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‘Taking sides’: The international activists for Palestine Israel targets

US Turkish woman’s killing last month puts a spotlight on international activists’ efforts to expose Israeli violence.

Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, a Turkish-American activist, gained international attention after being fatally shot by an Israeli soldier during a protest against illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. The incident, which occurred a month ago, sparked widespread condemnation and made headlines worldwide.

However, on the same day near the city of Nablus, another tragedy took place that received far less attention—a 13-year-old Palestinian girl named Bana Laboom was also killed, yet her death went largely unnoticed by the global community.

Huwaida Arraf, an American Palestinian activist and co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), the organization with which Eygi had traveled to Palestine, highlighted the stark difference in the media coverage of these killings. Arraf noted that this disparity reflects a troubling double standard when it comes to the lives of Palestinians compared to foreigners.

The ISM and similar groups have long used this imbalance in global attention to draw greater scrutiny to Israeli violence. While international activists understand that their foreign passports offer limited protection, they hope to leverage their status to bring awareness to the ongoing violence and to support Palestinians resisting the occupation.

Arraf emphasized the challenge of navigating this system, explaining that it reveals a hierarchy in how lives are valued. “It was always difficult to decide how much to engage with the inherently racist system that values different lives unequally,” she said, underscoring that Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim lives are often marginalized.

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