Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi: Her Fire For Justice and Understanding

When Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi went to the West Bank, her goal was simple: to bear witness to and stand with the Palestinian people’s struggle for equity and sovereignty, educate herself, and return home with her new knowledge. She’d pursue a graduate program and later teach about the Palestinian resistance. 

Her friends say they looked forward to her return. 

“She has this really enamoring personality,” said her friend Kelsie Nabbas. “She just has such a great laugh and a beautiful smile, and she had a way of helping people just kind of drop their walls without knowing, and just being around her was so easy and so comfortable.”

But just three days into her trip on Sept. 6, she was shot and killed near Beita, Nablus, by an Israeli sniper after a protest against illegal Israeli settlements. Beita is a Palestinian town in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. According to the United Nations Human Rights Council report in March 2023, about 700,000 Israelis are living in 279 outposts in the West Bank illegally. Israeli settlements have been deemed a violation of international law according to resolutions by the United Nations General Assembly, the United Nations Security Council, and the International Court of Justice, according to the Geneva Convention. 

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) claimed the shooting was unintentional, but Eygi’s family and friends have rejected this and are calling for an independent investigation into her death. According to eyewitness accounts, Eygi and other activists had retreated after soldiers had tear-gassed protesters. After conditions had settled down, shots were fired at the group, at which point Eygi was killed. According to The Intercept, 15 other protesters had been killed in the same area since 2021.

Friends say Eygi, who was raised in Seattle and graduated from the University of Washington (UW) in spring, always seemed to be passionate about activism. One friend said she had “fire” in her, and that her passion for education — particularly in educating herself — was the driving force that took her to the frontlines of this crisis.

High School Years

In 2014, as a high school senior, Eygi attended the Ida B. Wells School on the University of Washington campus. The school’s namesake is a Black American journalist and activist who investigated cases of white mob violence and the lynchings of Black people during the Reconstruction era. Wells also criticized the women’s suffrage movement for its exclusion of Black women and helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). 

Wells was one of four campuses of the Middle College High School program, alternative schools that supported students who were not represented well in higher education.

“The way the school approached teaching was based on the philosophy of Paulo Freire, the Brazilian philosopher and educator. … [It’s] more about looking at education as a tool for empowerment, as a tool to engage students in their struggle,” said Rogelio (Roger) Rigor, a teacher who worked at Wells for around 18 years and who helped co-found the program. He went on to describe how the students understand “their struggles are unique, but based on the result of a systemic force that’s imposed upon them, and that every struggle, though unique, is shared by the community.” 

Freire’s theory of education uses an approach called critical pedagogy, which encourages students to question the dominant structures and systems in a society. The philosopher said students should become critically aware and conscious and use that to challenge inequality. 

Former Wells school student and Eygi’s high school friend Cody Choi says they read Frederick Douglass’ autobiography and learned about climate justice. 

“I’d always cared about different social causes as a younger person, but I’d never heard it talked about in school,” Choi said. 

Eygi and Choi became friends quickly, and Eygi came to love the curriculum just as much as Choi did.

“They were always together,” Rigor said. “They worked together when we had to be at the school board meeting to protest their decision about the school.”

Eygi started at Wells during a period when the school district was wanting a more standardized approach for the school, which was met with outcry from students, parents, and teachers, including Eygi, Choi, and Rigor. Eygi and Choi dedicated themselves to fighting the school board, attending meetings, and protesting against those changes.

Despite the pair’s hard work, the school district standardized the curriculum so it no longer followed the original model centered around social justice and activism that Rigor helped found.

Fighting for Palestinian Liberation

Samah Park met Eygi shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic, and the two became best friends. Park fondly remembers Eygi asking her to make a miso soup nearly every day during Ramadan, when the two would break fast together. 

“I’d pretend to groan, but obviously I was very happy to do that for her, given that she showed a lot of her love through cooking for others,” Park said.

Nabbas says Eygi was well known for making a cinnamon baklava — she shared it with Nabbas for Ramadan. “She wouldn’t buy the store-bought Phyllo dough. She would hand-make all of it,” Nabbas said.

Park says she caught onto Eygi’s passion for justice early on in their friendship. “What I saw was her sincere belief in all life being equal and people having the same rights, for human dignity across the world,” Park said. “She was very passionate about educating herself.”

In the spring, Eygi was one of the organizers of UW’s pro-Palestinian encampment and helped negotiate terms with administrators to end it. Last November, she hosted an art market at the Young Women Empowered (Y-WE) building to raise awareness about the crisis. All funds were donated to Palestinian charities. 

“It was a beautiful event, a lot of community,” Park said. “I’m really proud of her.”

Nabbas says she tried to be a “safe haven” friend for Eygi, to give her a break from work and activism. Eygi loved Halloween, and the two would stay up late watching scary movies together. 

Still, conversations would go back to justice, liberation, and, particularly at that time, the Palestinian people. 

“One of the … things that’s resonated with me throughout our entire friendship is her drive and commitment to witnessing and observing a people’s suffering and advocating and using her voice an, in whatever capacity, [being] there for those people,” Nabbas said.

Eventually, Eygi yearned to go to Palestine as a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement. 

“She just felt like nothing would ever be enough. Nothing on American soil would be enough, not enough protests, not enough calls to government officials, not enough money,” Nabbas said. “She wanted to come back and pursue a graduate program and be able to teach about the Palestinian resistance and hold the history of Palestine in truth.”

After Eygi’s death, her friends and her family called for an independent U.S. investigation, as did Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, Reps. Pramila Jayapal and Adam Smith and nearly 100 other Congress members. Eyewitness accounts and a Washington Post investigation suggest the killing was intentional, contradicting the IDF’s preliminary investigation. Eygi’s other country of citizenship, Turkey, is investigating her death and treating the case as one of premeditated murder. The Turkish president has condemned Israel for her death. The United States has not begun an investigation. 

On Oct. 8, Rep. Jayapal’s office released another statement reaffirming her support for an independent U.S. investigation into Eygi’s killing.

“The justice that we deserve is for her to be alive right now and for her friends and family to have her back,” Nabbas said. “But since [the] Israeli military decided to take that away from us, our only option at this point, and I think the driving factor for all of us, is to push for the U.S. government to order a transparent investigation into everything, because simply allowing the Israeli military to investigate their own killing is not enough. The bare minimum would be to hold them accountable and to stop allowing them to escape with impunity.” 

The Emerald reached out to Eygi’s family, but they were not available for interviews in time for publication.

Choi recalled a conversation they had with Eygi earlier this year about their experience in advocating for an education founded in understanding and participating in social movements.

“I liked how she said it. She was like, ‘Truth tellers always have to put up with the most bullshit, like you and I,’” Choi said. “That’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot too. Things are difficult because we’re not submitting to what they’re telling us is the truth.” 

Eygi went to the West Bank to witness the truth of what is happening in Gaza, and she wanted to return to the U.S. to inform others about what she saw there. Now, her family and friends continue that legacy by investigating her death and the circumstances surrounding it.

“We can only be humbled by her action and how she has impacted the world,” Rigor said.

This Friday at the University of Washington’s Middle East Center, Eygi’s family and friends will host an evening of reflection celebrating her life and activism. The event will take place from 7 to 9 p.m. and is open to the public.