There have been many low points in the course of President Joe Biden’s unconditional backing of Israel’s razing of Gaza the past year — the mass murder of tens of thousands of Palestinians first among them. But we keep discovering new ones. As the fallout from the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) September 6 murder of American activist Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi continues to billow out, it’s become undeniable that not only the Israeli government was lying about how she was killed but that the Biden administration has been too.

The administration’s immediate reaction to the murder was bad enough: silence, followed by a series of emotionless insistences to wait for more information, a world away from the instant outrage and threats that the discovery of the body of US hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin, killed by Hamas a few days earlier, had triggered. But now it’s even worse.

The Biden administration has accepted and now backs Israel’s claim that the shooting was merely an accident, with the president calling it “a tragic error resulting from an unnecessary escalation” in a statement on Eygi’s death (released, unlike with Goldberg-Polin, two days after it happened). Talking off the cuff to reporters, Biden went further, claiming the IDF bullet had simply “ricocheted off the ground” and hit her. (This is all on top of the insult of multiple White House officials not learning to pronounce Eygi’s name properly, and the fact that Biden has not bothered to call up and talk to her family).

This has all now, predictably, been proven to be lies. Three forensic experts who reviewed the autopsy report of Eygi prepared by the Palestinian Authority (the entity that collaborates with Israel to govern the West Bank, and which is dominated by Hamas’s bitter political rival), told Middle East Eye its results indicate the sniper’s bullet was a direct shot to the activist’s head — not, in other words, a ricochet.

Meanwhile, based on its review of video and photo evidence and the accounts of thirteen eyewitnesses, the Washington Post has determined that Eygi was not killed during a “violent riot” where the IDF fired at the “key instigator” and accidentally hit her instead. Rather, it found that Eygi had been killed more than half an hour after the height of tensions during the protest, and twenty minutes after demonstrators had moved down the road far from Israeli troops, during a period of calm.

Let this sink in: not only is the US government handing weapons and unconditional backing to a foreign country that regularly kills American citizens with impunity; its president is now also lying about it to cover for the foreign military responsible.

The Biden administration’s unconditional backing for Israel’s mass slaughter of Palestinians — an extermination campaign that experts are warning could leave as much as a quarter of Gaza’s population dead by the end of the year — is the most objectionable thing about its Israel policy. But its shameful behavior, and that of most other elected officials in Washington, around Eygi’s killing might be the most revealing measure of just how disturbingly servile both this White House and the entire US political class is to Israel.

It should go without saying that there is no other country on earth that would continue to get fawning US praise and support, let alone more US weapons, after killing multiple American citizens in cold blood — specifically, three in the West Bank since last October alone. And no US administration would be caught dead making excuses and dissembling to cover up those murders, nor would it be allowed to get away with it by the press and its political opposition if it did.

Just think about how long the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, survived for years as a major scandal in Washington, or the eruption of outrage at the fake news about Russia merely paying the Taliban to kill US troops in Afghanistan. Or you can look at how much attention and anger Hamas’s killing and kidnapping of US citizens over the past year has garnered, including as recently as two weeks ago.

Yet Eygi’s murder, while not entirely ignored, is effectively being allowed to drift into oblivion, with her name settling into the ever-growing list of US citizens killed by a country many US politicians (incorrectly) rhapsodize as a close US ally. Only three members of Congress have called for an actual independent investigation into Eygi’s death, all of them from her home state of Washington, with the Biden administration happy to accept whatever the Israeli government determines after it investigates itself for the crime. The politicians who bleat about “America First” are completely silent. The Morning Joe program — which has covered at length the plight of US citizens held hostage by Hamas, and whose cohosts was nearly in tears reporting on the Israeli American hostage killed — has mentioned her murder exactly once, off-handedly and emotionlessly, without even saying her name.

While the Washington establishment may not care, it’s incumbent on any reasonable, thinking American to ask themselves what exactly they and their country are getting out of their government’s bizarre relationship with Israel, which is carrying out unspeakable horrors every day, further destroying America’s global reputation, threatening to drag it into war, inciting potential terrorism against them, and even murdering them directly — all with the help of weapons and political cover from their own government.

Then they should ask themselves, why is it being allowed to continue?