Israel’s lie about a U.S. activist’s murder has exposed the Biden-Harris double standard on Palestine
Israel’s lie over the murder of U.S. activist Aysenur Ezgi Eygi has been exposed, and in the process, so has Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s double standard on the worth of Palestinian lives.
FILE: Joe Biden and Kamala Harris attend a trilateral meeting with the leaders of the Philippines and Japan on April 11, 2024.(Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)
On August 31, when the dead bodies of six captives, including a dual American-Israeli citizen, were found in a tunnel in Rafah, President Joe Biden made a statement that very day condemning and threatening Hamas for the act.
“I am devastated and outraged,” Biden stated. “Hersh (Goldberg-Polin) was among the innocents brutally attacked while attending a music festival for peace in Israel on October 7. … I have worked tirelessly to bring … Hersh safely (home) and am heartbroken by the news of his death. It is as tragic as it is reprehensible. Make no mistake, Hamas leaders will pay for these crimes.”
In comparison, when Israel killed activist Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, a dual Turkish-American citizen, in the West Bank town of Beita, the White House was silent. Neither Biden nor the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris said a word.
Spokespeople for the White House and State Department deflected questions and made bland statements about caring about Aysenur while their statements about American actions and policies demonstrated beyond a doubt that an American helping Palestinians, much like white people who supported Black people in the American South in bygone days, deserved no better fate than the Palestinians whose lives have been treated as less than worthless by the Biden administration for years, and more so since October 7.
Finally, on Wednesday, five days after Aysenur’s killing, Biden and Harris had something to say. “I am outraged and deeply saddened by the death of Aysenur Eygi,” Biden said in a statement. “The shooting that led to her death is totally unacceptable.”
Harris’ statement gives us a very clear window into just how little she and her boss care about the death of an American citizen at Israel’s hands.
“The killing of Aysenur Eygi is a horrific tragedy that never should have happened…Aysenur was peacefully protesting in the West Bank—standing up against the expansion of settlements—when her young life was senselessly cut short. No one should be killed for participating in a peaceful protest. The shooting that led to her death is unacceptable and raises legitimate questions about the conduct of IDF personnel in the West Bank. Israel must do more to ensure that incidents like this never happen again.”
Harris then stated that she accepted Israel’s version of the incident, saying, “Israel’s preliminary investigation indicated it was the result of a tragic error for which the IDF is responsible. We will continue to press the government of Israel for answers and for continued access to the findings of the investigation so we can have confidence in the results. There must be full accountability.”
Both Biden and Harris affirmed Israel’s absurd story that a trained sniper accidentally fired a shot that ricocheted off a rock and managed to hit Aysenur with a kill shot to the head that ended her life in minutes. It is a cartoonish narrative of a magic bullet that wouldn’t be remotely credible in a movie script.
On Wednesday, the Washington Post reported the conclusions of their investigation into Aysenur’s murder, and they established that she was some 200 yards away from the Israeli forces when she was murdered some 20-30 minutes after the protest had ended. This contradicted Israel’s lie that Aysenur was shot accidentally during a “violent riot.” Eyewitnesses immediately verified that there was no violence at the protest and that it had ended long before Aysenur’s murder.
But there will likely be no American investigation, let alone one from an independent source. No, we will take Israel’s word for it. As White House spokesperson Jack Kirby stated, “The Israelis have reached out, made sure that we knew that they were promptly investigating this…we’ll obviously withhold our judgment…we’ll see what they learn.”
This is tantamount to saying Derek Chauvin is investigating George Floyd’s murder and we don’t want to make statements until he can tell us exactly what happened. And Aysenur’s family—who have still not heard from either Biden or Harris—made it clear they are not going to be quiet about this. “We are deeply offended by the suggestion that her killing by a trained sniper was in any way unintentional,” a statement from the Eygi family read. It remains to be seen whether the Post article will change anything, but similar investigations did not lead to investigations in the case of Shireen Abu Akleh, so it would seem unlikely now.
Naturally, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin have also made the requisite statements calling on Israel to “do more” to prevent such killings. Yet not one of them has raised any objection to Israel’s claim that they were not shooting at Aysenur, but at a Palestinian whom they call an “instigator.”
Since the protest had ended by the time Aysenur was shot and there was, according to every credible eyewitness, no violence during or after the demonstration, the message the Biden administration is sending here is hard to miss. The Israelis probably didn’t know they were killing an American, and if it was “only a Palestinian” there would be no problem, as indeed there isn’t every day, whether in Gaza or the West Bank.
