1 November 2024 Didim, Turkey by Sam
The walk to the graveyard where Ayşenur is buried made me feel as though I was back in rural Palestine: the olive groves on either side of the dirt road, the farmers harvesting olives using the same methods I’d seen them use in the West Bank as well as simply the serene beauty of the landscape.
It felt strange visiting her grave when exactly two months ago today I met her for the first time in Ramallah four days before she was brutally murdered by the Israeli occupation forces (IOF), and I almost feel a sense of guilt for being able to visit her hometown in Didim, Turkey while she is unable to. Why was it her who was shot and not me?
In the wake of her death, numerous well-meaning people have said to me “any one of you could have been killed like Ayşenur was” but I think this misses the point: many Palestinians ARE shot like Ayşenur was, many more are bombed and burnt to death and unfortunately, as Ayşenur herself would say, their deaths receive a fraction of a fraction of the attention her death received.
The grave itself was incredibly peaceful. I was the only one in the graveyard apart from the birds above me, whose chirping added to the serenity of the scene. The peacefulness brought me comfort as it stood in stark contrast to the chaos of the days following her death. Those who attended the protest with her were speaking to journalists non stop for days while the rest of us were doing our best to support them as much as we could and her funeral in Palestine was plagued by diplomatic issues between the Turkish and American governments over where she would be buried. We never got a chance to mourn her in the midst of all this.
Of course, Ayşenur is but one out of hundreds of thousands who have been killed by the IOF in the last year alone. Now, two months after her murder, settler attacks and deportations of foreign activists have ramped up in the West Bank, the north of Gaza has been under siege and has been subjected to massacre after massacre, many parts of Lebanon have been bombed (along with Syria, Iraq and Yemen) and the IOF shows no signs of slowing down any time soon.
It can be easy to feel hopeless and helpless in the face of such monstrosities, but if the Palestinians on the ground haven’t given up the popular struggle for an end to the occupation then we shouldn’t either. I think Ayşenur would have said the same thing.
Rest in power.
