May 22, 2025<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Last night in Washington, DC, two young Israeli embassy staff members\u2014Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim, a couple about to become engaged\u2014were gunned down outside the Capital Jewish Museum by a shooter who chanted “Free Palestine” as he was arrested. Both were dedicated longtime peacebuilders – indeed, Sarah wrote her graduate thesis on \u201cthe role of friendships in the Israeli-Palestinian peacebuilding process.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The same day, at least 82 people were killed during Israeli military operations in Gaza\u2014part of an escalation that has claimed hundreds of lives in recent weeks, including three children from the Tlaib family who were sleeping with their parents in a tent in Gaza City when Israeli warplanes struck \u201cwithout warning and without [these children] having done anything wrong,\u201d according to their grandfather.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These horrific acts of violence\u2014each representing unfathomable loss\u2014are not isolated incidents, but symptoms of an accelerating spiral of zero-sum political violence that is consuming us all.<\/mark><\/strong> When we dehumanize “the other,” when we allow pain to justify more pain, when we choose revenge over relationship, we perpetuate a cycle that will ultimately devour everyone it touches. Whether the violence unfolds on the streets of Washington or in the neighborhoods of Gaza, it feeds the same destructive force that thrives on division and despair.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is precisely in these darkest moments that the work of the Jerusalem Youth Chorus becomes not just important, but urgent\u2014perhaps more urgent than ever before.<\/strong> <\/mark>Our Palestinian and Israeli singers know intimately the weight of this violence; each of them has been touched by loss, fear, and grief. Yet they continue to choose each other. They continue to choose the radical act of singing together, of looking into each other’s eyes, of refusing to let the loudest voices around them define their future.<\/mark> <\/strong>They understand something that the cycle of violence depends on us forgetting: that our fates are intertwined, that my liberation is bound up with yours, and that there is another way forward if we have the courage to choose it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n