Thoughts on Aaron Bushnell's Self-Immolation
As the situation in Gaza deteriorates further, it feels like nothing will stop the destruction.
Today, I’m going to talk about Aaron Bushnell and the power and context of his actions. This blog has focused on spiritual development, on lessons and ideas I am learning and engaging with. My heart breaks every single morning as the headlines from Gaza get more and more sickening.
Children have begun to die of malnutrition in the besieged North Gaza where aid has not been able to flow and, this morning, we awoke to news that over 100 Palestinians were killed this morning and nearly 1,000 injured when they were lined up to receive needed aid - fired upon by Israeli forces. Die if you don’t seek out food, die if you do.
This on top of the fact nearly every western country has pulled funding from the UNRWA, the only organization with the infrastructure and capacity to provide aid throughout Gaza. Months ago, Israel asserted that a small number of UNRWA assisted in the October 7th attacks - Israel has still not provided evidence of this participation to the global community. The US Congress will soon vote to permanently ban funding for UNRWA.
On the political end, we witness Israel escalate the very actions the world (other than the US government) is asking them to stop, including the provisional requests from the ICJ. Israeli politicians have made very clear that a two-state solution will not happen, and thousands of new settlement homes have been approved in the West Bank along with upscaled attacks by settlers and Israeli forces. Rhetoric indicates a looming invasion of Rafah during the holy month of Ramadan, all while any hesitation on Israel’s part to begin only makes the conditions of famine across Gaza even worse than before.
The Biden administration was trying to tout that talks for a temporary ceasefire were close to completion, but this was obviously disingenuous from the start. Israel has said they will not agree to a permanent ceasefire and Hamas has said they will not agree to anything but a permanent ceasefire. In other words, there was never common ground to agree upon - all just political posturing to seem like the US was the reasonable, diplomatic partner in the room. Netanyahu has made Hamas’ reasoning very clear - he has explicitly stated an operation in Rafah would happen no matter what, even if a temporary ceasefire was reached. Why would anyone agree to such a deal?
This only scratches the surface of what is happening, but it is becoming clear that the death toll in Gaza is at-risk of exploding and that the leaders of the Israeli government are openly declaring this as their very intent. Further, that United States efforts to intervene are toothless and disingenuous - as the US continues to provide military assistance all while demanding the most superficial of actions, such as giving Israel one-month to sign a letter saying US munitions won’t be used to commit war crimes. In one-month, the 500,000 people in North Gaza will starve to death.
When the war ends, for many there will be no homes, schools, hospitals, or towns for people to return to. This doesn’t even begin to acknowledge the toll that disease and famine are currently having upon the Gazan people and what that means for rebuilding the region.
If it is not abundantly clear yet that the Israeli regime’s objective is to annex all of Palestinian territory, then perhaps a wake-up call is in order.
And this is where Aaron Bushnell enters the picture, who self-immolated in front of the Israeli embassy this past week in protest of Israel’s operation in Gaza and US support for it. These were his final words:
I am an active-duty member of the United States Air Force, and I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I am 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. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal. Free Palestine.
His actions are not without precedent - he is the second American to self-immolate in protest of the war in Gaza. In 1963, Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc self-immolated on the streets of Saigon in response to the escalating persecution of Buddhists by the (you guessed it) United States-backed regime in South Vietnam.
Venerated Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn described Quang Duc’s actions as follows:
The press spoke then of suicide, but in the essence, it is not. It is not even a protest. What the monks said in the letters they left before burning themselves aimed only at alarming, at moving the hearts of the oppressors, and at calling the attention of the world to the suffering endured then by the Vietnamese. To burn oneself by fire is to prove that what one is saying is of the utmost importance…. The Vietnamese monk, by burning himself, says with all his strength and determination that he can endure the greatest of sufferings to protect his people…. To express will by burning oneself, therefore, is not to commit an act of destruction but to perform an act of construction, that is, to suffer and to die for the sake of one’s people. This is not suicide.
Suicide is an act of self-destruction, having as causes the following: (1) lack of courage to live and to cope with difficulties; (2) defeat by life and loss of all hope; (3) desire for nonexistence….. The monk who burns himself has lost neither courage nor hope; nor does he desire nonexistence. On the contrary, he is very courageous and hopeful and aspires for something good in the future. He does not think that he is destroying himself; he believes in the good fruition of his act of self-sacrifice for the sake of others…. I believe with all my heart that the monks who burned themselves did not aim at the death of their oppressors but only at a change in their policy. Their enemies are not man. [Their enemies] are intolerance, fanaticism, dictatorship, cupidity, hatred, and discrimination which lie within the heart of man.
See, here in the United States, we have a very euphemistic relationship when it comes to death. We, as a nation, really try to keep death out of sight and out of mind. We still have over 100,000 people each year dying from overdose and it barely scratches the political discourse. Yet, our life in the United States, where many of us are largely insulated from the carnage of war and death, is actively built upon war and death across the globe. The US foreign policy is a policy of destruction and it has been since it established itself as the “world’s policeman” in the wake of World War II. From Korea to Iran to Vietnam to Central America to Afghanistan to Iraq to Israel - the United States has continuously left entire entire regions of the world in desperate situations.
Perhaps, we shouldn’t take too much pride in being the world’s police - when Aaron Bushnell was burning in front of the Israeli embassy, an officer pulled a gun on him, which feels like the most American response to such an incident. This is sort of what the United States is like across the globe - we see a fire and we pull a gun on it. It is why there is so much animosity globally towards our own government - because our government brings guns to put out fires.
The leaders of the United States enact a foreign policy of destruction and, yet, these same politicians do not have to even witness the wars, the carnage, the outcomes. We are all, in the US, insulated from witnessing the reality of our own nation’s actions across the globe. For, if we witnessed it, if we awoke to it, we would not be able to abide it, it would tear us open, and we would cry for it to stop.
What Aaron Bushnell did was say: Look! Look upon the violence of US policy. Bear witness to the reality of tens of thousands dead, of hundreds of thousands starving, of entire city blocks destroyed and demolished, of historic mosques and churches bombed to nothing, of children dying of starvation, of families making bread with animal feed to survive, of people being shot while they line up for needed aid or while trying to enter a hospital.
For, the United States is the only nation in the world that is preventing the international community from addressing this conflict through diplomacy - once again using it’s veto power in the UN, saying that a UN ceasefire resolution would inhibit negotiations for a ceasefire… even though, (as we’ve discussed), those negotiations have been going nowhere.
There appears to be no route to actually get the Biden administration to listen. Voters went to the ballot box in Michigan and made it clear that Biden will lose the upcoming election if the policy of supporting the destruction of Gaza continues - how effective this form of electoral protest will work is still to be seen. Unsurprisingly, many have even denounced this form of protest! If protests at the ballot box aren’t welcome, then how is anybody supposed to protest anything!
Bushnell, no matter how you feel about it, through the extremity of his final act, demanded that we all gaze upon the very terror being advanced by US policy, the very insanity that US leadership perpetrate across the globe. It doesn’t really matter what you think of him, it only matters that you look and truly see what is happening. His actions asked us to look, to not turn away, to bear witness to, to open our eyes. Because nothing else seems to be working…
May his memory be a blessing.
Excellent post, thank you.
We, most, here in Ireland are keening with the grief of what our relations are doing to the Palestinian people and the pain of it is only dwarfed by the helplessness felt to stop it. Stop the US war machine grinding its way through all hope.