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

Aysenur Ezgi Eygi‘s name has spread around the world in the month since an Israeli soldier shot the Turkish American activist in the head during a protest against illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Yet while Eygi’s killing made international headlines and sparked global condemnation, the killing of a 13-year-old Palestinian girl named Bana Laboom – on the same day, also near the city of Nablus – went largely unnoticed.

The disparity in attention paid to Israeli killings of Palestinians and foreigners is not lost on Huwaida Arraf, an American Palestinian activist and co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), the group with which Eygi travelled to Palestine.

In fact, it is a double standard that groups such as the ISM have sought to use for years.

While increasingly aware that their foreign passports offer only a measure of protection and no guarantee of safety, international activists seek to leverage their status to expose and bring greater scrutiny to Israeli violence and support Palestinians in resisting the occupation.

“It was always a struggle, how much to play into and utilise the very racist Israeli system that places different values on different lives,” Arraf told Al Jazeera. “You know that they don’t really value Palestinian, Arab, Muslim lives.”

ISM members lie in front of an Israeli army jeep in Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, in 2001 [Reuters]

History of solidarity

Eygi was one of more than a dozen foreign activists killed by Israel in the last two decades.

Like the tens of thousands of Palestinians also killed over the same period, there has been little consequence for the soldiers who killed them.

The Israeli army said after an initial probe that Eygi was shot “unintentionally” and that it was launching a further investigation.

Turkey said it plans to probe the killing, but the United States has rejected calls for an independent, US-led probe, deferring instead to the Israeli one.

Israeli forces have killed several US citizens in recent years, but US President Joe Biden’s administration has consistently rejected calls for independent investigations.

“We fear that if this pattern of impunity does not end with Ms Eygi, it will only continue to escalate,” two legislators from Washington state, where Eygi lived, wrote to the administration.

The family & loved ones of Aysenur Ezgi Eygi—the WA state resident killed in the West Bank—deserve to know their government has done everything it can to fully understand what led to her killing & pursue accountability.
@RepJayapal & I are calling on @POTUS for a full, US-led… pic.twitter.com/kxtS9thuej

— Senator Patty Murray (@PattyMurray) September 11, 2024

Eygi’s killing has put a spotlight on the role of international activists in Palestine and their efforts to expose the violence of Israel’s occupation.

International solidarity with Palestine has lasted decades, with left-wing and anti-colonial movements from around the world aligning with the Palestinian resistance struggle as far back as 1948.

Starting around the beginning of the second Intifada in the early 2000s, a different sort of international solidarity took hold in the occupied Palestinian territory.

Foreign nationals began travelling to Palestine in greater numbers specifically to document the realities of life under Israeli occupation, participate in protests, attempt to stop home demolitions or accompany Palestinians to their lands in an effort to protect them from Israeli settler and military attacks.

ISM – now one of several similar groups – largely pioneered the strategy, starting as a loose network of international and Israeli activists who were already in Palestine during the second Intifada.

Israeli forces arrest a protester during a joint demonstration by Israeli, Palestinian and international activists in the West Bank village of Bilin in 2005 [Goran Tomasevic/Reuters]

As Israeli attacks intensified, the group started stationing international activists in Palestinian homes targeted by the Israeli military, then notified foreign embassies and media of their presence.

“We just put out a press release noting that there were internationals in this area where Israel is firing tanks at civilian homes, as a way to get international embassies involved,” Arraf explained.

“[W]e focused on where the Israelis were carrying out military operations to try to put internationals there and in a sense raise the stakes on Israel, and get international embassies and governments more involved,” she said.

At the time, Arraf noted, Palestinian voices were a rarity in foreign media coverage of the region, and having internationals on the ground “provided an opportunity to talk about what was happening and dispel a lot of the stereotypes and the narrative that had been built up about Israel being the victim”.

ISM soon started calling for people to go to Palestine and get involved. About 50 people responded to the first call for volunteers, Arraf said.

A second call drew about 100 – primarily Europeans and North Americans, for whom travel to the region was easier.

The activists tore down military roadblocks and marched on checkpoints. When the Israeli military imposed a curfew on Palestinians, foreign activists would break the curfew when someone needed food or medicine.

“We would hold our passports in front of Israeli tanks,” said Arraf. “Because Palestinians who broke the curfew were getting shot.”

The strategy seemed effective for a while, though local communities were sometimes suspicious of international activists. Israeli authorities also detained, deported and banned several of them.

Arraf stressed that activists would follow Palestinians’ lead and only go where their presence was requested – the ISM remained a Palestinian-led movement, she said.

That was at times difficult. Arraf recalled the example of a village that Palestinian residents had fled after a settler attack; a group of international activists accompanied the residents back, but then realised they would have to stay to avoid future attacks.

“We didn’t want it to be so that you can’t do anything without an international there,” she said.

Activists killed

Then, in March 2003, an Israeli soldier drove a bulldozer over 23-year-old American ISM activist Rachel Corrie, crushing her to death. Corrie had been in Rafah, attempting to stop a home demolition.

