, his former side of the spectrum wouldn’t have identified with the “settlers,” whom it considers “extremists” and “obstacles to peace.”
It’s a lesson that lots of liberal Jews in the Diaspora refuse to accept but would do well to internalize. The forces seeking Israel’s destruction “from the river to the sea” don’t make such distinctions. Indeed, to jihadists and their Western apologists, anyone who favors the continued existence of a Jewish state is a target, regardless of his bleeding-heart bona fides.
The same was true in Europe 80 years ago. The Nazis didn’t care whether a Jew lit Shabbat candles or marched for Socialist causes. They shoved everyone into the same cattle cars and crematoria.
Today, those who chant “globalize the intifada” don’t differentiate between Likud voters and Labor supporters or between reservists in the Israel Defense Forces and Israeli artists protesting judicial reform. Ditto for Rodriguez, who didn’t check the credentials of Lischinsky and Milgrim when he fired several rounds into their bodies.
To say, “May they rest in peace,” therefore, rings hollow. A more appropriate prayer is: “May God avenge their blood.”