Today Israeli forces killed Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, a Turkish-US citizen, in the West Bank, shooting her in the head as she protested one of the country’s growing and accelerating illegal settlements in the Palestinian territory. The US and Israeli governments are claiming that it is unclear who killed her, but as multiple US outlets report, eyewitnesses and Palestinian officials in the territory say she was killed by Israeli gunfire, and the Israeli military admits that it shot at the protesters.

Before we look at the fallout to this latest incident, the latest in a lengthy history of Israeli forces attacking and killing US citizens, let’s take a look at the response to a very similar one that happened just recently.

A week ago, another US citizen, this time one holding dual Israeli citizenship, was killed in the Middle East: twenty-three-year-old Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who was one of the six Israeli hostages executed by Hamas last weekend. The discovery of their bodies, and the realization that one of them was an American, rightfully set off a wave of outrage and grief among US politicians and commentators.

“Make no mistake, Hamas leaders will pay for these crimes,” President Joe Biden said in a statement the day the news broke, calling his murder “as tragic as it is reprehensible,” and professing that he was “heartbroken,” “devastated and outraged,” and was grieving “more deeply than words can express.”

“Hamas is an evil terrorist organization. With these murders, Hamas has even more American blood on its hands. I strongly condemn Hamas’ continued brutality, and so must the entire world,” Vice President Kamala Harris said the same day, adding that she has “no higher priority than the safety of American citizens, wherever they are in the world.”

“It reveals, yet again, the ugly truth about the vile, depraved ideology that Hamas represents,” US ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield later told the UN Security Council. “No member of this Council would tolerate their citizens being taken hostage and murdered. . . . The United States strongly condemns Hamas’ brutality. It is long, long past time this Council do the same.”

Outside of the administration, members of Congress and other political figures lined up to similarly condemn the killing in the strongest terms, even implying that a US military response was in order.

“What are they going to pay? I mean, what’s the price?” asked uber-hawk Sen. Lindsay Graham.

“I would urge [Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu] to finish the job against Hamas, which is exactly what Kamala Harris and Joe Biden should’ve done from the very beginning,” said Sen. Tom Cotton.

“Hersh’s brutal murder by Iran-backed Hamas cannot be ignored,” Sen. Joni Ernst said in a statement. “This is a barbaric regime that has been emboldened to celebrate the death of Americans when they should be cowering in fear of the response awaiting them for spilling American blood.”

“Hamas executes six hostages in cold blood. Who gets blamed? Everyone but Hamas,” complained Rep. Richie Torres, seemingly ignoring the wall-to-wall denunciations of Hamas the incident had sparked.

Donald Trump’s former deputy national security advisor Victoria Coates charged that Hamas leadership wouldn’t actually pay for that and other crimes because “under Biden-Harris the US taxpayer pays them to commit them,” a gesture at the talking point popular on the Right that the Biden administration’s reversal of Trump’s unjustified Iran sanctions was tantamount to funding Hamas.

Some commentators called for, at minimum, far-reaching legal measures against the group, if not also advocating for continued military force against it.

“Hamas executed one of its American hostages. That requires an American response,” said Richard Goldberg, senior advisor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “We need to bring the hammer down on Hamas and all its sponsors and enablers,” he later told the New York Post.

Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt called for going beyond the Biden Justice Department’s indictments of Hamas leaders that came in the wake of the hostage killings, saying that Hamas had “violated the most basic norms of our society,” and that “like al Qaeda, ISIS and other terror organizations, it must be eradicated.”

“Hamas’s execution of [Goldberg-Polin] should not be treated as merely an issue of concern for Israel but as a brazen act against the United States,” was the response from the right-wing National Review’s editors, in a piece titled, “Hamas Must Pay for Murdering an American Hostage.” They warned that “it would send a terrible signal if the response from the Biden-Harris administration were to move closer to Hamas’s position in cease-fire negotiations. Instead, Biden must follow through on his declaration that Hamas will pay.”

It was not only the right-wing and Israel-right-or-wrong fringe that called for tough action. Just today, the Boston Globe editorial board likewise called for the Biden administration to put pressure on US allies to arrest and extradite Hamas’s leadership, concluding it would “send a powerful message that anyone who threatens the lives of American citizens must pay for their crimes.”

