On Thursday evening, a terrorist gunned down two staff members from Israel’s Embassy in Washington, D.C., as they were leaving an American Jewish Committee event focused on promoting unity and understanding among young diplomats.
According to early reports, the shooter, a 30-year-old associated with radical leftist organizations in Chicago, had an online footprint filled with vile antisemitic ranting and support for terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, including a manifesto posted on Thursday evening explicitly calling for the murder of American Jews in response to Israel’s war in Gaza.
The short video of the police hauling the killer away in handcuffs sharply captured the dystopian world we now live in. Newly minted as the coldblooded murderer of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, a beautiful young couple about to be engaged, he proudly chanted “Free Palestine!” in a cadence eerily familiar to any college student who has walked by an encampment in the last year.
Indeed, what’s most shocking and horrifying about Thursday’s events to anyone who has been paying attention is just how unsurprising they are.
The tributes pouring out about the two we lost make clear that they are heroes who built bridges and fell deeply in love with each other as well as with the Jewish state. They didn’t pursue their jobs for the money or because it was easy or comfortable. Their choices meant that they saw something bigger that they wanted to build.
This calls for a different kind of courage and conviction. Working at one of Israel’s diplomatic missions in the U.S. is not the same as taking a job with Norway or New Zealand.
I know firsthand. From 2010 to 2013, I was an American employee of Israel’s Mission at the United Nations in New York. There were frequent reminders of potential threats. Every morning, I walked past a permanent police cordon into the office building and then past two more doors manned by Israeli secret service. Every time we set foot in the ambassador’s car, his security detail swept it for bombs, with the knowledge that other Israeli diplomatic vehicles had recently exploded in India and Georgia.
The stigma of serving as Israeli diplomatic staff was made abundantly clear to me in certain corners of New York society, where the lies of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel were already gaining ground. At dinner parties in Brooklyn or concerts downtown, people would raise an eyebrow when they heard what I did for a living and share their ill-informed takes on the Middle East, sometimes tinged with antisemitic conspiracy theories.
I often left the Orwellian world of the U.N., where Israel is chastised and disdained while the world’s dictators sit on committees devoted to human rights and women’s empowerment, only to enter another theater of the absurd in America. This is also a world where Israel is a genocidal monster — a world where I had to justify how I could consider working for such a country.
For me, these experiences only clarified the need for the job I held, working to tell the story of the only Jewish state in a universe undeniably filled with hatred of Jews. Yet, the greatest lesson I took from those years was the tremendous power of pursuing a life of purpose alongside extraordinary people. Those I had the privilege of serving alongside — from Israel, America and Canada — were among the strongest, most principled and most dynamic that I’ve ever come across. Working with them forever changed my life.
Over the last decade or so, as antisemitic ideas have moved from the fringes to the mainstream — particularly since Oct. 7, 2023 — the world I encountered as a part of Israel’s U.N. delegation has become increasingly familiar in the lives of all Jews.
Every weekday, I line up with other parents to drop off my six-year-old and eight-year-old at Jewish day school amid high walls, thick gates and heavily armed guards. It is the same drill when our family goes to synagogue, attends a Jewish event or gets on a plane to go to Israel.
My kids read antisemitic graffiti sprayed on the streets and ask what it means. The roads in our city are sometimes blocked by violent protestors, holding signs that deny rape, justify murder and call for the destruction of all Jews.
Thursday’s attacks are yet another reminder that a culture of incitement — where Jews are demonized and dehumanized, where calls for Israel’s destruction are tolerated “depending on the context,” and where conspiracy theories are validated and considered — often leads to violence. In the dark corners of the internet and in the hateful riots on our streets and campuses, monsters will justify and celebrate these murders, as they have with other murders of Jews, whether in Pittsburgh or Poway or at the NOVA Festival in Israel or a Kosher supermarket in France — and call for more blood.
As Jewish and Israeli institutions further ratchet up their security protocols, the question for American society is this: will the monsters continue to be heard and justified, or will this — the murder of a young couple — wake us up?
History shows that in cultures where Jews live under threat and persecution, the rest of the society inevitably suffers as well. It also shows that while antisemitism is a constant, so is the tremendous resilience of the Jewish people and the State of Israel, supported by men and women of conviction like Yaron and Sarah willing to risk their lives for a better future.
Nathan Miller served as the speechwriter for Israel’s Mission to the United Nations from 2010 to 2013. He is the CEO of Miller Ink, a strategic communications firm.