Changing the conversation
It is, however, fair to say that there was some real anger in Washington over Israel’s actions. Killing an American protester, in and of itself, seems little more than an inconvenience to the Biden administration, and it’s only that because the media has asked some questions for a few days.
But with most of their focus on November’s election, the Harris campaign team is concerned that issues that clearly divide Democrats should not be focused on. In their debate on Tuesday, Harris reiterated her absolute support for Israel and read down the list of Biden talking points. She repeated the belligerence about Iran, made it clear that her version of history in Palestine and Israel starts on October 7, and bookended her remarks with promises that Israel will get unconditional military support. Donald Trump found it impossible to be more pro-Israel and pro-genocide than her.
There is a growing desperation in the administration to try to recapture the narrative. The genocide in Gaza is having effects like nothing Israel has ever done before. The effort to try to bury and move past Israel’s murder of Aysenur is part of that desperation.
So was the announcement last week that the Department of Justice had brought charges against Hamas leaders, including Yahiya Sinwar. This is an act of pure political theater.
The goal is two-fold. First, the charges are a response to the International Criminal Court’s Prosecutor requesting warrants for both Israeli and Hamas leaders. It is the United States’ way of saying that only Hamas can be held accountable to international law while Israel may flout the very highest law, against genocide, with complete impunity.
Second, it is an attempt to refocus Democratic concerns that are increasingly uncomfortable with the genocide in Gaza toward the specter of Hamas instead.
Biden was clearly enraged at the killing of the six Israeli hostages at the end of August, but his attempt to lash out at Hamas over them was undermined by the massive protests in Israel. While those Israeli protesters have expressed little concern over the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians, they understand very well that it is their own government that has blocked a ceasefire and hostage exchange deal. They know that the blood of the hostages who have died in Gaza over the many months is on Benjamin Netanyahu’s hands. And if it is on Netanyahu’s hands, his enablers—Biden, Harris, Blinken, and the rest—have hands equally soaked in blood, mostly Palestinian, even if many of the protesters don’t think of that reality.
It is from that well that the absurd charges against six Hamas leaders—three of whom, Mohammed Deif, Marwan Issa, and Ismail Haniyeh, are already reportedly dead—sprung. The last thing Biden wanted was for Israel to murder an American protester in the West Bank.
Yet that’s just what Israel did.
The diversion fails
The charges against Hamas leaders were only part of the effort to shift the narrative. The Israeli government also forged documents purporting to show that Hamas leaders had planned to spirit hostages out of Gaza, along with Hamas leader Yahiya Sinwar. The plan was to use the forged documents to convince people that Hamas was rejecting a ceasefire and that Sinwar was abandoning the people of Gaza to save himself.
The effort failed, but only after the German news outlet Bild and the ultra-right wing British news outlet, The Jewish Chronicle were fooled into reporting the documents as authentic.
Together with the American charges and the recently reported Israeli effort to get members of Congress to press South Africa to drop its case at the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide, we can see a picture of increasingly desperate figures in Washington and Jerusalem, frantically trying to restore the illusion of Israel acting according to the laws of war and only in self-defense.
Killing Aysenur Eygi obviously wasn’t part of the plan, but when Israel fed the Biden administration an utterly ridiculous story about an accidental ricochet that happened to hit Aysenur in the head, Biden and company grasped at it in desperation. That didn’t end well either, and Biden and Netanyahu cannot be happy that it was debunked so quickly by no less a source than the Washington Post.
Few will be surprised that Israel lied. The story they told was without credibility on its face and the torrent of misinformation and flat-out lies that have been coming from Israel since October 7 has been staggering. But Biden accepted it, as did Harris. Both still criticized Israel, calling the killing “unacceptable,” but it was clear they had no intention of doing their own investigation and they were trying to move past the incident by accepting Israel’s story.
The conclusive nature of the video, photographic, and eyewitness evidence that the Post used to establish the facts of what happened makes a solid case. Biden and Harris have been exposed for trading in the double standard that Palestine advocates have been trying to draw attention to for decades.
It’s too much to hope that this will mean any real change in policy toward Israel. But this is no longer a clash of narratives. Israel’s lie has been exposed. They lied because they knew they had killed an American in cold blood, again, just as they did to Rachel Corrie, Mohammad Khdour, Tawfic Abdel Jabbar, Shireen Abu Akleh, and numerous others, none of whom have even gotten justice or even an investigation conducted by their own government. Just one whitewash after another.
It seems clear that this issue is not just going to fade into the background. Aysenur’s family seems prepared to keep it front and center as long as they have to, as have Rachel Corrie’s family. American officials, from Biden down, insist they have no greater responsibility than protecting the lives of U.S. citizens abroad. It’s time they were held to that.