WARNING: The following article deals with extremely graphic subjects. Additionally, this article in no way condones or supports self-harm as a form of protest or for any other purpose
Aaron Bushnell may have died from his extreme act of self-immolation in protest against U.S. support of the Israeli genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, but the message his protest created must be kept alive.
On Feb. 15, nearly an hour after noon, 25-year-old United States Air Force member Aaron Bushnell started a livestream as he approached the Embassy of Israel building in Washington, D.C.
“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,” he says to the camera as he approaches the front gate of the embassy.
Bushnell then positions the camera on the ground facing the gate which he proceeds towards. In full military fatigues, he positions himself to face the camera, takes off his fatigues cap, douses his body with fuel and snappily places his cap back on his head in a formal fashion. Bushnell then lights the fuel on fire by his feet. When the fuel finally catches fire, the flame engulfs his body. He shouts “Free Palestine” several times until he physically can’t, likely due to a mixture of smoke inhalation and extreme pain.
First responders and embassy agents surrounded Bushnell nearly a minute after he self-immolated, putting out the fire nearly half a minute later.
Bushnell succumbed to his injuries in the hospital a few hours later that day.
While Bushnell was burning, one of the Israeli embassy agents in the video responded by pointing a gun at his flame-covered body. A first responder next to the agent can be heard telling him: “I don’t need guns… I need fire extinguishers.”
The embassy agent’s actions have since become a focus of discussion by commentators, with many pointing out the symbolic nature of the response considering that Bushnell was protesting unjustified, excessive military action against innocent civilians.
Bushnell’s act of protest had gone viral around the world by the next day.
But with widespread attention, partisan-hack commentators immediately tried to downplay the gravity of Bushnell’s actions with many in liberal and conservative camps asserting that Bushnell was mentally ill.
Conservative pundit Ben Shapiro of The Daily Wire writes in Creator Syndicate that “this week, a mentally disturbed anarchist and active-duty Air Force member named Aaron Bushnell lit himself on fire and proceeded to burn himself to death while shouting ‘Free Palestine’ in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C.”
However, a multitude of factors suggest Bushnell was of a clear mind at the time: his speech was coherent in his preambulatory statements in the livestream video; just before the act, he created a will that donated his personal savings to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund and he surrendered his cat to his neighbour; messages from online forums that Bushnell was actively engaged in have been dug up and they show he had a complex and nuanced understanding of the conflict alongside a clear personal position of being anti-colonial and anti-apartheid; and a friend of Bushnell in an Al Jazeera interview indicated that she did not think he was mentally ill.
Bushnell was clear about why he was undertaking such extreme and tragic actions: “Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now,” he said in a Facebook post earlier on the same day.
The death count of Palestinians in Gaza has likely surpassed 30,000 with most of the deaths being civilians and two-thirds of the deaths being women and children.
Bushnell couldn’t stand that we are seeing the greatest human rights violation of the century so far; a genocide, in fact, which is aided and abetted by the Canadian and US governments as they continue to provide financial and military support to Israel.
While done in a tragic and horrendous way, Bushnell’s message of standing firmly against genocide must and will live on.
Anyone claiming to be a decent human being must stand against Israel’s actions.