Her death prompted widespread condemnation – but ultimately, there were no consequences for Israel’s relationship with the US, its top ally.

In April of that same year, an Israeli soldier in Jenin in the occupied West Bank shot another American ISM volunteer – Brian Avery – in the face, causing permanent injuries. A month later, an Israeli soldier killed Welsh journalist James Miller who was filming a documentary in Gaza.

The next year, Tom Hurndall, a British photographer and volunteer with the ISM in Rafah, was shot in the head while trying to shield two children from Israeli fire. He died nine months later.

Lebanese protesters with a poster of Rachel Corrie during a demonstration near the US embassy in Beirut in 2010 [Bilal Hussein/AP Photo]

The killings deeply shook the small community of international activists, but only reinforced their determination to stay in Palestine.

“It did cause us to re-evaluate really how effective it was … if now Israel is not only willing to kill an international, but almost blame them for their own death?” Arraf said.

“But we couldn’t abandon Palestinians. We were going to continue providing our solidarity, documenting and taking stories back home. It’s also a very human message, person to person, for people’s morale to really know that they’re not alone.”

Foreign activists have continued going to Palestine, even after Israeli forces launched a deadly raid on a humanitarian flotilla seeking to break Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza in 2010.

Ten activists were killed in the assault on the Mavi Marmara; nine were Turkish citizens and one was Turkish American.

Turkish prosecutors issued arrest warrants against four Israeli military commanders in connection to the raid, but the two countries eventually settled the case, Israel agreeing to pay compensation to the victims’ families in exchange for Turkey dropping its pursuit of the Israeli officials.

Pro-Palestinian activists from Turkey, wearing life jackets, hold a news conference on board the Mavi Marmara on May 30, 2010 [Erhan Sevenler/Reuters]

After the flotilla incident, Arraf said, organisers told those who wanted to travel to Palestine that they couldn’t guarantee their safety.

“You still had hundreds of people come, willing to go, despite everything that Israel is putting in our way,” she said. Even after Ayigi’s killing last month, one of her students wrote to Arraf to tell her she planned to travel to Palestine.

‘Bring attention’

Sami Huraini, a Palestinian activist from Masafer Yatta in the southern occupied West Bank, grew up around international activists.

A group of them have lived on a near-permanent basis for two decades in his hometown Tuwani, a rural community surrounded by ever-expanding Israeli settlements.

He credits that international presence with bringing scrutiny to Israeli actions in Masafer Yatta, where dozens of Palestinian communities have been fighting for years to remain on their lands after Israel unilaterally declared a large swath of it a “firing zone” and ordered their expulsion.

“This movement has helped bring attention to this place and our situation – the settler violence and military harassment we live under,” Huraini told Al Jazeera. “It’s good to have an outsider testify to the daily reality that we see and we live.”

A protester argues with an Israeli soldier during a demonstration against illegal Israeli settlements, in Masafer Yatta, September 17, 2022 [Mussa Qawasma/Reuters]

Huraini stressed that settler and military incursions into Masafer Yatta remain frequent – and often violent – despite the international activists documenting them.

However, when there are fewer foreigners around, as was the case during the COVID-19 pandemic, the situation for locals is far more dangerous. “If it’s Palestinians alone, then settlers do whatever they want,” he said. “It can be very bad.”

The presence of international activists in Masafer Yatta has become such a staple that farmers and shepherds tending to their land and animals in areas that come under frequent settler attacks always take two foreigners with them to film any encounters and offer a measure of protection, Huraini explained.

When not working alongside Palestinians, he added, foreign activists “are part of the community” in Masafer Yatta, said Huraini.

“They are joining us at our weddings, they are joining us in our sad moments, they are joining us every moment. They are not tourists for one day. They are here with us, they are living our lives, we’re having breakfast together, lunch, harvesting in the field.”

Resisting Israeli colonialism

While foreign activists stay in Palestine for varied lengths of time – the ISM recommends a minimum of three weeks for each stay – others, including several Israelis, are there to stay.

Jonathan Pollak, an Israeli activist who was at the demonstration where Eygi was killed last month, has spent years working with the Palestinian Popular Committees, a grassroots Palestinian movement that organises actions and protests against the Israeli occupation.

He said foreign activists do more than offer protection or bear witness.

“The idea always was that people would come and be part of the resistance to Israeli colonialism,” he told Al Jazeera. “Not as some external human shield, but rather as a force within the movement.

Israeli and international activists sit in front of a bulldozer during a protest against the construction of Israel’s separation barrier in the occupied West Bank village of al-Walaja in 2011 [Bernat Armangue/ AP Photo]

“It’s not about this role of a saviour but rather how people can integrate into the struggle rather than … just being there.”

While a big part of the experience of international activists was to get a “political education” that would make their solidarity work back home more effective, he said, the primary purpose was to participate in the Palestinians’ struggle as full members of it.

“It was always about taking a political standpoint,” Pollak added. “Aysenur wasn’t here to witness, she was here taking sides.”