Two souls taken in Washington, D.C., seemingly selected at random for death from those gathered outside the Capital Jewish Museum. The shooter reportedly shouted “Free, free Palestine” when arrested. This is the inevitable chaos that results from political violence—violence that does not tell the difference between a government and a people.
The collapsing of all things Jewish onto and into the state of Israel cuts in two directions. If all criticism of Israel is successfully tied to antisemitism, as is advocated, then every act of violence against Jews can be framed as anti-Israel. That is the grotesque logic being encouraged—by bad-faith ideologues, by far-right Israeli actors who happily enjoin chorus with the US far-right, a body that refuses to confront or even acknowledge its own antisemitic pedigree.
Here is the deeper tragedy: because stochastic violence kills arbitrarily—it so often kills those working for peace. It is a virtual certainty that many Jews murdered on October 7th were peace activists, as it is with tens of thousands of Palestinians who have been murdered since. Murdered like Sarah Lynn Milgrim, the woman we just lost in D.C. who had dedicated her life’s work to resolving the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Her master’s thesis investigated how personal ties that span borders can create opportunities for dialogue and peace. In this way, the randomness of violence feels not random at all—as it is so predictably destructive of the hope her work might have brought forward.
Since October 7th, Israel’s violent response has been exactly what Hamas and Netanyahu et al. want: wanton destruction that solidifies ideological entrenchment and—by extension—their political power. Mass death, used by cynical state actors to justify further violence, spinning a wheel forward that adds layer after layer of tragedy and crushes everything in its path, making no one more safe.
This is the logic of viciousness, not justice. If we cannot untangle identities from ideologies, or human lives from the actions of states, we will raze every space where peace might be found. In that wreckage, we will lose any hope of a shared future—whether on a narrow strip of contested land or in the whole of this fragile, spinning blue dot we call home. A home surrounded by an infinite nothingness that lays bare our petty differences.
