He will not go down in history like Aleksei Navalni, the Russian opposition 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 some lines, maybe even some tribute.
Who were these individuals?, some will ask. Bouazizi was the 26-year-old Tunisian who, with his immolation, precipitated, in December 2010, 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 that 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 action 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, a US soldier, was raised in the Christian faith in a remote rural area of Massachusetts - little to do with Palestinians, Arabs or Islam.
Last Sunday afternoon, Bushnell walked with determined calm to the entrance of the Israeli embassy in Washington. He was dressed as a military man and had 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 not continue to be an accomplice to genocide. I am about to commit an extreme act of protest, but compared to what the 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 normal".
He put down his mobile phone so he could continue filming, sprayed his head with a flammable liquid he had brought in a water bottle and set himself on fire with a lighter. He died hours later in a hospital. He was 25 years old.
What can we say? First we will talk about the unsaid, what numerous politicians and commentators in the United States said without any evidence: that Bushnell was mentally ill. In the United States, no one has accused Navalni, whose death was a slow-motion martyrdom, or in his day Bouazizi or Palach, 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 to free speech or change through the vote were not closed to him. 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 this freedom, but what Bushnell had in common with them was that he had lost hope. Protesting on social networks would not change anything, not even the politics of his country - that idea of "normality" that he denounced in his last message before he died. Bushnell knew well enough that the elections at the end of the year in the United States, with Joseph Biden and Donald Trump as candidates, would not offer many alternatives. Biden does not stop supporting Israel despite the infanticide carried out by Benjamin Netanyahu's regime. Trump's pro-Israel fervor is even greater. At least Biden doesn't admire Netanyahu; Trump, yes. So, it was so important to Bushnell to have the right to vote on the issue he was most passionate about in the world, it didn't matter which of the two occupied the White House.
The fact that he belonged to the armed forces of his country, having sworn to defend the motherland with his life, only fueled his frustration and anger. He would 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 will you arm those who kill them. To be a US soldier was to be complicit in a horror, as he said in the final message, that he could no longer bear.
So what can we say about Bushnell? Express admiration for the moral purity of his gesture? Why not? It resembles 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 inhabited by Israelis and Palestinians 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 all too soon Bushnell will be forgotten, his memory drowned in blood and more blood.
The Palestinian movement Hamas, with its own slaughter of innocents on October 7, and the Netanyahu regime, with its ferocious response, have ensured that they both have what they want, that the cycle of revenge exterminates all possibility of a peaceful solution to the longest conflict 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 these same people as a holocaust II, ergo, the merciless destruction of the place where the evil came from.
The same logic applies to the Palestinians. The Gaza ordeal will be remembered for years and years as its own holocaust, as its license to kill Israelis. The orphans of Gaza today and their children will see the uniform of Israel's soldiers as the European Jews of the 1930s and 1940s saw the uniforms of Hitler's soldiers. An eye for an eye, as Gandhi said, and all end up blind.
Bushnell thought he saw the problem with sharp clarity. He gave his life for essentially admirable principles: Thou shalt 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 part of the world abandoned by God.
