We Sacrifice Law and Morality When We Allow Israel to Commit Genocide Without Repercussions

We Sacrifice Law and Morality When We Allow Israel to Commit Genocide Without Repercussions


Released on 23 May 2025


The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security mourns the murders of Sarah Lynn Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky, two young workers at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC, who were gunned down yesterday outside of the Capital Jewish Museum after attending the American Jewish Committee’s Young Diplomats Reception. Milgrim and Lischinsky were just starting out in the world and were in the prime of their lives. Our deepest condolences go out to their families.

Milgrim and Lischinsky were allegedly murdered by Elias Rodriguez, a 30-year-old Chicago resident who told a security guard afterwards that he “did it for Gaza” and shouted “Free Palestine!” as he was arrested.

Predicatbly, it did not take long for many politicians and people in the media to embrace the retributive logic that led to Milgrim and Lischinsky’s murders by turning the tragic murders into a renewed justification for ongoing genocide in Gaza and the supression of anti-genocide activists in North America, the UK, and Europe. Using classic doublespeak, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a statement in which he said that “‘Free Palestine’ is just today’s version of ‘Heil Hitler’,” seeking to deflect, of course, from the fact that Israel is the entity currently committing genocide, not Elias Rodriguez, not the anti-genocide movement, and not the Palestinians.

The timing and the development of this tragedy leaves open the possibility that these horrific murders were a false-flag operation, sponsored by entities that were threatened by the sudden, coordinated demonstration of moral conscience by Israel’s allies last week. This is a developing story and there is of course no evidence of such an operation at this point. Until more information becomes available, we must remain cognizant of all possibilities.

Based on the gunman’s own statements, the sole motive for the murders appears – at the present moment – to be political: to inflict retributive violence on agents of the Israeli state whom he held responsible, as state employees, for the genocide in Gaza. Nevertheless, already the crime has been called antisemitic and an act of terrorism without evidence. The Lemkin Institute always condemns antisemitism and will condemn it again if it comes to light that Rodriguez was motivated by it. When people rush to throw around the terms ‘terrorism’ and ‘antisemitism in imprecise ways for propaganda purposes, as they have in the immediate aftermath of these horrible murders, they mean to criminalize anti-genocide advocacy and create a veil of conspiracy and criminality around the population targeted by genocide as well as their defenders.

It is of course also possible that the murders were indeed antisemitic. Antisemitism is a deeply-rooted ideology of hate, especially in the Western world, and it is growing. Sacha Roytman Dratwa, an Israeli military veteran who is the CEO of the Combat Antisemitism Movement, suggested in a statement that “[t]he murderer did not know his victims were Israeli, he just knew they attended a Jewish event.” Whether the assailant, in his choice of target, was conflating Jews with the actions of the Israeli state (as Israel itself often does) will be important to understanding the motivation behind this crime. It is not a given, however, that Rodriguez “did not know” the people he killed.

Whatever the case, the exploitation of these two young people’s deaths for political gain is a disgrace and a dishonor to their memory.

The attention of world leaders and the media shifted almost immediately from Israel’s latest assault on Gaza and its starvation of millions to a single gunman’s assassination of two employees of the Israeli government. There is practically no mention in the mainstream news that during the same 24 hours in which Milgrim and Lischinsky’s lives were tragically ended, Israel’s air and ground assaults killed 82 Palestinians. It must be said loud and clear: No one acting in good faith would create a conceptual equivalency between the gunman’s murder of two people and Israel’s murder of more than 50,000. While these two acts are related to one another by the desperate political dialectics of our day, and share a retributive logic, they are very distant from one another in terms of intent and scale.

We have repeatedly warned, notably as far back as 8 May 2021 in our Statement on Israeli Violence in Jerusalem, that “[i]f the world continues to buckle under Israel’s current extremist and genocidal governmental policies, the result will be not only more conflict, but very likely also the further radicalization of conflict into catastrophe for Palestinians and Jews alike.” Wednesday’s tragic murders must be understood within this dynamic, one that the Western world has encouraged and supported.

In the murder of Milgrim and Lischinsky we encounter the horrifying fact that genocide creates a world without laws and morals. Perpetrators assume that their superior force will protect them, but there is no Iron Dome when it comes to blowback.

Perpetrators of genocide make all their own rules and thereby unwittingly open the door for everyone else in the world to do the same. If perpetrators are not stopped, if, as in the case of Israel, there is no real attempt by any government in the world to push back forcefully against the crime, the crime itself – its darkness, its logic, its destructive force – will overtake the entire world. Once the lawlessness of genocide is allowed to become the order of the day, there is no longer any consistent moral standard against which anyone can be held for murder, rape, torture, and pillage. If one endorses and countenances what is happening to Palestinians, one endorses and countenances by extension all other similar crimes everywhere, both large and small.

