This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
From Gaza to the West Bank to the Israeli-Lebanese borderlands, it's been a genuine nightmare. The devastation in Gaza remains surreal and almost impossible to take in. Housing, hospitals, schools, religious institutions, you name it -- they're all now a "maze of rubble" while the fighting just goes on (and on and on) with Palestinians (and far smaller numbers of Israelis) still dying daily. The normally cited death toll of Gazans now sits at 38,000 (with untold thousands more buried under the rubble or in mass graves); the death toll of Israeli soldiers is far more modest. It's been nine months of intense war on a stretch of land that, unimaginably enough, is just 25 miles long with -- despite some negotiations now underway -- no end yet in sight. Having fought their way in a devastating fashion from the northern reaches of Gaza to its southern border, Israeli forces are now returning to areas they've already largely destroyed to do yet more damage, even as the possibility of another war on Israel's northern border with Lebanon seems to be revving up, and conditions on the West Bank are growing far worse.
It's all hard to take in. Had you been told that such a set of events would happen before they began, my guess is that you wouldn't have believed it possible. Yet here we are while, in our world, the very idea of supporting a "cease fire" in Gaza, once a major focus of attention at the United Nations, seems to have more or less disappeared. And this was the world in which, as TomDispatch regular Nan Levinson explains today, U.S. Air Force Senior Airman Aaron Bushnell set himself afire in protest (having made out a will leaving what money he had to the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund). It's hard to imagine a more extreme act -- the decision to quite literally obliterate yourself to make a point, destroy your own life to emphasize the nightmarish acts of others while trying to end a horror beyond compare.
Let Levinson take you into just such a world (which also happens to be ours) and make some sense of it. Sigh. Tom
When Too Much Is Not Enough
Moral Passion and the Extremes of Protest
By Nan Levinson
It began with Aaron Bushnell and a visceral response of mine: Why would anyone do such a thing?
Bushnell was the 25-year-old active-duty airman who set himself ablaze on February 25th in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., to protest that country's brutal war in Gaza. The first question was tough enough, but his dramatic and deadly action also brought to mind other questions that have occupied my thinking, research, and writing in these last several years: What spurs someone to such an unyielding, ultimate commitment to a cause? What kind of political action is actually effective?
When the campus protests over the bloodbath in Gaza exploded shortly after Bushnell's act, those questions came to seem even more pressing to me.
And not only was I not alone in my interest in Bushnell's act, he wasn't even the first American to self-immolate over the fate of the Palestinians. Last December, an unidentified woman set herself on fire outside the Israeli consulate in Atlanta, apparently in a similar protest. She survived, just barely. (In April, a man who self-immolated across from the courthouse in Manhattan where Donald Trump was on trial for illegally trying to influence the 2016 election seemed aggrieved about other things.)
Three incidents, of course, do not an epidemic make, but they do attract attention. So, the phenomenon of self-immolation stayed in the news for a while.
Bushnell live-streamed his action, which was quickly posted on the social media platform Twitch (though that video was soon taken down there). As of this writing, however, it's still up at Reddit. It opens on the early afternoon of a clear February day, with Bushnell in combat fatigues walking resolutely toward the Israeli embassy. He had emailed some independent news outlets about his protest and, as he walks, he says, "I am an active-duty member of the U.S. Air Force, and I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I'm about to engage in an extreme act of protest but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it's not extreme at all."
He then props up his cell phone on the pavement, pours some flammable liquid over his head, pulls his cap down, and flicks a lighter on around his ankles. When his uniform doesn't ignite, he lights the pool of liquid surrounding him. It erupts into flames, which climb his body. Yelling "Free Palestine," he bucks and moans in what must be unbearable pain before collapsing on the ground. Police and Secret Service agents rush over with fire extinguishers. One points a gun at the crumpled, still-flaming body and yells at him to get on the ground. Off-camera, another responds, "I don't need guns, I need fire extinguishers!" After the video ends, Bushnell will be loaded into an ambulance and taken to a hospital, where he will soon die. In its only response, it seems, the Israeli embassy will report that none of its staff were injured.
In the following weeks, third-party presidential candidates Cornel West and Jill Stein will express solidarity with Bushnell; vigils honoring him will be held in several American cities, including Portland, Oregon, where members of the antiwar veterans group About Face will burn their uniforms in his memory; the Palestinian town of Jericho will name a street after him; another active-duty airman will be inspired to stage a hunger strike in front of the White House and, when he's ordered back to his base in Spain, two fellow members of Veterans For Peace will begin a hunger strike in his stead.
Admirable? Unhinged?
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
