you're american until they kill you

on ayşenur eygi's martyrdom

Image credit: Megan Farmer via KUOW

The cover photo accompanying The Intercept’s September 6th story about the killing of 26-year-old U.S. citizen Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi by Israeli forces in the West Bank shows her body, wrapped in a blue body bag and covered with a shock blanket, being wheeled through the halls of Rafidia State Hospital in Nablus. The only part of her that is visible in the photograph is a small portion of the soles of her sneakers, showing through an opening in the body bag and still caked with traces of soil from the olive grove where she was standing when she was shot.

Just five days earlier, Ayşenur had traveled from Seattle to the West Bank to defend that same soil. She was there as an activist with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), an organization which brings volunteers from around the world to “support and strengthen the Palestinian popular resistance by being immediately alongside Palestinians in olive groves, on school runs, at demonstrations, within villages being attacked, by houses being demolished or where Palestinians are subject to consistent harassment or attacks from soldiers and settlers.” At the time of her murder, she was protesting against illegal settlements in the West Bank town of Beita. Despite the IDF’s claims that Eygi was shot “indirectly and unintentionally” when soldiers responded to a “violent gathering of dozens of Palestinian suspects, who burned tires and threw stones,” video evidence and eyewitness accounts tell a different story—Eygi, as it turns out, was targeted from a distance of more than 200 yards, a full 20 minutes after the protesters had already moved away from the site.

I was scrolling on Twitter the other day when I came across a screenshot of the following passage from the New York Times’ recent story on Eygi’s funeral:

Although she moved to the United States as a toddler, acquired citizenship and spent most of her life there, the funeral for Eygi, 26, was deeply Turkish, and profoundly pro-Palestinian.

Hundreds of people, many carrying Palestinian flags and wearing Palestinian scarves, gathered at the central mosque in the town of Didim to say prayers for her, including senior Turkish officials. No U.S. officials attended, and there was not an American flag in sight.

The passage appeared on my timeline a handful of times, accompanied each time by a quote tweet expressing dismay and outrage at the way the article seemed to downplay, if not outright dismiss, the fact that Ayşenur was a U.S. citizen. As one post by journalist and activist Molly Conger so eloquently put it:

although. although she lived her entire life here. although she was a citizen. that word burns through the screen. the NYT sees her ethnicity, her religion, and her politics as inherently unamerican and factors to be considered in deciding if she ever belonged here at all.

This is reflective of a disturbing larger pattern. Reading a great deal of the mainstream media’s coverage of Eygi’s murder in its immediate aftermath, it was hard not to be struck by the sense that these outlets wanted us to think that even though Eygi was an American citizen, she was still not quite an American in the same way that we are. Every mention of her citizenship seemed to be accompanied by an unwritten asterisk conveying not just a factual acknowledgement of Eygi’s dual Turkish nationality, but a tacit affirmation of her Otherness. Ayşenur, they seem to be reminding us, was American—she just wasn’t our kind of American.

• • •

The statement released by the White House on September 6th was a masterclass in the violence of the passive voice, shamelessly deploying toothless phrases such as “the shooting that led to [Ayşenur’s] death.” In the statement, President Biden reaffirmed the IDF’s claims that Ayşenur’s death was “the result of a tragic error resulting from an unnecessary escalation”—claims that were later called into serious doubt by eyewitness testimony and video evidence. Notably missing from the statement, however, was any promise of an independent investigation by the U.S. government into the killing of an American citizen by a foreign military—instead, Biden merely called for “continued access” to the findings of Israel’s own investigation. Biden’s statement ended with a full-throated condemnation, not of the Israeli soldiers who just killed an American citizen in broad daylight, but of “Palestinian terrorists” who are “sending car bombs to kill civilians.”

Compare this to the statement that the White House released a week earlier in response to the death of another U.S. citizen: Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who was taken hostage by Hamas fighters on October 7th and whose body was recovered on August 31st. In stark contrast to the carefully-wordsmithed hemming and hawing of the official response to Ayşenur’s killing, this statement was unequivocal in its denunciation of the “vicious Hamas terrorists” who “brutally attacked” civilians in a “savage massacre” on October 7th. Whereas Ayşenur’s death at the hands of Israeli soldiers warranted little more than the vague pronouncement that “Israel must do more to ensure that incidents like this never happen again,” Biden’s response to Hersh’s killing was to declare to the world that “Hamas leaders will pay for these crimes.” And while Biden still has yet to meet with Ayşenur’s family nearly two weeks on since her death, he wasted no time in calling the Goldberg-Polins just one day after Hersh’s body was discovered.

Unlike Hersh, who immigrated to Israel at the age of 7, Ayşenur spent the overwhelming majority of her life in this country, and was a U.S. resident at the time of her death. And yet, whereas the official reaction to Hersh’s death was to frame it as a loss for the entire nation—in his statement, Biden declared that “all Americans tonight will have [Hersh’s family] in their prayers”—the fact of Ayşenur’s American citizenship seemed to feature as little more than a footnote in the official statements from the country’s leaders. This contrast is especially marked in the statements issued by the office of Vice President (and Democratic presidential nominee) Kamala Harris—it’s notable, for example, that the “safety of American citizens” finds a mention in Harris’ response to Hersh's death, but not to Ayşenur's.

If you didn’t know better, you might think that our government leaders and media elites want you to see Ayşenur as somehow ‘less’ of an American than Hersh. You might even think that they are trying to send the message that American citizenship does not, in fact, mean the same thing for everyone—that some Americans’ lives are more valuable, and their deaths more tragic, than others. But of course, that’s impossible. They’d never do that. Right?

Right?

