What Will Define Us?

Two young diplomats were murdered in Washington, D.C. while leaving an event at the Capital Jewish Museum. Sarah Milgrim, 26, and Yaron Lischinsky, 30, served at the Israeli embassy. They had fallen in love; Yaron had bought a ring. He planned to propose to Sarah on an upcoming trip to Jerusalem.

I read the FBI affidavit, scrolling through the lurid details while fighting back tears. I spoke on a panel at the Israeli Embassy last month about the denial of and disinformation surrounding the conflict-related sexual violence that Hamas and other terrorists committed on and after Oct. 7. I imagined the 26-year-old woman, whose bright smile and strong hug had welcomed me and my guests, frame by gruesome frame.

“I remember her. She was beautiful,” one friend texted me. “She was so much more than that too, of course. I just remember being struck by how pretty she was that night.”

She was. And not just on the outside.

Rage and anger are appropriate emotions to such a vile act, one so clearly motivated by the violent antisemitic vitriol that motivates much of the ostensibly “anti-Israel” and anti-war discourse. When two young people are murdered just for being Jewish, anger and anxiety may be the only logical emotions. But what we do with those emotions determines everything that follows.

Sarah and Yaron spent their short lives working on peacebuilding efforts between Israel and its neighbors, sometimes at great personal cost. When Sarah joined the staff of the Israeli embassy, she found that many of her friends from graduate school turned their backs on her and refused to remain friends with her. Since Oct. 7, they had both done their diplomatic duties knowing full well that a growing segment of their fellow countrymen would justify or deny their deaths if they were ever killed, as many online commentators had done of Israelis murdered by terrorists on Oct. 7.  

Sarah and Yaron spent their short lives working on peacebuilding efforts between Israel and its neighbors, sometimes at great personal cost. 

And sure enough, online commentators did: various posters on social media have called the murders a false-flag operation and an inside job, or a justified killing of murderers. Overnight sleuths publicly picked apart every aspect of their lives, seizing on any signs of their devotion to Israel and the Jewish people (there were many) as evidence that these two diplomats were indeed better off dead. 

“He was a terrorist,” one of the nicer commenters posted in response to a moving tribute to the two by influencer Montana Tucker. “Rest in piss you won’t be missed!” wrote another.

The shooter emptied two magazines into Yaron and Sarah, firing 21 bullets in all. He continued to fire at Sarah as she attempted to crawl away, as she attempted to sit up. He even stopped to reload his handgun.

After killing Sarah and Yaron, the shooter entered the museum and told the police, “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza.” He pulled out a red keffiyeh and shouted “Free Palestine” as they escorted him out of the building. After being read his Miranda rights, he added that he admired the 25-year-old “martyr” who set himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy last February.

Thursday morning, local rabbis scrubbed Sarah and Yaron’s blood from the sidewalk. “They didn’t know these young people personally,” Attorney General Pam Bondi told reporters at a press conference. “And they came out here, and they’re cleaning their blood. They put it in a bag, and then that bag will be buried with these two beautiful young people.”

Eight years ago, Sarah’s high school in Prairie Village, Kansas was vandalized with swastika graffiti. “I worry about safety at my synagogue and I have to worry about safety at school and that shouldn’t be a thing,” a teenage Sarah told a local reporter. Just three years prior, a 14-minute drive away, a white supremacist known to the FBI shot and killed three people at an Overland Park Jewish community center and retirement home. “I hope that they learn their lesson,” Sarah said of the swastika vandals, “and I hope that they learn to be more tolerant people and nicer people. It’s so ignorant that you would bring out a symbol like that that brings so much pain to a lot of people and it’s not okay.”

Following our panel at the Embassy last month, an audience member had asked a question. Why, he asked the embassy’s diplomatic staff, did Israel not circulate footage of the atrocities of Oct. 7 — recorded by terrorists on GoPro cameras, uploaded onto Telegram, even live-streamed from the victims’ cellphones — more broadly? Why, when the other side has no problem sharing images of their dead with the world, would the Embassy’s PR team so willingly cede ground in the visual information battle? 

There is a debate between Americans and Israelis who work in the field of gender-based violence, as I do, concerning the matter. The Israeli position, essentially, is that the dead deserve better than our lurid curiosity. The families deserve better, the survivors deserve better, the world deserves better. The American perspective, one I held until recently, is that we must share what we have, or else the world will never see the Jewish people as victims, only as perpetrators of violence. 

There is another level to consider. What does it do to the souls of the living to be subjected to such content? While reporting in Israel in October 2023, an active Telegram channel opened by Israeli first responders was filled almost constantly with lurid images of the bodies they found among the ashes, sharing their raw pain and shock in real time. Reporting from the scene of death, which I have done, is one thing. Having a visual reminder of the experience available in your cell phone at all times is quite another.

Following the massacres, the IDF compiled available footage into a 45-minute compilation that it screened privately to journalists at the beginning of the war, and eventually, more broadly. “The videos show pure, predatory sadism; no effort to spare those who pose no threat; and an eagerness to kill nearly matched by eagerness to disfigure the bodies of the victims,” one Atlantic reporter who was shown the compilation said.

Is sharing such graphic visuals truly necessary to convey the evil of slaughtering thousands of innocent people, raping, torturing and burning them alive? 

In the eyes of the Israeli government, the video was shown in an effort to prevent journalists from any moral equivalency-making between the terrorists, who infiltrated Israel and slaughtered civilians in intimate and evil ways, and the Israeli army, whose acts they see as entirely in self-defense. “We are not looking for kids to kill them,” the IDF spokesperson told the reporter. “We have to share it with you so no one will have an idea that someone is equal to another.”

I have not seen the compiled footage, though I have seen many of the clips as they were uploaded to Telegram in those early days. Nor have I watched any of the prominent documentaries on the atrocities that followed — and I do not intend to. I spent October sitting with families of those who had been killed or kidnapped, with those responsible for bringing the kibbutzim back to life and feeding the country, walking through the killing fields while the acrid smoke of smoldering bodies still clogged the air. I do not need a reminder that Hamas is evil. I do not need a soundtrack to my pain beyond the birdsong that mingled with the sound of artillery fire in those dark days. I have seen and heard enough. 

To be a Jew these days is to have lived through a series of personal and communal tragedies. We must take seriously the Hamas leaders’ threats to rise “like a phoenix” from the ashes, their vows to repeat the attacks of Oct. 7 “again and again” until Israel is “annihilated.” We must take seriously the more than 10,000 antisemitic hate crimes reported to the ADL last year, the very real fear and security threats that Jews and Jewish communities around the world now face. 

It’s not always clear what the next right response is. But there are certainly clear wrong ones. There are real and persistent threats to the physical safety of Jews around the world right now. There are also urgent moral ones.

“Words lead to deeds,” as Michael Sfard, a prominent Israeli lawyer, put it. “Words that normalize or legitimize serious crimes against civilians create the social, political and moral basis for other people to do things like that.”

When the news spread last November that Shiri Bibas and her two young boys, who were kidnapped during the massacres of Oct. 7, 2023, had been murdered by Hamas terrorists, some in the Jewish community fell into justifying terrorist acts of our own. 

“There are no innocent Palestinians,” they raged. “Rabbi Meir Kahane, of blessed memory, was labeled as a violent extremist, but he was right. This is the truth right here. The only language the Arabs understand is force and fear,” one self-styled influencer who attends my synagogue wrote of the rabbi so extreme that Israel’s Knesset banned his political party, and whose follower massacred 29 Palestinians praying in a mosque Hebron, wounding hundreds of innocent civilians.

My own reaction to Wednesday night’s murders, and to those murders, was Genesis-like in the depths of its rage — ”What have you done? Hark, your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground!” God cries in the Book of Genesis after Cain kills Abel. “You shall be more cursed than the ground, which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand.”

And yet. I think of Ofri Bibas, aunt of Kfir and Ariel Bibas, and her reaction to the news of her loved ones’ murders: “We are not seeking revenge now.”

Neither, I think, would be Sarah and Yaron, who continued to be so deeply dedicated to peace with Israel’s neighbors even after everything they’d witnessed. Jews shouldn’t need to be peaceniks for the world to mourn their deaths. But who Yaron and Sarah were should shape our reaction to their murders.

In this time of rising antisemitism, we do not have the luxury of falling into anger and despair, of turning inward on our pain. We need each other. And we are responsible for creating and sustaining communities strong enough to survive this.

In this time of rising antisemitism, we do not have the luxury of falling into anger and despair, of turning inward on our pain. We need each other. And we are responsible for creating and sustaining communities strong enough to survive this.

“We are shaken. We are not OK. But we will bounce back,” then-antisemitism envoy Deborah Lipstadt wrote after a Texas congregation was held hostage in their synagogue in 2022. “We are resilient because we cannot afford not to be. That resiliency is part of the Jewish DNA. Without it, we would have disappeared centuries ago. We refuse to go away. But we are exhausted.”

We have witnessed time and again what blind rage does to those whose hearts are infected with rage that turns to hatred of the Jewish people. It has made them excuse away this tragedy and every murder of Jews that came before it. It has enabled them to see in antisemitic murders an act of legitimate anti-Israel protest, a praiseworthy globalization of the intifada. And last week, it enabled a 31-year-old man with no criminal record and no connection to the conflict to murder two people for the high crime of being Jewish in public.

I won’t speak for Sarah and Yaron. But I will speak for myself: being Jewish is not about these moments of darkness. It is about building strong communities and lives that are a glorification of the divine.

Most Abrahamic traditions hold that Seth, the brother of the slain Abel, is the progenitor of all of mankind. But he is, too, the brother of Cain.

We all hold within us the capacity to make the world a brighter or more terrible place. 

May we each have the courage to make the braver choice.

Laura E. Adkins is a writer based in New York and an associate vice president at Jewish Women International.