They Came for Peace. Hate Was Waiting Outside.

Last night’s gathering at the Capital Jewish Museum in DC was about peace.

@IsraelinUSA / X

My friend Jojo Kalin was one of the organizers, and my friends and I came to support her. Jojo is the kind of person whose presence lights up a room — radiant, generous, and lit from within by a hopefulness that feels contagious. True to form, she stood glowing at the podium as she introduced the evening’s speakers: representatives from the Multifaith Alliance and IsraAID — two organizations doing the hard, often invisible work of bringing aid to civilians in Gaza and elsewhere and imagining a future rooted in compassion and coexistence.

“Israelis and Gazans have far more in common than they do differences,” said the speaker from the Multifaith Alliance. And in that moment, it felt true — not just as a sentiment, but as a vision worth holding onto.

Later, I spoke with Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, who had come to the event out of the same belief that brought us all there: that peace is still possible, and still worth fighting for. I chatted with Yaron in Hebrew and English. I complimented Sarah’s beautiful, warm smile. I left the event a little early, waving at Yaron as I stepped out. My friends stayed behind.

And then — hate shattered everything.

The beautiful couple I had just spoken to were murdered outside the museum, moments after I left. “Free, free Palestine,” the terrorist shouted. And predictably, news outlets are calling him a “pro-Palestinian gunman,” despite the fact that slaughtering peacemakers in cold blood is inherently anti-Palestinian.

The bitter irony is unbearable. The entire event had, in its deepest spirit, been about freedom — freeing Gaza’s civilians from suffering, from violence, from the brutal grip of Hamas. It had been about dignity. About life.

I don’t have many words today. Only this: Hate has never — and will never — liberate anyone. It only destroys.

The ideology that led a man to kill two people devoted to coexistence is the same one that fuels pro-Hamas rhetoric on college campuses. It’s the same one Hamas itself preaches. And it will only reinforce the prisons, prolong the wars, and murder the very people trying to build a bridge out.

Real freedom isn’t won with slogans or bullets. It’s built — quietly, courageously — by people like Jojo, like Yaron and Sarah, who chose dialogue over division, light over darkness.

We owe it to them to remember that.
We owe it to them to keep building.