• • •

Eygi is far from the first American to be martyred by Israeli occupation forces. In 2003, 23-year-old activist Rachel Corrie—like Ayşenur, a resident of Washington State and a volunteer with the ISM—was crushed to death by an IDF armored tank while protesting the demolition of Palestinian homes in Gaza. In 2010, 18-year-old Furkan Doğan was shot “execution-style” by Israeli commandos while attempting to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza aboard the MV Mavi Marmara. In 2022, prominent Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was “deliberately” targeted by an IDF sniper while reporting on a raid in the West Bank city of Jenin. And in January and February of this year, 17-year-old American citizens Tawfik Abdel Jabbar and Mohammed Khdour were killed in the West Bank by Israeli forces. In each case, the institutional response has been the same: delay, deny, deflect. In each case, the message is clear: if Israel kills an American, we will ask no questions and seek no answers. ‘Justice’ is a four-letter word.

Every time this happens, the mouthpieces of empire stand up straighter and clear their throats, preparing to issue yet another pronouncement of life and death from behind their flag-draped podiums. Wringing their hands in mock contrition as the crocodile tears pour forth, they fall over themselves to come up with excuses, rationalizations, justifications. They do this because they hope that if they drag their feet for long enough, we will stop believing our own eyes and ears, will start thinking that the obvious is somehow impossible. This is, after all, the most moral army in the world that we’re talking about. Why on earth would they stoop so low as to intentionally kill an American citizen? (Unlike the death of a Palestinian, of course, the death of an American still warrants an explanation—for now, at least.)

It was simply a tragic accident, they tell us.

It was an indirect hit.

The bullet ricocheted.

And by the way, what was she even doing there in the first place? (Subtext: she should have known better. Subtext: she had it coming. Subtext: you’ll be next if you’re not careful.)

A forensic expert who reviewed Ayşenur’s autopsy report told Middle East Eye that “the size of the entry wound may indicate the bullet wasn’t fired from a simple gun or rifle but from a more sophisticated weapon”—in other words, that Ayşenur may well have been killed by sniper fire. It’s worth pointing out that the IDF’s standard-issue sniper rifle is the M24, which is produced by Remington Firearms at a facility in Ilion, New York. This means, in other words, that there is a distinct possibility that the weapon which killed this American citizen was manufactured on American soil by an American company, its sale to Ayşenur’s killers approved by the American government in one of the more than 100 weapons deals that this administration has greenlit since October 7th.

But in the end, of course, none of this matters. What the people in power are really saying when they validate Israel’s claims that this was just a tragic accident, when they allow Ayşenur’s killers to investigate themselves and refuse to give anything more than the vaguest of nods toward some ill-defined notion of “accountability,” is that Ayşenur’s life was expendable to them—expendable, because she aligned herself with resistance to empire rather than with empire itself. In the eyes of the ruling class, what made Ayşenur’s Americanness less than complete wasn’t actually the fact that she was born in Turkey—it was the fact that she chose to resist the violence of American empire, and Israel’s role as an outpost of it. By making that courageous decision, she renounced the privilege and protection of Americanness—and for that, they killed her.

For all this country’s patriotic self-mythology and propaganda about what a blessing it supposedly is to be a citizen of the United States, the fact remains that in the end, Ayşenur’s American citizenship meant nothing. It was not enough to protect her from the bullets of an army that her own government continues to fund with one blank check after another, not enough to protect her from the forces of imperialist violence when they turned their sights on her.

This is not to say that the circumstances of and reactions to Ayşenur’s death constitute an affront to some idealized liberal imaginary of America as a multicultural haven. Nor is it to say that we should defend Ayşenur’s Americanness because Americanness is itself worth defending. I’ve written at length elsewhere about why I think, for example, that those of us with immigrant backgrounds or dual heritages should proudly embrace the use of hyphens when describing our identities:

Ultimately, while calls to drop the hyphen may be well-intentioned, it is also true that the line of argument advanced by the punctuation mark’s many critics—namely, that hyphenating the identity of immigrants somehow undermines our status as equal Americans—plays into this same xenophobic logic, implying that our American identity is somehow more important or valuable than any other identities we may hold.

I still believe this. But I think it’s also important, when faced with cases like this one, to use them as an opportunity to explicitly name the false promise of Americanness—not in order to ‘prove’ that Ayşenur was a ‘real’ American, or to claim her as part of some project of liberal patriotism, but rather to expose the violent hypocrisy underlying all the grandiose rhetoric about what an honor and a privilege it supposedly is to be a citizen of this, the ‘greatest country in the world.’

The murder of Ayşenur Eygi, like the murders of Tawfik Abdel Jabbar and Mohammed Khdour and Shireen Abu Akleh and Furkan Doğan and Rachel Corrie before her, shines a much-needed light on the deadly transactionality of American citizenship. It lays bare the dark secret about Americanness that nobody wants to admit to themselves—that to be a ‘real’ American is to make a pact with the devil. In exchange for the good grace and protection of this dying empire, we tacitly promise our unquestioning loyalty to it. And when our membership in this most imaginary of imagined communities is affirmed, we unknowingly accept the possibility that we ourselves might someday be sacrificed on the altar of empire should we ever be so bold as to challenge it. We all know that the violent delights of Americanness come with a price—but it’s only in moments like this that we come to understand what, exactly, that price really is.

• • •

One of my favorite poems of all time is “Partition” by the Kashmiri-American poet

Fatimah Asghar

. The poem, like the others in Asghar’s 2018 collection If They Come For Us, explores themes of Muslim identity, the legacies of colonialism, and belonging in post-9/11 America. Weaving together these themes across generations and continents, the poem ends with the lines:

you’re american until the towers fall. until there’s a border on your back.

To this, I might add: you’re American until they kill you.

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culture shock is a blog by the Indian-American writer and organizer Pranay Somayajula. Click the button below to subscribe and receive new essays in your inbox: