He will not go down in history like Alexei Navalny, the Russian opponent buried in Moscow on Friday. Nor like the young Mohamed Bouazizi or Jan Palach, who set themselves on fire, just like him, in protest against the cruelty of the world. But Aaron Bushnell deserves a few lines, maybe even some tribute.
Who were these individuals? Many will ask. Bouazizi was the 26-year-old Tunisian whose immolation in December 2010 precipitated the beginning of the Arab Spring. Palach was the 20-year-old Czech student who burned himself alive in January 1969 to denounce the Russian invasion, which a few months earlier had crushed the anti-communist rebellion known as the Prague Spring.
Bushnell gave his life in the same way a week ago, with the difference that his life has nothing to do with spring and everything to do with the eternal winter that is experienced in Israel-Palestine. Another difference would be the altruism that motivated him. Bushnell, an American soldier, was raised in the Christian faith in a remote area of rural Massachusetts – having little to do with Palestinians, Arabs or Islam.
Last Sunday afternoon, Bushnell walked with determined calm toward the entrance to the Israeli embassy in Washington. He was dressed as a military man and was carrying a mobile phone in his hand with which he filmed his last words.
“I am an active member of the 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 suffering in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it is not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be the normal.”
He placed his cell phone so he could continue filming himself, doused his head with a flammable liquid that he had brought in a water bottle and set himself on fire with a lighter. He died hours later in a hospital. She was 25 years old.
What to say? Well, let's first go to what should not be said, what numerous politicians and commentators in the United States said without any proof: that Bushnell was mentally ill. No one in the United States has accused Navalni, whose death was a martyrdom in slow motion, or Bouazizi or Palach in their day, of being mentally ill. The consensus in the American establishment is that all three were heroes.
Bushnell will be a hero to those who shared his cause, but not to so many within his country, where many will say, with some reason, that the doors were not closed to free expression or change through voting. His Facebook and Reddit posts were fierce in their condemnation of the Israeli invasion of Gaza. He claimed that no Israeli was innocent, that all were complicit in the oppression of the Palestinians.
Bouazizi and Palach did not enjoy that freedom, but what Bushnell had in common with them was that he had lost hope. Protesting on social networks was not going to change anything, not even the politics of his country – that idea of “normality” that he denounced in his last message before dying. Bushnell knew well that the end-of-year elections in the United States, with Joseph Biden and Donald Trump as candidates, would not offer many alternatives. Biden does not cease his support for Israel despite the infanticide carried out by Beniamin Netanyahu's regime. Trump's pro-Israel fervor is even greater. At least Biden doesn't admire Netanyahu; Trump, yes. So, what difference did it make to Bushnell to have the right to vote if, regarding the issue he was most passionate about in the world, it didn't matter which of the two occupied the White House?
Belonging to his country's armed forces, having sworn to defend the country with his life, only fueled his frustration and anger. He was going to give his life, yes, but not for his country, of which he ended up feeling ashamed, but for what he considered a higher cause, the defense of a universal value: you will not kill children, nor arm those who kill them. To be a United States soldier was to be complicit in a horror, as he said in his final message, that he could no longer bear.
So what to say about Bushnell? Express admiration for the moral purity of his gesture? Why not? It was something akin to a generous Christian impulse that inspired him to give his life to redeem the sins of the world, or those of his country. The problem is that in the real world the sins continue, in the real world that Israelis and Palestinians inhabit, Bushnell's sacrifice will not serve to reduce cruelty or human suffering. His rebellion was more metaphysical than earthly.
Palestinian mothers who have lost children will appreciate your gesture, perhaps. Even though he doesn't seem to have understood it, so do some Israeli mothers. And many Jews around the world, for sure. But too soon Bushnell will be forgotten, the memory of him drowned in blood and more blood.
The Palestinian movement Hamas, with its own massacre of innocents on October 7, and the Netanyahu regime, with its ferocious response, have ensured what they both want, that the cycle of revenge exterminates any possibility of a peaceful solution to the conflict. longest in the world.
In the sector of the Israeli population that votes for Netanyahu, the collective memory of the Nazi Holocaust represents a license to kill in defense of the Jewish cause. The massacre of October 7 was understood by those same people as a holocaust II, ergo the merciless destruction of the place from which evil came.
The same logic applies to the Palestinians. Gaza's ordeal will be remembered for years and years as its own holocaust, as its license to kill Israelis. Today's Gaza orphans and their children will see the uniform of Israel's soldiers as European Jews in the 1930s and 1940s saw the uniforms of Hitler's soldiers. An eye for an eye, as Gandhi said, and everyone ends up blind.
Bushnell thought he saw the problem with crystal clarity. He gave his life for principles in their essence admirable: you shall not kill; No man is an island; The suffering of one is the suffering of all. But most likely his sacrifice will be remembered more than anything as a cry of despair, as a gesture that eloquently and faithfully portrays the mental illness of that God-forsaken part of the world.
