I Met Yaron Lischinsky the Day Before He Was Murdered

I met Israeli diplomat Yaron Lischinsky 30 hours before his murder. It was around 4:30 p.m. Tuesday. I was leaving the Middle East Forum’s annual policy gathering at a hotel in Washington, D.C., a little early in order to decompress before the evening session and catch one of the final episodes of Around the Horn. Lischinsky’s conference name tag caught my eye as I hurried toward the elevators. In my line of work, you are all but obligated to strike up notebook-free conversations with diplomats whenever one happens to be sitting alone outside a hotel ballroom. I turned around and backtracked down the concourse. So you work for the embassy, I said to this clean-shaven man with pleasant cantilevers of wavy hair who looked a decade younger than me, and who turned out to be a researcher in the embassy’s Middle East policy division. I mentioned I had only been to the Israeli mission once, but had been amused by the complex’s proximity to its Chinese counterpart. Seems like you work in an interesting neighborhood, I observed. Yes, he replied, there are always protesters, sometimes for them, sometimes for us, though he added that the pace and intensity of the anti-Israel picketers had lessened in recent months.

Lischinsky is now dead, and we were speaking informally, realities which make it both unfair and unethical for me to share any more of what he said to me. At some point Yemen came up—the former foreign minister of the country’s internationally recognized government was speaking at the conference later that night—and I found myself explaining the long-ago American domestic politics of the Yemen conflict to someone who I assumed was too young and maybe too new to Washington to know much of anything about these bygone local controversies. He listened attentively, cracking a smile when I observed that the American effort to stop the Saudi and Emirati campaign against the Houthis, and the subsequent removal of the Houthis from the U.S. terror list, represented the biggest progressive foreign policy victory of the past decade.

Maybe he knew all about it already. But I am no longer all that young, and at 37 I have an ever-growing awareness that my own knowledge and sensibilities already belong somewhere in the past, and in any case this soft-spoken, cerebral, and unflappably diplomatic Israeli instantly struck me as the kind of person who had trained himself to absorb more information than he gave away. I asked for his business card. He handed me one and said I could get in touch if I was ever in Washington and wanted to visit the embassy again.

In my experience the diplomats of the Jewish state are among the least Israeli of Israelis. They are restrained and secular and quiet and usually know how to dress themselves; they speak with every possible accent, and it’s hard to imagine them whacking at a matkot ball, fighting their way onto a bus, or davening during halftime of a basketball game. They are the normal and cosmopolitan faces of a rambunctious and inherently tribal country. But it is the tension between the rigors of diplomacy and the character of their homeland that also makes them deeply Israeli: Whatever their religious practice and whatever their politics, Israeli diplomats are inevitably Jews among the nations, a tiny subtribe that serves as the official foreign representation of the world’s only Jewish state, the first in 2,000 years and one of the most hated and lied-about countries in the entire history of humankind. To carry out this mission for fairly low pay on behalf of an often-dysfunctional foreign ministry, in places far from home where spies and activists and journalists and local Jews are circling you or even actively targeting you at any given moment, requires a typically Israeli mix of creativity, resourcefulness, and optimism. An American or even an Egyptian diplomat can coast on the prestige of their government, but an Israeli one cannot. They have a job that can’t be done on autopilot.

Moreover, they have a job that can’t be done without great personal investment. It is challenging work representing an unpopular country with a self-sabotaging government, and it carries its own special burdens. In Oslo, some years ago, the Israeli ambassador calmly explained to me what had and hadn’t changed since riots at the embassy gates in both 2008 and 2009. Over the past 70 years, Israeli diplomatic facilities have been the target of state-backed terror plots in India, the U.K., Thailand, Turkey, and of course Argentina, where Iran blew up the entire embassy. In 1973, Black September-hired gunmen murdered Yosef Alon, an IDF colonel and the military attaché in Washington, outside his Maryland home.

When we shook hands and parted ways I noticed how different Lischinsky was from the great majority of Israelis I’d ever met, but also how typical he was of the country he represented. This was a smart kid, I thought, one who knows not to reveal too much to strangers in public fora but who is evidently dedicated to his thankless, indispensable work. He was friendly without being falsely familiar; he seemed to know it would be unseemly to share too much about his work at the embassy, but somehow undiplomatic or even dishonest to share nothing at all. Israelis, including the quieter diplomats, are generous enough in spirit never to completely hide themselves. Lischinsky also had one of the most crucial of all Israeli qualities: youth.

How do we repay the service and dedication of Yaron Lischinksy and his would-be fiancée Sarah Milgrim, a fellow embassy staffer murdered right beside him? One should study Jewish texts and undertake mitzvot in their memory, as the tradition teaches us to. Then we should look ahead to the predictable consequences of this horror and resist them as best we can.

Security, and the constant expectation of catastrophe that inspires our vast and expensive infrastructure of safety, are among the defining characteristics of American Jewish life in the 21st century. We are so used to going through a metal detector to enter a JCC or a synagogue that we no longer even think about the logic behind it or the possibility of any better way of living. Already it’s considered normal that Jewish and explicitly Israel-related events are conducted in quasi-secrecy, with their times and locations withheld until the last second. Israel-phobic intimidation has triumphed even in New York, where Israeli films don’t get screened, Israeli cultural events are scarcer than ever, and Israeli restaurants sometimes hide the national origin of the cuisine they serve. The murder of embassy staffers outside a Jewish museum a short walk from the National Mall is sure to hypercharge everyone’s worst fears, making us vulnerable to the rise of elaborate new bureaucracies, protocols, and mental habits that may never go away. But at no point in the past 5,000 years has it ever been risk-free to be a proud representative of the Jewish people. Total safety is an illusion—we can dream up novel ways of being quiet or careful, but we also know there are inherent risks to being who we are that no amount of caution or care can eliminate. Past a certain point, a safety obsession becomes a convenient alternative to dealing with other, tougher things.

One such thing, worthy of hard consideration: America is now a country where significant numbers of young people don’t really read, attend religious services, have sex, date, or even socialize, opening up a void of meaninglessness that destructive and often foreign agendas can fill. The alleged Washington killer is a 31-year-old activist who reportedly was affiliated at one point with the Chicago branch of the pro-China Party for Socialism and Liberation, which is one of the organizing forces for radical activists in cities across the U.S. A month ago, I wrote about how violent fantasies had become unremarkable within the anti-Israel scene in Pittsburgh, to the point that a Lebanese-born Air Force reservist and a local pastor’s daughter active in the city’s BDS movement built and detonated at least four homemade bombs as part of an inchoate plot against their Zionist enemies. A small but highly motivated contingent of our country’s anti-Israel extremists, brought together through conviction and a lack of any stronger motivator in life, believe the time for nonviolent protest has passed.

They are a threat to Jews and to American social harmony in general, but at least they understand the nature of the war they’ve convinced themselves, and each other, that they are in. Our enemies are dedicated people with a rapidly weakening sense of moral constraint. Thus they impose upon us the urgent need for an equal seriousness. They force us to face a hostile world without apology, without recklessness, without delusion, and without fear—to face it like the young man I met outside a hotel ballroom who had only 30 hours left.