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On 11 September 2024, President Biden claimed to be “outraged” and “deeply saddened” by Israel’s murder of our comrade Aysenur Eygi, but his actions tell a very different story. While he described the shooting as “unacceptable,” he is refusing the family’s demand for an independent, transparent investigation and continuing to trust the murderers to investigate themselves. Aysenur’s family and the ISM have been clear that we have no confidence in any Israeli investigation, given the Israeli army’s longstanding practice of using investigations as exculpatory coverups. We continue to demand a transparent and independent investigation.
For the United States government to accept the results of Israel’s internal military investigations is a complete dereliction of the US government’s responsibility to its own citizens, but it is nothing new. In 2003, the US did nothing to hold the Israeli killers of Rachel Corrie responsible for that murder. In recent years, the US has done nothing when Palestinian Americans, like Shireen Abu Akleh, have been murdered by Israel. President Biden is pursuing business as usual and allowing Israel to continue to kill both US Citizens and Palestinians with total impunity.
President Biden’s disrespect for Aysenur’s family and community extends even further. Although Aysenur’s family is mourning the death of a US citizen, his administration has yet to pick up the phone and call the family to offer condolences. He asserts that he will remain in contact with Israeli and Palestinian authorities but is unwilling to communicate with the ordinary people who were closest to Aysenur.
In his statement, President Biden asserts that he treats “violent extremist Israeli settlers” and “Palestinian terrorists” equally and implies that the violence in the West Bank is equally the fault of both groups. Both assertions are false. President Biden’s administration arms the violent Israeli extremists, as ISM volunteers can testify to based on our extensive experience doing protective presence work in the West Bank face to face with Israeli settlers armed with US weapons. These are the same weapons that make the US complicit in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. As long as the US continues to send weapons to Israel to kill Palestinians, in Gaza as well as in the West Bank, the US is sustaining the violent extremism of the Israeli settlers and the Israeli government. Meanwhile, President Biden’s false equivalence between Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank elides the fact that the current violence has its roots in over a hundred years of settler colonial terrorism, ethnic cleansing, and now genocide, all perpetrated by Israel. Contrary to what President Biden asserts, it is Zionist colonization that is the obstacle to peace.
Ultimately, it is hypocritical for President Biden to attempt to change the focus to Israeli settlers alone, given that the Israeli army killed Aysenur with weapons likely provided by the Biden administration, which is fully aware that they are used to attack people protesting or witnessing demonstrations against illegal settlements. As one American ISM volunteer who wishes to remain anonymous says, “When I was detained by the Israeli army for my nonviolent work with ISM, everything I saw in the army van was stamped with ‘made in the USA’ or ‘property of the USA.'” As Amado Sison, another American citizen shot by Israel in August during the weekly demonstrations in Beita noted, “The money I pay in my taxes as a teacher probably funded the bullet they have run through me.” President Biden and his administration are complicit in Aysenur’s death and his statement today attempts to elide what the whole world knows: Israel’s violence is funded, sustained, supported, and endorsed by the US. Honoring Aysenur’s memory requires a complete change of policy, starting with an independent, transparent investigation and extending to an arms embargo.