Opinion: Israeli embassy killings ‘could have been us'

Montreal Gazette

23-05-2025

'This is us,' wrote a former colleague upon learning of the targeted killing of Israeli embassy staffers Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky.
And indeed — it could have been us.
The photos splashed across international media are hauntingly familiar: two bright-eyed 20somethings, dressed in suits and wearing diplomatic pins — symbols of state, now often positioned near yellow hostage ribbons.
Their profiles echoed many of ours — young professionals at the very beginning of their careers, who chose service over salary, policy over profit, and long hours over recognition. They chose the path of purpose: the quiet, often invisible labour of diplomacy.
I know this path well. Over a decade ago, I served in the same ministry, in the same department. We believed in the soft power of dialogue, in midnight memos and morning briefings, in showing up — day after day — in rooms where conflict and hope shared the same air. We believed diplomacy could hold back the tide — that words, presence and principle might prevent the chaos from reaching our doorstep.
But on the evening of May 21, outside of the Capital Jewish Museum, the tide spilled over. And it did not stop at a border.
The assassination of unarmed embassy personnel in the heart of Washington, D.C. — the symbolic capital of Western diplomacy — is more than a tragedy. It's a rupture of the global order. Under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, foreign service staff are protected by international law. Milgrim and Lischinsky were not armed combatants. They were emissaries of engagement. Their killing was not only an act of violence; it was an attack on the very principle of diplomacy itself.
When diplomats are no longer safe, when embassies become targets, and when international norms are violated without consequence, we all lose something. The scaffolding that holds together fragile peace efforts, conflict resolution and cross-border co-operation begins to collapse. That collapse affects every nation, not just one.
It would be easy to chalk this up as another isolated act of violence in a world that has grown disturbingly used to them. But this wasn't random. It didn't happen in a vacuum. It unfolded in a climate of rising extremism, normalized hate speech and tolerated antisemitism — conditions that have been increasingly excused, dismissed or politicized.
When rallies call openly for intifada, when hostage posters are torn down as if they're offensive rather than urgent, when Jewish institutions face threats that are dismissed as overreactions, violence becomes not just possible, but predictable. This is what happens when democracies turn a blind eye to growing ideological radicalism within their own borders.
The irony, the heartbreak, is that Milgrim and Lischinsky devoted themselves to preventing the very kind of violence that claimed their lives. They were not only symbols of diplomacy — they were practitioners of it, working tirelessly to make dialogue possible in a world that is increasingly rejecting it.
They are us. And we will be them — if we fail to defend the ideals they lived for.
Because when emissaries of peace are gunned down, it is not only a Jewish tragedy. It is a diplomatic one. A democratic one. A global one.
We cannot afford to let this become just another headline, another name, another shrug of indifference. The line has been crossed. The question now is: Who will stand up to redraw it?
Margaux Chetrit is a writer, speaker and entrepreneur. She is a former parliamentary intern in Israel's Knesset. She served at the Consulate General of Israel in Montreal from 2008-2015.