This is why genocide is such a self-radicalizing crime: In seeking to destroy an identity group or groups, perpetrators of genocide end up overturning all traditional systems of justice, concepts of fairness, rules of good governance, and resources for civilized collective life, leaving only power and violence in their wake. In that world, there is no right and wrong, there are only the bare facts of violent actions and counteractions. Human life becomes universally valueless and human beings begin to behave that way.

This is why nobody is safe in the space of genocide, everyone is a target, and expectations that it will be otherwise are naive and misguided. Distinctions between soldier and civilian evaporate along with distinctions between guilty and innocent. These quaint oppositions are simply bulldozed out of the human world. The Allied Powers realized this in World War II and set about creating a world that protected human rights and subjected states to international law. Raphael Lemkin realized this and devoted his entire life to ensuring that genocide would be recognized, condemned, criminalized, prosecuted, and prevented.

Did today’s Western governments and the media forget all the lessons of the Holocaust and really believe that this cruel elimination of Palestinian life would simply ride itself out quietly, neatly contained in the Gaza concentration camp? Their responses to these two murders suggest that they did.

As long as the world allows Israel to carry out the immoral and unlawful genocide in Palestine, we are all living in a world devoid of morality and law. In such a world, anything can happen. Tragedies and counter-tragedies will mount, providing justifications for the next retaliation, and the next, and the next. People will be upset about this, but it will happen nonetheless. If readers need an example of how far this can go, they need only look at the European bloodlands of World War II or the wars and mass atrocities in Democratic Republic of Congo since the genocide in neighboring Rwanda three decades ago. Genocides create vortexes of violence that can grow exponentially across time and space and are very hard to transform into peaceful social fabrics. In today’s world, genocidal ideologies, practices, and logics can quickly travel across borders and jump across oceans.

When there is no accountability for the powerful under the law, some people will inevitably take the law into their own hands. If one is horrified by the latter, the answer is not to feed the former. The answer is to rebalance the scales towards accountability and justice for everyone. Security that comes at the price of genocide is not security at all. Genocide makes everyone unsafe, including the citizens of the perpetrator state. We believe Israeli leaders know this and simply do not care, given their callous disregard for the lives of Israeli hostages in Hamas captivity, their maximalist demands that place ordinary Israelis at ever-greater risk, and their use of the Hannibal Directive.

Violence always begets more violence. The latest round of escalating violence by Israel against Palestinians began with Israel’s disproportionate response to Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israelis. We, the people of the world, cannot allow that pattern to repeat itself with the recent shooting. We also cannot let this tragic event overshadow the hundreds of tragedies happening to Gazans every day. It was only the potential deaths of 14,000 Palestinian infants that garnered the same level of sympathy and coverage as the death of two Israeli adults.

In the coming days, we will learn about the full lives of Sarah Lynn Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky, as we should. Their lives are irreplaceable. Each and every person killed in Gaza also lived a full life, full of the same kind of love Sarah and Yaron shared. They too are irreplaceable. Yet, when Israel murders hundreds of Gazans in one day, it barely makes the news.

The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security affirms the value of each individual human life. Every single person is sufficient unto themselves, necessary to our common purpose, and utterly irreplaceable. Every single person has the right to be treasured and valued for their identities and to find meaning and hope in collective life. Our universe of moral obligation extends to everyone. This is precisely why we ask humanity to recognize genocide as the monstrous threat it is for our species, one that regrettably has currently taken over our life in common. The fight against this crime is the single most important issue of the present day. If we can harness our species’s darkest instinct, we will be much stronger and more resilient in the face of the many other potential catastrophes that we are facing.

Many courageous activists have stood up against the genocide in Gaza, often suffering grave consequences for their bravery. We applaud and are inspired by these upstanders. In standing up against genocide, we must all be sure that we are creating a moral system that is worth fighting for. We must support one another against despair. This shooting, while predictable within the political dynamics of genocide, is not the way forward. Milgrim and Lischinsky are not responsible for this genocide, no more so than millions of other people around the world. Why should they be forced to pay for it with their lives when the world leaders who are responsible live securely in their impunity?

We ask people to be wary of those describing Elias Rodriguez’s actions as terrorism, as antisemitism, or as representative of the entire anti-genocide movement. We predict that the US government, and potentially other governments around the world, will take advantage of this moment to come down even harder on anti-genocide activists, to strengthen their own support for Israel’s genocide, and to pursue military actions against Iran and other states in the Middle East. We call on everyone who opposes genocide to condemn efforts to weaponize these murders in the pursuit of ideological, authoritarian, and expansionist goals. Human beings are stronger when we stand together. If we want to live in a just world, we must fight for a big tent where morals and laws have meaning. We can only end the cycle of violence by making violence unnecessary. There is no end to genocide unless we collectively decide to end it.