ZOHPAMINE

You know, I believe that there must be room to mourn every single life. There must be room to mourn the lives of the more than 1,100 Israelis that Hamas killed three years ago. There must be room to mourn the 74,000 Palestinians that the Israeli government has killed since. There must be room to reckon with the ways in which so many New Yorkers' lives have been shattered. And that, to me, is a part of what it means to believe in a sense of humanity, that we need not choose between which death we will mourn and which we will ignore. That we can reckon with the fact that all of it is to be opposed. And what I so appreciated about being at the vigil yesterday evening, as I had been the year before, is that it was a vigil that brought together and brings together New Yorkers to read testimonies of their own family members, testimonies of others who have been killed either on the day or in the genocide since, and ends with a shared vision for peace and for an end to the genocide. And that, to me, is the future that we have to fight for.