So that was the response to the murder of a US-Israeli citizen. This is hardly surprising: ensuring the safety of its citizens abroad, and justice for them when they are harmed, is one of the most basic responsibilities of any government. And while no human life is worth more than any other, and the taking of any innocent life is an outrage no matter whose it is, we understand that in the world as it exists, states reserve a special level of fury when their own people are harmed.

With all that in mind, here is how, so far, the US government has responded to Israel’s murder of the Turkish American Eygi. Here’s State Department spokesperson Matt Miller:

We are aware of the tragic death of an American citizen, Ayşenur Eygi, today in the West Bank. We offer our deepest condolences to her family and loved ones. We are urgently gathering more information about the circumstances of her death, and will have more to say as we learn more. We have no higher priority than the safety and security of American citizens.

And here’s National Security Council spokesperson Sean Savett:

We are deeply disturbed by the tragic death of an American citizen, Ayşenur Egzi Eygi, today in the West Bank and our hearts go out to her family and loved ones. We have reached out to the Government of Israel to ask for more information and request an investigation into the incident.

And . . . that’s it.

No statement from the president, vice president, or any administration official. No condemnation of the unnamed killers, not even a tepid one, nor is there any vow that they will be brought to justice.

In fact, reading the US statements, you wouldn’t even know that Eygi was killed by anyone — just that she tragically, mysteriously died, somehow. Nor has she received the warm, lengthy tributes to her life, character, and future dreams that officials rightly included in their statements on Goldberg-Polin. While officials went to great lengths to demonstrate their grief over his death, the response to Eygi is markedly emotionless.

Unlike Hamas, whose guilt in the killing of the hostages was immediately assumed, US spokespeople have chosen to not just muddy the waters around who’s guilty of this murder, but, absurdly, to ask the prime suspect, Israel, to investigate itself. Meanwhile, the fiery demands from commentators to “bring the hammer down” on who’s responsible are absent, as is the outrage over the killing of an American and the dire warnings about what would happen if this is allowed to stand.

By contrast, here’s how the foreign ministry of the other country Eygi was a citizen of, Turkey, responded: “We condemn this murder committed by Netanyahu government.”

It could not be more obvious that, unlike the (far from virtuous) government of Turkey, the United States government simply couldn’t care less that Israel, which it lavishly arms and financially props up, killed one of the US’s own citizens. That might sound like hyperbole, but we now have years and years of evidence to that effect, with Israel killing one US citizen after another with not just complete impunity and no real condemnation from US officials, but the US government at times actively covering for the murders.

In fact, we could just look at the last couple of weeks alone, when multiple US citizens have been attacked and shot by Israeli forces and settlers at the exact same protest that Eygi was killed at, and US officials not only didn’t utter a peep about it, they didn’t even bother contacting and checking in on them.

Or think back to when Israel last killed a US citizen during this current war, in April, when it carried out three separate attacks on a convoy of aid workers who had informed the Israeli military about their movements and killed a US-Canadian dual national in the process. That outrageous incident briefly ignited the kind of broad domestic outrage that months worth of exterminating Palestinian families had failed to do, and then it just . . . went away.

The fact is that both the US media and politicians have, through their silence, selective outrage, and inaction, tacitly created a hierarchy of human life throughout this war. And while Palestinians are at the very bottom of that hierarchy, even American and Israeli lives cease to matter if they happen to have the wrong ethnic background, or if they happen to be killed or endangered by Israel.

The end result is that the Israeli government effectively has a green light to kill Americans whenever it wants — a green light, and the means to do so, since these murders are supplied and underwritten by the US government itself.

But maybe we should let a US official have the last word. Here is what Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield said just two days ago to the UN Security Council about Hamas’s murder of Goldberg-Polin and the five other hostages: “From its massacre of 1,200 people to its weaponization of sexual violence, these latest murders confirm that Hamas is a terrorist organization.”

Given that the Israeli military has itself now killed more than forty-thousand people, engaged in sickening sexual torture, and now also killed US citizens, what does that say about the Israel Defense Forces? And why is the US government still giving such an institution billions of dollars in military aid?